Sustainability, Faith, and the Market

While "sustainability" has become a major concern in business today, there has been little progress toward a sustainable future. This is because the idea of sustainability in academic and policy debates is too small and too beholden to the assumptions that have created today's environmental and development crises. Current calls for reform have neither the vision nor the authority to sustain us in the relationships to self, society, and environment that define our human being. Reaching beyond our secular profession of business management to our Christian faith, we argue for a bigger idea of sustainability that puts these relationships into their true context based on our relationship to God. We identify sustainability with four principles of Christian theology - which we label anthropic, relational, ethical, and divine love - and we link economic development with eight principles of Catholic social doctrine - which the Church labels unity andmeaning, common good, universal destination, subsidiarity, participation, solidarity, social values, and love. We believe this bigger idea of sustainability transforms talk about the future from a gloomy contentiousness rooted in fear to a bright cooperation rooted in hope.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58610/1/1107-Hoffman.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58610/4/1107r-Hoffman.pd

Christmas Thoughts about Business Education

Ebenezer Scrooge lived to be redeemed. And so we might hope it will be for a business education today that conveys many useful values and practices, but no good. I argue that business education today leaves students unprepared for a life in business because it has no moral center and thus has no basis to judge the good of business values and practices. In a word, business education lacks an idea of the supreme good of man—a summum bonum. With the help of Charles Dickens, I consider the lessons of Christmas to suggest how business education can be redeemed in the good. In the end I find that these are the lessons of the social teachings of the Church.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/56192/1/1098-Sandelands.pd

Strategic Thinking: Theory & Practice

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to test a potential means of measuring strategic thinking ability (Cognitive Process Profiling) in individuals through a multi-method approach. First, we identify what strategic thinking is in theory by analysing the current literature and then identify the most prominent competencies that enable individuals to think strategically. Following this literature review, we have used Cognitive Process Profiling (CPP) in practice to determine if we are able to measure and isolate this ability. Finally, we seek to establish whether a correlation exists between the strategic thinking abilities of individuals and their work experience and educational background. Our findings may prove valuable to any organisation who intend to hire, or are looking to develop their employees, as well as for individuals who wish to assess their own strategic thinking capability. Research Questions: Q:1 What is Strategic thinking? Q:2 Does CPP measure the strategic thinking ability of an individual? Can we isolate this ability through the use of CPP and implementing our knowledge of the core competencies of strategic thinking? Q:3 Does work experience and educational background have any influence on the ability to think strategically? Methodology: Our research is based on a deductive approach. Findings were generated through the compilation of research on what concepts are indicative of strategic thinking, and then through drawing correlations between data which was generated via the CPP assessment, background questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The research design is in the form of a multi-method quantitative study since the data was gathered through multiple quantitative means. Structured interviews and questionnaires were analysed according to a scale to allow objective comparison with the CPP assessment itself. Findings: Strategic thinking research is characterised by a multidisciplinary, multidimensional approach that we validated into 15 distinctive core concepts. We argue that strategic thinking is based upon an underlying process influenced by personality, value systems and environmental factors in any individual. Following this, we measured strategic thinking ability of individuals via CPP assessment and our own developed self-assessment tools (background and in-depth questionnaire). The results demonstrated that the CPP assessment do measures and isolates key cognitive elements of strategic thinking ability in individuals, however, in a more profound way for individuals from a managerial or executive background than students. This led us to consider the merit of an organisational context in our measurement process, whilst maintaining an objective outlook due to the limited number of managers/executives involved in our study. Additionally, this study has cast doubt on the importance of work experience and educational background (engineering/non-engineering), as we did not find any conclusive evidence of their link with the strategic thinking. Limitations: This study was conducted under stringent time limitations meaning we had to be specific not only with the number of participants (40 in its present format) but also the scope of the research. Ideally, our research would have involved a higher number of participants to allow for further analysis and to consider CPP results across additional variances (e.g. specific years of experience, specific degree subjects or specific professions compared and contrasted with one another). In addition, since we also used self-assessment methods (survey and interview), we were reliant on each participant’s ability to assess themselves, which at times may be subjective and variable. Lastly, once the CPP assessment is taken by an individual, they are not allowed to take it again. Practical Implications: This study sheds light on what strategic thinking is and what the core concepts of strategic thinking are through analysis of the current literature. Our research has identified potential areas of expansion for measuring and isolating strategic thinking ability in individuals, and through experimentation, has identified areas that may not contribute to this understanding. Our research provides value to organisations who want to hire, or are looking to develop their employees, as well for those who wish to develop their understanding of strategic thinking and individuals who wish to assess their own strategic thinking ability

A Thin Spot 1

A “thin spot” in thinking about business endangers our human being. This article traces a change in business thinking over the last generations to note how, under the spell of the scientific method and the thrall to utilitarian values, our understanding of our self has grown harder, more determined, and less sympathetic. Bringing together ideas about the meaning of self from the study of semiotics and from the author's own religious faith, this article describes how we can reclaim our human being by grounding thinking about business in faith that reaches to God.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78720/1/j.1467-8594.2009.00351.x.pd

Toward an Empirical Concept of Group

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93537/1/j.1468-5914.1993.tb00543.x.pd

The contours and consequences of compassion at work

This paper describes two studies that explore core questions about compassion at work. Findings from a pilot survey indicate that compassion occurs with relative frequency among a wide variety of individuals, suggesting a relationship between experienced compassion, positive emotion, and affective commitment. A complementary narrative study reveals a wide range of compassion triggers and illuminates ways that work colleagues respond to suffering. The narrative analysis demonstrates that experienced compassion provides important sensemaking occasions where employees who receive, witness, or participate in the delivery of compassion reshape understandings of their co-workers, themselves, and their organizations. Together these studies map the contours of compassion at work, provide evidence of its powerful consequences, and open a horizon of new research questions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57917/1/508_ftp.pd

The Idea of Social Life

This paper reclaims the idea that human society is a form of life, an idea once vibrant in the work of Toennies, Durkheim, Simmel, Le Bon, Kroeber, Freud, Bion, and Follett but moribund today. Despite current disparagements, this idea remains the only and best answer to our primary experience of society as vital feeling. The main obstacle to conceiving society as a life is linguistic; the logical form of life is incommensurate with the logical form of language. However, it is possible to extend our conceptual reach by appealing to alternative symbolisms more congenial to living form such as, and especially, art.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68336/2/10.1177_004839319502500201.pd

Impact and Management Research:Exploring Relationships between Temporality, Dialogue, Reflexivity and Praxis

This paper introduces the special issue focusing on impact. We present the four papers in the special issue and synthesize their key themes, including dialogue, reflexivity and praxis. In addition, we expand on understandings of impact by exploring how, when and for whom management research creates impact and we elaborate four ideal types of impact by articulating both the constituencies for whom impact occurs and the forms it might take. We identify temporality as critical to a more nuanced conceptualization of impact and suggest that some forms of impact are performative in nature. We conclude by suggesting that management as a discipline would benefit from widening the range of comparator disciplines to include disciplines such as art, education and nursing where practice, research and scholarship are more overtly interwoven

The Problem of Experience in the Study of Organizations

This paper deals with the fact that we cannot experience large organizations directly, in the same way as we can experience individuals or small groups, and that this non-experientiability has certain implications for our scientific theories of organizations. Whereas a science is animated by a constructive interplay of theory concepts and experience concepts, the study of organizations has been confined to theory concepts alone. Implications of this analysis for developing a science of organizations are considered.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68303/2/10.1177_017084069301400102.pd