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  • Preface
  • Michael C. Jordan

As a result of the remarkable achievements of the market economy, it frequently happens that leaders in many areas of culture look to business leaders for guidance and consider how to transpose the principles and practices of business to sectors such as political governance, health care, and education. Such efforts often produce improvements in attentiveness to the needs of the individuals served by an organization, enhancements in the efficiency of operation, and effective redesigns of the mode of organization of large enterprises. But there is a risk that an exaggerated emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness and the adaptation of measures of success from the business sector to other cultural areas will result in myopia and confusion concerning the fundamental purposes and values of each area of culture.

It is therefore the case that a conceptualization of business and of the market economy that brings to the forefront the highest values and purposes of business can serve as a much needed corrective to a broader culture that frequently looks to business for leadership. Such a vision has now helpfully been brought into focus in a document released by Cardinal Peter K. A. Turkson through the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace titled, “The Vocation of the [End Page 4] Business Leader: A Reflection.” The twenty-nine-page booklet offers what could be called in grand terms a cosmological vision of business as it claims that “businesspeople can share in the unfolding of the work of creation” and “are participating in the work of the Creator” through their activities, calling upon people engaged in business “to realize the grandeur and awesome responsibility of their vocation” (8). Such a concept raises the importance and therefore also the responsibility of business to a higher level than many businesspeople would ever have dared claim for themselves, and this lofty vision therefore poses an important and challenging invitation to those engaged in business to recognize what is required to fulfill the high responsibilities they carry.

To acknowledge that engagement in business is a vocation is an ennobling act and anyone who lives up to that acknowledgement faces a call for spiritual conversion that will necessarily result in a transformation of professional activity in the conduct of business. The document addresses itself first to Christian business leaders in whom spiritual seeds have presumably been sown from the moment of baptism, but then also to all business leaders of good will who will recognize the confluence of other spiritual and ethical traditions with the Christian vision, even if they do not share in the creedal claims of the Church.

The first high and demanding call for spiritual transformation issued by the document is for business leaders to live with integrity. In common, contemporary usage, the root sense of this term has been greatly attenuated to mean something like simple honesty. But the document immediately reinfuses the word with its deep, primary meaning through the reminder that living with integrity is to live in a spirit of internal unity in all areas of one’s life. We can again look to common parlance to highlight the way this claim challenges common contemporary attitudes and assumptions. We sometimes speak of the ability of a person to compartmentalize his or her life, indicating the practice of isolating the claims of professional activities from the claims of personal life, and perhaps in some cases even [End Page 5] extending to the development of one type of personal character in fulfilling the duties of work and a different character in participating in the obligations and joys of personal life. We sometimes hear as an explanation of a ruthless decision in the area of work that “it’s business, it’s not personal.” And we frequently speak of achieving balance in the various areas of life. But the document reminds us that the created order is one, even with its splendid variety and diversity, and the call to live in accord with truth requires us to reconnect each area of human activity with the divine source of all.

Here already we can see that the Christian call to live in integrity finds support in other traditions. For instance, I...

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