Recent posts

Gift Giving in Business

On June 26, 2023 gave a presentation on Gift Giving in Business at the Management & Gift workshop of The Economy of Francesco program. He focused on two questions: (1) What should a leader be like and what decisions does the leader take to make a company generative? and (2) What is the spirituality that enables dialogue between poverty and management? Zsolnai’s presentation emphasized that a business leader should be genuinely altruistic, i.e. giving without… Read More »Gift Giving in Business

Art and Ecological Regeneration

Laszlo Zsolnai gave a keynote lecture on ” Art and Ecological Regeneration” at the Photography MA graduation of MOME on May 16, 2023. He argued against the market metaphysics that dominates business and economics as well as almost all spheres of social life today. He suggested to follow the idea of “beautiful act” by Immanuel Kant which requires doing gentle, careful ways of living and acting. Acknowledging the intrinsic value of things and measuring success… Read More »Art and Ecological Regeneration

The Human Potential

Anikó Zsolnai and I published a book in Hungarian entitled “The Human Potential – Jozsef Zsolnai’s Pedagogy” (Az emberi potential. Zsolnai József pedagógiája. 2023. Savaria University Press.) The book documents the pedagogical concepcion of our father, Professor Jozsef Zsolnai (1935-2011) which aimed at the total development of values and capabilities of children and young adults. We summarized the Zsolnai’s pedagogy as follows. The basic postulate of the Zsolnai’s pedagogy: (1) The task of pedagogy is… Read More »The Human Potential

Galileo Commission Talk on Spirituality and Economics

On March 23, 2023 Laszlo Zsolnai delivered a lecture on Spirituality and Economics for the Galileo Commission (London). The main point of the lecture was that the extension and reorientation of economics toward a spiritually informed science is required to consider humans as having both material and non-material needs and desires, to recognize that they can be driven by intrinsic motivations, and to accept that economic actions should be evaluated multidimensionally with reference to the… Read More »Galileo Commission Talk on Spirituality and Economics

Business Ethics Center 2022

The 2022 Annual Report of the Business Ethics Center covers activities, projects, and publications including The Awakened Campus Global Initiative with Columbia University, The Economy of Francesco Program of Pope Francis, and the Sustainability Conference at the Indian Institute of Management – Shillong. The 2022 Annual Report of the Busiess Ethics Center can be downloaded here: BEC-Newsletter-2022

Beyond Materialism & Reductionism

Laszlo Zsolnai gave a keynote presentation entitled “Beyond Materialism and Reductionism“ in The Awakened Campus Global Initiative Conference in November 29-30, 2022 at Columbia University. Zsolnai argued that today’s mainstream social practices and the professions are based on strong materialist and reductionist assumptions. He showed that spiritually informed social practices can lead to better and more satisfying results than materialist and reductionist models of current mainstream practices. Zsolnai called for whole person education, that is,… Read More »Beyond Materialism & Reductionism

The Awakened Campus Global Initiative

Columbia University Spirituality, Mind, Body Institute, the European SPES Institute, Leuven, and the Business Ethics Center of Corvinus University of Budapest organize an international online conference on The Awakened Campus Global Initiative in November 29-30, 2022. The aim of the conference is to create a collaborative global network of higher education institutions to integrate spirituality in their activities. The overall goal is to help the formation of spiritual awareness of students, faculty and university leaders… Read More »The Awakened Campus Global Initiative

Wellbeing Oriented Organizations

I published a major paper on Wellbeing Oriented Organizations with Paul Shrivastava (Penn State University). We argue for connecting human flourishing with ecological regeneration and provide real world examples of innovative business and social organizations doing this. The paper is available online as open access publication at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/beer.12421

Art and Aesthetics in Sustainability Education

Sybille Persson, Paul Shrivastava and Laszlo Zsolnai: “Art and Aesthetics in Sustainability Education. Insights into Beautifying Management Education with François Jullien” RIPCO (Revue Internationale de Psychosociologie et de Gestion des Comportements Organisationnels) Vol XXVII, Issue 71, 2021 pp. 75-98. The paper questions the conceptual basis of art and aesthetics used in management education in order to foster sustainability education. Our specific approach is to open a dialogue with the Chinese conception of aesthetics, particularly focusing… Read More »Art and Aesthetics in Sustainability Education

Ethics and Spirituality

Laszlo Zsolnai: “Ethics and Spirituality” in Yochanan Altman, Judi Neal and Wolfgang Mayrhofer (Eds.): Workplace Spirituality. Making a Difference. 2022. De Gruyter. pp. 75-83. The paper discusses the relationship between ethics and spirituality in business and management context. It shows that business ethics lacks a deeper existential-spiritual foundation which causes inadequate and ineffective functioning of ethics in business and management. The paper argues for spiritual-based business ethics and presents some research tracks, namely Integral Ecology,… Read More »Ethics and Spirituality