Skip to content

Spirituality and Business: An Interdisciplinary Overview

    Luk Bouckaert, & Laszlo Zsolnai ‘Spirituality and Business: An Interdisciplinary Overview.’ Society and Economy, 2012, vol.34, no. 3, pp. 489-514

    We believe that business ethics needs a more spiritual foundation to solve the business ethics failure. Why? Because spirituality – as an inner experience of deep interconnectedness with all living beings – opens a space of distance from the pressures of the market and the routines of business as usual. This distance is a necessary condition for developing innovative ethical ideas and practices. It restores intrinsic motivation and provides a long time horizon. Unfortunately spirituality is not yet a mainstream concept in academia and the business world. In academia and business, instrumental and utilitarian rationality is still the dominant perspective, whereas spirituality is anchored in a deeper, noninstrumental and nonutilitarian experience of life. The paper summarizes the main findings of our Palgrave Handbook of Spirituality and Business as a response to developments that challenge the “business as usual” mindset.

    Spirituality and Business- An Interdisciplinary Overview