| Another Way of
Doing Business SPU
Invites Students to View
Business as Service
BUSINESS ETHICS, AS IT IS generally
taught, is most frequently conceived of in
terms of limits — that is, in terms of what one must not do. For example, in
advertising, one must not engage in deceptive practices. In employment, one must
not inappropriately invade an employee’s privacy. And so on …
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But ethics, properly understood, is a study of “what ought to
be done.” At Seattle Pacific University’s School of Business and
Economics (SBE), we believe that ethics and values must undergird
our entire curriculum and that we must talk not only about what
should not be done, but also about what should be done. We encourage
our students to wrestle with traditional ethical limitations. But
we also ask them to develop a theologically grounded understanding
of the fundamental purpose of business. How can the practice of
business have intrinsic value in the eyes of God? In what sense
can day-to-day business activities further God’s kingdom in this
world? Why would God call anyone to business as a holy vocation?
We are inviting our students to answer these questions by thinking
about “another way of doing business.” Building upon Seattle Pacific’s
commitment to “engage the culture and change the world,” we are
suggesting that the fundamental purpose of business be reconceived
of as service. We are teaching that business will further God’s
kingdom when it pursues as its ends goods and services that meet
the legitimate needs of others (i.e., customers) and provides vocationally
rich opportunities for expression of creativity through work (i.e.,
employees). Profit-making remains important under this model, but
not as the ultimate purpose of business. Rather, profit becomes
a means to the ends of serving others. Just as fund raising is
to a nonprofit corporation, earning a profit is to a for-profit
company. Both are vital to the health of the organization. Neither
are its reason for being.
At SBE, we are promoting this alternate
understanding of business in a variety of ways. Within the curriculum,
members of our faculty are expected
to include questions of
faith, ethics and values
in every course,
and students are
asked to “grade” the faculty members on their efforts to do so. In addition to
this cross-curriculum approach, all of our undergraduate majors are required
to take “Business Ethics” as a capstone course. At the graduate level, our students
must take two ethics and values classes — as far as we know, more than any other
M.B.A. program requires. We have also instituted a series of one-unit courses
specifically designed to consider questions of business and spirituality (e.g., “a
Christian understanding of wealth accumulation” or “appropriate Sabbath organizational
practices”).
We are working to deepen SBE faculty members’ understanding of the
intersection of theology and business. We have sponsored summer seminars for
our faculty and funded their participation in academic conferences exploring
these topics. We have invited experts from around the world (and from SPU’s School
of Theology) to work with us in a series of workshops and have retained the assistance
of a “consulting theologian.”
At the extra-curricular level, we are regularly
providing our students with access to business leaders who approach their businesses
as service. We offer a quarterly “Faith in the Marketplace” speaker series. Mentors
meet one-on-one with our students. We also provide all of our seniors with a
free subscription to Ethix magazine, a periodical that emphasizes an ethical
approach to business and technology.
In order to allow us to interact with the
broader business and academic community on these issues, we have launched our
Center for Integrity in Business.
This Center is designed to facilitate discussion
between a variety of audiences, including students, alumni, academics and the
business community at large.
The Center maintains a detailed Web site that collects
ethics resource materials and publishes a quarterly newsletter. This summer,
it hopes to sponsor a gathering of management professors from across the country
to encourage scholarship on issues of business-faith integration.
The Center
has also sponsored a seminar for business leaders considering the development
of a theology of business and is making plans for further seminar offerings.
Currently, the Center is designing a series of roundtable discussions to bring
together theologians, business practitioners, faculty and students to discuss
questions of business ethics and values.
We are quite serious about this. We
intend to graduate students of competence and character, students who will engage
in “good business.” For us, this means not only providing the training that will
enable our graduates to be good at traditional business disciplines, but also
developing their character and providing them with a perspective that will enable
them to be forces for good in their places of work.
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