This article explores the various ways in which Muslims, in the past and the present, think about God. The article canvasses a range of views on questions and puzzles pertaining to the essence and attributes of God, the basis of God's Justice, the transcendence of God, and our ability to know and understand God. We encounter a diverse, and at times radically divergent range of views on how best to understand divinity within the tradition of Islam. Given the various conceptions (...) of divinity, available within the tradition, I develop an argument for the view that God is best understood as love. The view that God is love, I contend, emerges directly from the Quran, which is a document that sits at the very heart of the Islamic tradition. (shrink)

Sumantra Ghoshal’s condemnation of “bad management theories” that were “destroying good management practices” has not lost any of its salience, after a decade. Management theories anchored in agency theory (and neo-classical economics generally) continue to abet the financialization of society and undermine the functioning of business. An alternative approach (drawn from a more classic institutional, new ecological, and refocused ethical approaches) is reviewed.

This article considers the relationship between business ethics and philosophy, specifically in relation to the field and persons working in it. The starting point is a grammatical one: business ethics by the rules of grammar belongs to ethics. In terms of academic disciplines, it belongs to applied ethics, which belongs to ethics, which belongs to practical philosophy, which belongs to philosophy. However, in the field of business ethics today one will seldom meet colleagues from philosophy; instead, they will come from (...) business, applying business studies perspectives, approaches, and increasingly quantitative methods. This article provides empirical evidence that today the three top journals with “business ethics” in their titles are mostly run by business scholars with PhDs in business. The article compares the three journals today with their inaugural issues and finds that at their inception all three were run by a majority of philosophers. The article discusses six possible explanations for this shift and provides suggestions for how to bring business ethics back to philosophers. (shrink)

Christian social thinkers who strongly support the free-market system often have drawn connections between the social values of their faith and the ideas of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Hayek's comments on religion, however, seem to predict its demise for the sake of progress, whereas his colleague Wilhelm Röpke posits “transcendent” religion and established moral traditions as essential to a humane economy. This essay contends that what Röpke described as “enmassment” has similarities to the present “financialization” of society, which involves the (...) rising influence of financial values in all institutions, exaggerated emphasis on quantitative performance measures, and reliance on technical processes in lieu of human relationships. Röpke's “Christian humanist” philosophy advances the kind of ethical entrepreneurialism needed to morally sustain a global society experiencing enmassment and financialization simultaneously. (shrink)

This paper argues that economics, over the past 200 years, has become steadily more anti-philosophical and that there are three stages in the development of economic thought. Adam Smith intended economics to be a descriptive social science, rooted in an understanding of the moral and psychological processes of an individual’s decision-making and its connection to society in general. Yet, immediately after Smith’s death, economists made a clean cut and invented a totally new discipline: they switched towards a physicalist understanding of (...) human nature. Humans, like atoms, follow a natural law: they are driven by an emotion (defined as a non-emotion, rationality), namely selfishness. Thus economics became a ‘natural’ science. In the 20th century, the second reinterpretation removed all traces of humanity from the study of economics and declared economics to be a formal science like mathematics and logics. The actor in Phase 3 economics is homo economicus syntheticus, a postulate whose only connection to real humanity is the word homo. The paper asks what the results of this dramatic relocation are and why Phase 3 economics still claims descent from Smithian economics, despite the massive differences. (shrink)

Postmodern understandings of the god concept, based upon sociological and anthropological insights, support the ontological reality of the god concept. AII such god constructs can be understood as real but human products which come out of a situated Drama of the Holy. The reality quotient of any god concept can be seen as a function of solidarity activities within a society. Social justice concerns are, thus, the best indicators of that reality quotient while divisive, exploitative and oppressive practices in the (...) world tend to desanctify both society and nature thus justify Death of God analyses. Two interrelated solidarity activities are discussed for their efficacy in sanctification of nature and society: 1) situated Dramas of the Holy and, 2) social policies in the political economy. A variety of grand narratives are mentioned, each with differing foundational concepts, with which to institute social justice as we move into the 21st century. (shrink)

Every academic endeavour rests ultimately on a particular assumption of human nature. Two views of human nature are compared and contrasted: (1) a utilitarian naturalistic humanism which holds essentially the view that human nature is materialistic, and (2) an Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law/virtue ethics humanism which holds the view that human nature is both materialistic and spiritualistic. This paper argues that the latter view better captures and explains the metaphysical realities of human nature. In addition, the role of virtues and its (...) applications in management practice are presented. Organisational policy mechanisms and managerial implications will depend on which view of human nature one adopts. The failure to integrate the virtues and natural law ethical principles into management practice threatens the stability and survival of the firm since they are required to correct the dysfunctional aspects and ethical deficits of the current business philosophy. (shrink)

Gregory Bateson said that we are “governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong” back in 1972. In the same book Bateson wrote: “the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself.” Almost forty years later, global ecological systems are in steep decline and converging crises make a deep evaluation of the underlying premises of our philosophical traditions an urgent imperative. This paper will suggest that the roots of the economic crisis are epistemological and that, to correct this error, whole (...) systems thinking and ecological literacy will become increasingly important in business management as well as in other disciplines. It will also suggest that the economic crisis opened new political space and has provided an opportunity for intervention. If we are brave enough to examine the roots of our problems there is possibility for renewal. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to take a critical look at some of the assumptions and theories found in economics and management and discuss their implications for the practices found in the management of business and in public management. Two sets of assumptions are of interest here. First and foremost, the assumption that economic agents are only actuated by self-interest, accompanied by assumptions about the motivating effect of pecuniary incentives and assumptions about the regulation of behaviour through rules, controls (...) and sanctions; secondly, assumptions about “scientificness” and objectivity, accompanied by demands for mathematical formalism, clear goals, quantifiable models and measurements. The assertion is that unrealistic assumptions of economics have become taken for granted and tacitly included into theories and models of management. Guiding management to behave in a fashion that apparently makes these assumptions become “true”. Cases and illustrative examples are used to show how this influences the practice of decision makers and managers. (shrink)

This article reflects on the philosophical implications of the crisis for the nation-state and culture in relation to business and management. The global triumph of the neo-liberal economic model in the 1990s and early 2000s brought with it an ontological re-conception of the nation-state in its relationship to business, the market and regulation: the nation was viewed as a ‘brand-state’ analogous to a company. Much of the successful appeal of the ‘brand-state’ was based on its annexation of the Enlightenment discourse (...) of ‘cosmopolitanism’: it appeared that a world consisting of interlinked economies represented a fulfilment of the Kantian utopian project of detachment and perpetual peace. The economic crisis has brought this discourse into question. The article assesses whether lessons learnt from the crisis contain prospects for a post-teleological re-conceptualisation of the nation-state beyond the ‘brand-state’ towards a ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’ in which nation-states co-operate to ameliorate its worst effects. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with what Abbinnett1 described as fundamental to the discourses of social science: truth and its construction. The central problem around which the narrative is built is a growing disconnection in one area of social science, management research, between how truth is frequently defined and used and the approaches taken to constructing that truth. The result of this is an intellectual impurity whereby management research occupies an incoherent intellectual space somewhere between modernism and postmodernism. Our argument is (...) that, for a host of probable reasons, management research in many areas is dominated by the search for rational and scientific truth through the use of quantitative methodologies underpinned by a positivist philosophy. The result of this is frequently truth diluted rather than truth distilled. The essay discusses different routes to establishing a type of truth, the location of management research within a modern-postmodern continuum and the implications of this for management researchers. We begin, however, with a brief discussion of the nature of truth in social science. (shrink)

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 had its origins in the manner by which complex financial instruments allowed qualitative phenomena to become a tradable commodity. This process is part of a profound tendency in modern economic life to convert the qualitative, specific and non-commensurable into quantitative data. Simmel, in his Philosophy of Money, identified this transformative quality as an inherent characteristic of money. This paper argues that Simmel’s work continues to provide important insights. Modern financial instruments, in particular collateralised debt obligations, (...) possess this same transformative power thus showing the enduring relevance of Simmel’s work. (shrink)