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Spirituality and Sustainability: A New Path for Entrepreneurship Abstracts

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Spirituality and Sustainability:A New Path for Entrepreneurship

Abstracts

Annual Conference of the European SPES ForumSeptember 21-23, 2012, Visegrad, Hungary

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Laura Sarolta Baritcz, OP (Sapientia Theology College)

The Three Dimensioned EconomyAlternative Approach to the Mainstream Economic Theory

The mainstream economic order is based on a utilitarian way of think-ing and profit maximization as a goal function of economic activity. The economic theory is formulated upon these two pillars. The pre-sentation will introduce another paradigm of the economic thinking, which is based on the Aristotelian, Thomistic ethics, with virtue ethi-cal way of thinking and the common good as a goal of the economic activity.

The main difference between the two paradigm – utilitarian profit centered and virtue ethical, common good centered – is, that the perception of the human being differs substantially. Stefano Zamagni in their book with Luigino Bruni, Civil Economy, calls the course of human thinking “reductionism” in the modernity, which means, hu-man being looses his/her wholeness, which was complete by his/her spirituality, morality and sentiments before the times around the En-lightenment. Adam Smith, in his book “Theory of Moral Sentiments” speaks of the wholeness of the human yet: reciprocity, gratuitousness, fraternity have place on the market, but in his work, “Wealth of Na-tions” he describes the reductionism: the market and the economic ac-tivity is based on exchange of equivalents and contracts, and profit maximization only. Reciprocity, gratuitousness, fraternity have no place on the market, they are ceased into the private sphere of the hu-man. The same idea is described by Wicksteed, one of the representa-tive of the subjective economics in the 19th century, with his principle of non-tuism.

The presentation will introduce the difference between the “homo oeconomicus” and the “homo reciprocans”, and their origin: the tradition of the civil economy, which goes back to Aristotle’s con-cept of economy (based on his book “State” and Nicomachean Ethics) and Thomas Aquinas’s concept of economy and money, base on his Summa Theologica. Civil economy blossomed in the 16-18. century Italian civil humanism, with the human concept of homo reciprocans. The tradition of modern economy is based on Ockham’s, Hobbes’s,

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Locke’s, Mandeville’s and Adam Smith’s theories on humans, they are the fathers of the homo oeconomicus, who, according to the virtue ethical logic, is unhappy, reduced, is not able to love and missed his/her goal.

After having described the historical background and the two concepts of the human, the presentation turns to the introduction of the “three dimensioned economy”, which is based on the civil economic and virtue ethical approach. The specialty of it is the third dimension, the “infinite values”, like relational goods, trust, cooperation, loyalty, reciprocity, solidarity, etc., that are based on a whole man’s concept and a hierarchical order of the “good”’s (values) Together with Aristo-tle, Thomas Aquinas describes an (analogues) order of the “good”’s, which is as follows: the bottom of the order are the “useful goods” which, in the Aristotelian term are the “external goods”, that is, the material goods. They are tools and not ends, and do not have their own value, they serve the other goods that have intrinsic value and can be ends. On the first place of the order we can find the moral goods, which have the biggest importance among the goods, pointing to the Ultimate End of the human existence. The pleasant goods accompany both the useful and moral goods, but they are not ends in themselves, as they are in the hedonistic concepts. This order serves as a base for the alternative economic order. As we can see, this order of the goods is different from that of the order we can find in the contemporary economic, social thinking. (See “consumer society” or eco-ethics)

At the end of the presentation it will be confirmed by practical examples, that this alternative economic model, which brings back spirituality and value based thinking into the economic thinking and operation proves to be sustainable and serves as a “useful” vehicle for sustainability.

-------------------Laura Sarolta Baritz OP, member of the Order of Dominicans, Hun-gary, was born in 1960 and has diplomas of economics (1983), reli-gion teacher (2002) and ethic teacher (2004) specialized herself on the alternative economics, which combines economic science with ethics and theology. She works on his doctorate dissertation at the Budapest Corvinus University presently, which introduces an alternative eco-nomic model based on the virtue ethics. The model will be certified by

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a quantitative empirical research. Baritz runs a faculty called “Chris-tian Social Priciples in Economy” at the Sapienta College of Theol-ogy, Budapest, and she teaches there at the same time. She is active in familiarization of this alternative approach and the principles of the Church’s Social teaching, by publications, presentations and media ac-tivity.

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Marián Bednár (Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia)

Franciscan Values for Spiritual Leadership in Business

We have twenty two years old experience with unrestricted business and free market after the fall of socialistic society in Slovakia. This post socialistic period brings some positives experiences like freedom, more money and higher quality of life. But also some negatives come with those changes, like wild privatization, very cruel contest, unem-ployment and corruption [10]. After amoral period of jungle a lot of entrepreneurs (and theirs younger followers) would like to have a suc-cess on global international markets. Some of those leaders realize that business is a mission and is needed to be a moral person. Ethics and spirituality plays the essential role in their life, management and business. Hence we would like to propose a new path for spiritual leadership in business – Franciscan spirituality and its values.

The person of St. Francis of Assisi [2] and his life is the start point for a comprehension of Franciscan spirituality and values. St. Francis of Assisi, as the fundator of Franciscan tradition, was living as consistent with evangel of Jesus Christ. Testimony of his life talks about the restoration of Jesus’ teachings. His spiritual experience with God (through the penitence, meeting with a leper and the stigmatisa-tion) was not abstract and intellectual but it was corporal and sensible existential experience, therefore very human. His spirituality and val-ues as well as Regula bullata fratrum minorum [5] always were and still are surprisingly radical and innovative. Testament of St. Francis was an ideal for people in the Middle Ages and thousands in the past and still is an inspiration for many modern people. It follows from this observation that ideas of St. Francis could serve as the essence of leadership models.

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The spiritual experience caused by meeting with Jesus Christ is that point where the Franciscan spirituality begins [6, 8, 9]. This inner and deep mystical experience brings visible change and personal transformation. A metanoia means the answer to Jesus’ love, con-sequences following from this meeting and the process of systematic change. Created values are penitence, poverty (independence), humil-ity, liberty, peace, and joy. This change necessary leads human being to another “Thou”. The relationship is characterized by love (act of kindness to enemies), deep humanity, and communication. This love and humanity between I and Thou creates fraternitas (communion). Also the fraternity is the primary spiritual experience and the strategic goal. The culmination of new described attitude to all being is a har-mony and unity with nature.

We can answer the actual business challenges by Franciscan val-ues which mainly are: to live an evangel – it implies to accomplish the spiritual experience, then to realize the personal transformation, and this authenticity can finally make spirituality accessible as a good for life and business [1]; poverty and liberty – to make the business not only for the money and the greedy profit but like a mission, with some sense and for the others [4]; humility – to accept truly overview to each thing, to see things objectively as they really are, not to be a hu-man-god but to have critical self-reflection; humanity – not to be a dictator and use people for selfish interests but to have an empathy and kindness to others and also to their demands; peace and joy – not to be in depression and stressed of work but to have an inner peace and joy, which goes along with smile [3]; fraternity – not to build a complicate systems of management bureaucracy but to create a simple and an effective decentralized and flexible team [7]; harmony and unity with nature – not to polish environment and exploit the others but to live in harmony and make balanced business, including the pro-tection of the nature.

As we see from those applications, Franciscan spirituality and its values could be the alternative and new path for sustainability of en-trepreneurship.

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Notes

1. Assländer, F. and Grün, A. 2011. Práce jako duchovní úkol. Kostení Vydří, Karmelitánske nakladatelství.

2. Františkánske pramene I. Spisy sv. Františka a sv. Kláry z As-sisi. 2005. Bratislava, Serafín.

3. Grün, A. 2006. Pracovat i žít. Kostelní Vydří, Karmelitánske na-kladatelství.

4. Novak, M. 1998. Biznis ako poslanie. Bratislava, Charis5. Regula Menších bratov. 1996. Bratislava, Serafín. 6. Rotzetter, A. 2003. František z Assisi, Spomienka a vášeň. Brat-

islava, Serafín.7. Warnecke, H.J., Košturiak, J. et al. 2000. Fraktálový podnik.

Žilina, Scp.8. www.franciscanpublications.com (2012)9. www.ofm.org (2012)10. www.spectator.sme.sk (2012)

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Marián Bednár, PhD. (1975)

Marián Bednár comes from Slovakia. He finished his doctoral studies in theology in 2005 by his thesis "Postmodernism, the value of human life and Evangelium vitae". He gave lectures of moral theology and applied ethics at the Faculty of Theology, University of Trnava.

Nowadays, he is lecturer at the Department of Applied Ethics, Faculty of Arts, Pavol Josef Šafárik University in Košice. He gives lectures of applied ethics (Basis of Ethics, Ethics of Science, Ethics of Manager, Business Ethics, Christian Ethics, and Ethics of Politics). He is mainly interested in spiritual and ethical leadership in business and management.

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Katalin Botos (Pazmany Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Huna-gary)

Christian business ethics and sustainability

Europe’s acheavements in economics were dependent on its Jewish-Christian cultural and religious heritage. (Jonathan Sacks) Not only the development of capitalism is strictly connected with the religious ideology but the sustainability of the created welfare state and the sustainability of the ecological system of the world is also connected with the same. Without internalized sens eof duty and morality liberal democracy and narket economy cannot be defended by force of law and regulation alone.The contemporary financial crises has drown our attention to the moral barriers wich were taken aside

Fundamental market economy doesn’t acknolidge that there are values without price , wirhout wich the market economy cannot function smoosly. If Europe looses its spiritual values, the Jewish.Christian heritage in beleaiving in the allmighty God who created the world and who measures our activity wether it is morally acceptable cannot survive contemporary challenges The salt will be tasteless. Europe looses its creative energy Religious part of Europe has to be a c”rative minority „( XVI Benedict) to save both soul and competitiveness of Europe.

„Creativity” in financial innovation without stable moral fundings has led to such financial products where the innovators themselves knew it will have a destructive effect: NINJA-loans, waste products, infected products. But governments, too, have lost their moral responsability and they have promised in the elections champaigns such benefits to the voters which they were unable to realize without severe indebtedness. They havyly burdened the future genarations and it has led some of them to near bankrupcy. It is true at the same time that not only debtors but creditors are responsible for the current crises. Both financial sector, and business sector was led by a short sited profit motivation .Goverments, too, had no longer perspectives ,just their 4 years in power. This has led to the „Predator State” (Galbraith Jr,) where the government chanells tax money to the supporting lobbies.

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The market if it stays on „economic imperialism”destroyes the very virtues on it depends.

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Katalin BotosBorn: in Nagyvarad 13.12. 1941. Education: University of Economics (MKKE), Budapest, 1960-1964. Univ. Doctor: 1970Academic carrier: 1973. CSc. of HASc (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) in economics 1975. Honorary assotiate Prof. of University of Economics Bp.1987 DSc of HASc 1989, Honorary prof. Of economics and political sciences ELTE1995 Ordinary Prof. Budapest Pázmány Péter Catholic University (PPCU)1995. Ordinary Professor of Szeged University (SZU) (2Head of doctoral school (PHD) in economic history at PPCU (1999-2004) Professor of doctoral school (PHD) in history at PPCU (2005-) Head of doctoral school (PhD) in economics at SZU (2005-) Professor of doctoral school at SZU (2001-)Professor of doctoral school (PhD) in Law and political studies at PPCU (2004-)Guest professor: University Glasgow, Frankfurt, Hamburg, LSE, Milano, BonnProfessional carrier: Economist Hungarian Investment Bank (1964-1971); Head of section in Ministry of Finance and Finance Research Institute (1971-1987) senior research fellow Agricultural Research Institute (1987-1990). deputy finance minister (1990) minister without portfolio (1991), head of state Banking Supervision as state secretary (1992-1994). Head of Institute of PPCU Heller Farkas Economics Institute (1995-2008 )Professor at PPCU(2008-), Head of Department of Finance in SZU (2005-2007) Professor at SZU(2008-) Politics: MP 1990-92Publications: 8 books, more than 100 articles in Hungarian, English, German, Spanish, and Russian

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Memberships: EBHA, EASA, HA Sc. Development Committee and Economic committee ,Club of Rome Hungarian Association, Hungarian Economic AssociationAwards: State Award for Work 1985., “Prudentia Prize” of SSFI (State Supervision of Financial Institutions) (2006), Jubilee award of PPCU (2005) State Award 100 Excellent Women (2008).

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Corinne Boureau (artist, The Netherlands)

Our Common Light

The history of humanity begins in a garden.The garden germinates from an infinitely small seed.This pit contains a wise magic: matter, energy, space and time.‘ The Dreamtime ’ … That's what the Aboriginals call the primal blackness, before the Big Bang.Did abyss carry the ancestral dream, the promise of the Garden of Eden? Did this sleep contain the path to be followed to accomplish the desire, the plan? These are questions that only humans ask themselves.

Certain dreams are audacious and limitless...The pit swells, explodes, distends itself, giving birth to time.Stars, galaxies and our solar system organize itself.The fabulous promise is finally fulfilled when rains of dust of the stars sow the primitive oceans. The pure white energy of the stars impreg-nates the earth with life, which appears in the form of seaweed. Now, it so happens that this ‘seaweed-mother’ contains in its cells the seven colours of the rainbow. It is therefore, the atoms forged in the constel-lations to whom we owe colour, which represents the passage to life.Green was the firstborn: Chlorophyll is a natural green pigment in the plant cells, whose role is essential in the process of photosynthesis. Green arrives long before the fish and the birds because it is the colour of origin.

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The ancient cultures already knew the relationship between life and light. Between colours and energy.We are beings borne of light.The work of life travelled the mystical intuition of our ancestors, and keeps something impenetrable and intangible, like the art of any genius.The ancestral knowledge is transmitted through myths and fairy tales, but also through the etymology of words. They illuminate the earth and humanity’s origin story and sometimes draw us towards surpris-ing discoveries.Let us take the word colour. Color is a Latin word and its etymology helps us to go back up to the source of life.Color is linked to the group: celare which means: to hide, to hold secret, to hide from the eyes, from knowledge…Is it possible that the word colour contains the great secret of the cre-ation of the world and that this mystery is to remain forever inaccess-ible? The word celare has an Indo-European root: Kel, present in a number of Latin words: cell and cilia of: flagella.

Is it not striking to discover in the word colour, the terms: hiding, cell and cilia, especially when we know that the ancestral seaweed, the first form of life on earth, engendered an animal cell provided with a flagella with which to swim and to feed itself. Humans come from this animal cell.

Plants and their colours rooted their energy deep in the tissue of those living on Earth. In the blood of the human slips salt of the sea, our first mother, in our branches and in our veins flow the shadows of plantlife.

In ancient times, the forest protected humans by giving them shelter, fruit, bark and even the air they breathed.Only the strongest survived, but every vine, every sprig reflected the picture of their humility. Attached to a tree, humans shared their shel-ter with other beings in creation; they lived in the rhythm of seasons, with the rain, glow-worms living in their dreams.

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Today, the ‘ law of another jungle ’ rules the human heart. By basing the system on an economy of competition, we eliminate the weak so that the strongest survive. But this time, it is the whole planet, which is the source of profit, and we even parcel off sections of the moon.The human, pyromaniac consumer, lives in a frenzy, never done « Consuming » burning his hanging gardens.

Every minute, a primary forest disappears forever.

Every minute, precious manuscripts disappear, destroyed by fire, forever lost to science.

The parasite that destroys his host cannot survive on a massive loss of life. Liberalism, which exhausts its natural resources implicitly, con-demns itself and goes against the wellness of humanity.The biggest lie of our time, it is that consumption is necessary for our happiness and putting the human in the service of the economy rather than the other way around.The plant and animal world speak of altruism and symbiosis. We know today that trees help each other, that animals are capable of compassion, living with a high degree of mutuality. Nature tells us that solidarity is the only valid shield, able to protect life.

Our common value is nature. Wellspring of light, she centres us again in the cosmos and invites us to seek out and dilate the senses. If we listen long enough, she opens our imagination to spirituality and beauty and can help us to create a respectful and harmonious human-ity.

With the emergence of conscience, the human being could contem-plate the garden. The relation ship to art and the beauty of the universe is as old as humanity. By associating colours and lining up words, ac-cording to astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, humans pursue the creative activity of nature, which she has deployed for 15 billion years.

As a child, plants and animals nourished me, they also fed my imagin-ation: the bluetit, the wild orchid, the whale, the grizzly... Inspired so many emotions, still very much alive!

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For children to come we have to protect this natural and cultural herit-age.With every species that goes extinct, humanity mutilates its imagina-tion profoundly. With the death of the white bear we lose a piece of our fantasy. With the death of the giant sequoia, we amputate our own freedom…

MacMillan, a 19th century American ornithologist, has already alerted the world by writing:« We must save the condors not only because we need the condors but also because we need to develop the necessary qualities to save them; because these are this qualities that we shall need to save ourselves. »

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Corinne Boureau

Corinne Boureau born in France in 1957, lives and works in The Netherlands. She studied at both Art Academy’s of France and The Netherlands. First member of art group ‘RKG’ she produced en pub-lished bibliophile books then her own publishing house ‘Nominoë’. She is now full time painter and sculptor. Since 1983 her work has been national exhibited but also in New York, Miami, Argentina en Europe. Her travels and her garden feed her inspiration. Nature is like a tattoo on the skin of people. It’s a part of us, of our equilibrium, as well as a source of energy and intense emotion. Boureau believes there is a cosmic solidarity between human beings all around the world, with very strong collective memories these she wants to ex-plore.

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Jean-Paul Close (STIR Foundation, AiREAS and STIR Academy, The Netherlands)

The Global Paradig ShiftPositioning Spirituality & Sustainable Progress

Our global society is following a historic transformative path from a fragmented into a holistic structure of society with totally new roles of all the participants, including entrepreneurship. I will show that spiri-tuality is key in this process but also needs to be organized to produce sustainable progress. To get to an understanding of the real meaning of spirituality and sustainable progress I introduce definitions of my own that have proven adequate for usages in new purpose driven orga-nizations that I am setting up to address complex issues of society in a new paradigm.

In the paper I will refer to over 250.000 years of cyclic human learning processes by introducing the model of Human Complexities. All the crises, recessions and related chaos that we suffer today are a consequence of the breaking up of old fragmented system hierarchies to make way for new local, modern holistic cooperative formats of hu-man interaction based on equality, trust and a high level of spiritual awareness.After developing a describing the theory about the para-digm shift I started establishing some of those unique cooperative for-mats s.a. AiREAS where government, business, science and environ-mental authorities take joint responsibility for a complex higher hu-man objective (eg air quality -> health, multiculturality -> social cohe-sion), often hindered by elements out of the old paradigm. As the old paradigm crumbles into further recessions the new one gets room to grow eventually even producing a quantum leap in the line of human evolutionary progress, the second in our existence. We are lucky to be able to witness this unique, unprecedented historic process in our own lifetime and even become able to contribute to it personally while it happens.

The entire process is not an easy one and needs the contribution of all of us by acknowledging the transition as it happens, to see spiri-tuality as an essential part of our evolutionary process (and not just something extra), our leadership to identify humanistic objectives that we can shape together today, our professionalism to make it happen

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and our willingness to work together on the basis of equality. I will fi-nalize the presentation with yet another important condition for the global paradigm shift, that is proven also by the model, and that we al-ready implement in our private lives for many centuries but not in our societies: the true equality between man and woman.

Key of my presentation is the new beginning that humankind faces and that we are already shaping today by being entrepreneurs of our own lives, guided by our own spiritual purposeful drives. The peo-ple present in the SPES congress unite maybe the right combination of talents and insights to make that transformation happen and drive it into a definite process of change.

-------------------About the author:

After an executive career across the world I came back to Holland in 2001 to find a totally different country than the one I left in 1974. Having to support my two small daughters as a single father in a highly bureaucratic and systemized society it became my motivation to study see how I could contribute to the paradigm shift that was re-vealing itself to me. As an entrepreneur I started to write books, speak in public and coach enterprises on business spirituality until the credit crisis in 2008 opened the doors to more ambitious processes. These I started to conduct by uniting entrepreneurial people with a high sense of cultural creativity in the STIR Foundation with the objective to work together on transformative processes. Starting with self-em-ployed people we caught the attention of larger organizations and in-stitutions to eventually create new cooperative initiatives in various fields. Proving our concepts slowly in the complexity of the Nether-lands I find it high time to start communicating our findings on inter-national podia and through international papers. EuroSPES seems to unite the right spiritual and entrepreneurial energy for me to look for a long term partnership for the benefit of our common future, not just for awareness programs through congresses but also by presenting hands on workable formatsfor society itself.

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Mária Csutora and Ágnes Zsóka (Corvinus University of Budapest)

Relation of spirituality to happiness, life satisfaction and sustainable lifestyles

Spirituality does matter in pro-environmental behaviour, sustainable consumption, happiness and life satisfaction. This statement is sup-ported by a survey of 1000 respondents, representing the Hungarian society in age, gender, education, income and settlement, carried out by the Department of Environmental Economics and Technology at Corvinus University of Budapest in 2010. The survey focused on life-style and consumption habits, the ecological footprint of people, spiri-tuality and interpersonal relationships, as well as future attitudes of behaviour change towards a more sustainable living.

First results suggest that both life satisfaction and happiness are in very ambiguous relationship with the income of households, strengthening the proverb that “money does not make us happy”. Bad financial situation can make people feel unhappy and dissatisfied but higher income does not necessarily makes happier or more satisfied at all.

The number of children proves to be a much more important in-dicator of happiness (positively) and so does the priority order of im-portant elements in life (like important people, values, dreams, mate-rial things etc.). The relative importance of love, family and to career and self-actualization significantly correlates with happiness as well. Unhappy interpersonal relationships make people definitely much un-happier and more dissatisfied than the lack of money or job. Of course those respondents reported to be the happiest and most satisfied who do not suffer from any of the listed problems (like social alienation, illness, unhappy personal relationship, lack of family, bad financial situation, unemployment) but a deeper analysis shows the correlation of those factors with happiness and life satisfaction more precisely. Regarding sustainable lifestyles, people at the two extremes of happi-ness ranking seem to act environmentally friendly over the average, but the reasons behind are obviously different. Very happy people strive for a sustainable life from internal motivation which is reflected in their high willingness to act environmentally friendly in the future. Very unhappy people, on the other extreme, seem to be forced to live

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a modest life for financial reasons but if pro-environmental behavior was their own choice they would not go for it (their future willingness to act was lower than the average). Of course, environmental aware-ness does not necessarily mean sustainable consumption: respondents with higher income have a bigger ecological footprint, which is not compensated by their environmentally conscious attitudes. Results should also be “cleaned” from the distorting impact of relevance meaning that some questions regarding sustainable lifestyle were sim-ply not relevant for poor people (e.g. they cannot use their car less fre-quently as they do not have a car, etc.).

Spirituality is definitely a significant factor in sustainable life-styles, as people reporting themselves to be religious pursued signifi-cantly more pro-environmental activities than not religious people or those rejecting response. Strongly religious people are definitely hap-pier and more satisfied than less religious or atheist individuals. Those first results indicate the relevance to explore the relationships between spirituality, happiness, life satisfaction and sustainable life-styles in the Hungarian society. Our further aim is to possibly classify respondents into different groups (clusters), based on their spirituality, value system and attitudes towards sustainability.

----------------------Mária Csutora

Dr. Mária Csutora, associate professor, is head of the Sustainability Indicators Research Centre at the Corvinus University of Budapest. She is a steering committee member of the EMAN-EU environmental accounting research network and a standards committee member of the Global Footprint Network. Between 1998 and 2003 she served as an adjunct professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the US. Formerly she also worked as deputy director in the Hungarian Cleaner Production Centre. Between 2009 and 2011 she was coordin-ator for the Sustainable Consumption, Production and Communication Project. Her main research areas cover sustainable consumption, sus-tainability indicators, company strategies.

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Ágnes Zsóka

Dr. Ágnes Zsóka, associate professor, has been working for the De-partment of Environmental Economics and Technology at Corvinus University of Budapest since 1997. She is teaching subjects relating to sustainable development, CSR, pro-environmental consumer beha-viour at CUB, as well as Christian economic and social logic at Sapi-entia university. Her main research areas are: environmental aware-ness and social responsibility at companies, preconditions and chances of sustainable consumption, the role of environmental education in at-titude shaping, relevance of immaterial factors in well-being. Beyond teaching and research, she is the programme director in the Doctoral Programme of Management and Business Administration.

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Tomasz Dołęgowski (SGH - Warsaw School of Economics, Poland)

Modern Catholic Social Teaching and Philosophy – Implications for the Future of Competitiveness Theory and Practice

The modern Catholic Social Teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI has been concentrated on the reflection about the spiritual and moral dimensions of the market economy and capitalism. Encyclical letter Laborem Exercens by John Paul II can be treated as the exam-ple of the modern study of human work, labor, dignity of work as well as human rights, characteristic for the time of the crisis of Marxist ide-ology. The next important encyclical letter, Centesimus Annus, has been published just after the collapse of communism, which could be treated also as a challenge for the Western world. The most character-istic was here the conditional acceptance of the market economy and call for more ethics as well as rule of law. Benedict XVI has published his Caritas in Veritate just after the beginning of the financial and economic crisis in the end of the first decade of the XXI century. Pope Benedict XVI concentrates on the role of social capital, the concept of integral development (development of each person and the whole per-

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son), new forms of macro-organization as well as future of the econ-omy of communion. Both authors underline the role of particular val-ues and principles, like charity and justice, personalism, solidarity, common good as well as subsidiarity. There are however also some differences in the way of thinking and inspirations between both Au-thors. It is possible to see some intellectual links between John Paul II and Michael Novak, in case of Benedict XVI it is possible to realize stronger inspiration by German ordoliberalism/concept of Social Mar-ket Economy as well as Italian tradition of L. Bruni and S. Zamagni.

One can however also observe the evolution of the modern com-petitiveness theory and innovations theory. The simplest definition of competitiveness means “the ability (of corporation, sector, state, re-gion) to compete”. Traditional reflection about competitiveness has been dominated by the pure economic approach. Today we see the tendency to see competitiveness as a broader phenomenon. We see not only economic, but also social, cultural and ethical aspects and preconditions of competitiveness. Competitiveness of the corporations as well as the countries should be discussed in the context of the mod-ern Institutional Economics as well as Social Capital Theory. It is characteristic for some modern competitiveness indexes (The World Competitiveness Yearbook, The Global Competitiveness Report, Index of Economic Freedom).

According to many authors competitiveness is important, how-ever it can’t be treated as dangerous obsession (P. Krugman). Some economists think, that Traditional concentration on competitiveness is not enough and we observe the development of new research on well-being (T. Hamalainen). Many economists (J. H. Dunning) underline the role of ethical reflection and religious inspiration for the modern reflection about competitiveness and innovations (also social innova-tions) as well as in building new dimensions of social capital. Accord-ing to J. Dunning we should see the possible Christian response to global capitalism. This response can be defined according to him in the categories of 3 C’s (Creativity, Cooperation, Compassion).

Question is: how can religions (including Christianity, particu-larly Catholic Social teaching) help in creating new vision of competi-tiveness? According to many authors by the concentration of trust. Spirituality and religions should build the trust.

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The new situation creates also the new challenges for modern Ethics in Economy, Business Ethics and CSR reflection. They should be more open for personalistic approach and spirituality, which base on trust and build the trust.

----------------Tomasz Paweł Dołęgowski work: Warsaw School of Economics, World Economy Faculty, Warszawa, Polandeducation: studies at the Warsaw School of Economics - Foreign Trade Faculty (1979-1984). Masters’ Thesis about ethical codes of conduct for transnational corporations. Additional studies (parallel, minor without degree) on Historical Faculty (Warsaw University).Work experience: since 1985 work at the Foreign Trade Faculty (now called World Economy Faculty), Warsaw School of Economics.Ph.D. in 1994 (dissertation about globalization and regional coopera-tion in transportation sector);Habilitation in 2002 (dissertation: Institutional and Systemic Competi-tiveness in the Global Economy).Foreign Scholarships and fellowships: University of Minnesota, USA (Business Ethics – with prof. N. Bowie and I. Maitland) ; ICER-Inter-national Centre for Economic Research – Torino (Italy), courses in in-stitutional economics in Bratislava (Slovak Republic) and Dubrownik (Croatia).Functions: 1993-1996 and 1996-1999 – deputy dean (responsible for didactics and international cooperation);1999 till 2004: ECTS coordinator, one of the persons responsible for international cooperation. Person responsible for cooperation with the Baltic States and Polish community in Lithuania. Head of International Competitiveness and Business Ethics Unit (In-stitute of European Studies and Foreign Trade Policy, World Econ-omy Faculty).Head of the IAW Project – Education Project for the East (Project for the cooperation with the Baltic States universities and educational co-operation with the Polish Community in the Lithuania and other East-ern Countries).Foreign lectures: Ethics in Economy and Business Ethics: CEMS summer school courses in 2001 (Grasse, France), 2002 - Sweden

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(Stockholm School of Economics), 2004 and 2005 – Helsinki School of Economics, Competitiveness in the Global Economy: Peter Paz-many Catholic University (Budapest) in cooperation with ASERI in 2004, 2005 and 2006 as well as in Vilnius (Vilnius University),Competitiveness in the Global Economy – ASERI – Milan (March 2009). Lectures within Erazmus Exchange (Vilnius 2007, Stockholm School of Economics in Riga – 2009).Membership: European SPES Forum (Catholic University in Lova-nium), member of CEMS (Community of European Management Schools) Interfaculty Group.Other fields of activity: Active member of Catholic community (prier and studies), cooperation with OCIPE Warsaw, lectures at Tertio Mil-lennio Institute (course for catholic leaders about Catholic Social Teaching and ethics in public life organized by Dominicans, Father Maciej Zieba OP). Cooperation with Taize Community.

× × ×

E.C. van den Dool (Ede Christian University for Applied Sciences, The Netherlands)

From experiencing ‘hunger’ to mystagogy in organizations

People that are actively involved in social innovation, such as fair business and sustainability projects, experience what German libera-tion theologian Sölle has called ‘hunger’; hunger for justice and hunger for one’s own involvement in working on sustainability or jus-tice in organizations and society. According to Sölle these experi-ences are fertile ground for mystagogy: enacting the spiritual dimen-sion of working on sustainability of social/organizational justice in one’s experiences and making these experiences a powerfull source of resilience.

Based on Sölle’s view of how mystagogy works a counseling method has been methodically developed. The aim of the method is to make organizations dialogue partners of texts from spiritual tradi-tions in which the text’s characters (often victims) express their de-spair and their hope. The process of entering into a dialogue between one’s own experiences and the experiences of a character in a text is

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also known as double contextualization. The counseling method stim-ulates and facilitates people to read and ‘struggle’ with the texts and relate them to one’s own hunger experiences ‘until an existential meaning is found in the surplus of meaning in the text’ [1]. It is ex-pected that this may well lead to a self-transcendence, transformation and renewed praxis; ‘mystagogy at work’ [2].

In the period march – june 2012 we are experimenting with the counseling method in a total of nine sessions with participants from a variety of organizations that are involved in working on sustainability and social justice. The aim of this experiment is to see if the counsel-ing method actually leads to mystagogy, to see how the participants value their participation and, most of all, to improve the method. The paper will report on the fundamentals and actual procedures of the counseling method. First results will be presented as well. Finally the concept of mystagogic leadership will be shortly explored.

Notes

[1] Prinz, J.D.E., p.77, 2006, Self-implicating biblical spirituality: John Baptist Metz and Dorothee Sölle at the interface of biblical her-meneutic and Christian spirituality, Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union Berkeley California

[2] Jong-van Campen, A. de, 2009. Mystagogie in werking (Mystagogy at work), Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum

------------------Drs. E.C. (Eelco) van den Dool (1969) studied Business Administra-tion and currently works at the Ede Christian University for Applied Sciences (Netherlands) at the Center for Social Innovation as an asso-ciate researcher and as a lecturer at the department of Business Stud-ies. The Center for Social Innovation aims at creating and researching new relations between people in organisations and between organisa-tions and their environment. Within this line of research Van den Dool focuses on organizational spirituality.

× × ×Ine van Emmerik (Belieforama, The Netherlands)

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Working in whitespace: adult education, spirituality and de-velopment of social entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is often focused on creating value that can be mea-sured in money. Social entrepreneurship has another ambition: creat-ing social capital, value in and for meaningful social relations on all levels of society. The starting point is interdependence instead inde-pendence of the actors. [1] Whitespace is a concept that is well-known in art and literature, describing the white within the image or text that seems to be empty and at the same time is a meaningful element of the image or text. [2]This paper explores how spirituality in education can become a whitespace, a room for the development of social en-trepreneurship.

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor develops the concept of a sec-ularity in the third sense. ( In addition to a secularity in the first or sec-ond sense; the disappearance of God from public space and from per-sonal life.) We live in a secular age where “Faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others”. [3]In this third secularity, there exist different approaches for man what it is to believe and to investigate the fullness of life through meaningful expe-riences. It starts from the perspective of the rich diversity of the inner world of human beings and opens up to a rich, but complex approach of spiritual life today.[4] Human beings often explore during their lives (and even at one and the same time) a range of beliefs in their quest for the fullness of life. Life may become richer, bringing more freedom and personal space, but it can also be more confusing, where one constantly needs to position oneself in spiritual and moral space in order to discern what is best. And there is a need to belong to groups with shared views on spiritual life and to develop new horizons of val-ues. [5]

Belieforama is a European Community of Practice for adult edu-cation that wants to address the complex societal issue of religious di-versity through adult education, by means of development of educa-tional material and train-the-trainer courses, based upon its own qual-ity framework and expertise within the field. [6] Participants bring a large diversity in nationality, spiritual and professional background to a 5-day training program. The didactic flow creates an environment

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for experiential learning, thus building a safe foundation to explore the own identity and examine and confront conflicting issues. This “in-structive friction” within a safe and educationally rich environment leads to higher awareness and skills, empowering participants to social action within their own personal and professional background.

The training has the structure of the didactic flow and of each ac-tivity in that flow, but there is also room to ‘play’, to slow down and to face the complexity of the subject. The decision to slow down when facing complex issues is actually making an ethical move. [7] There is a ‘whitespace’, a space between order and surprise, for creative confu-sion that doesn’t turn into chaos. It enables participants to explore their inner spiritual diversity and that of others. The training creates room for horizontal transcendence: “transcending oneself and the other in dialogue”. Only if I can admit that I am not omnipotent and omniscient, but that something or rather someone cannot be con-trolled, then I can respect this person in his or her own right. [8] This focuses the discussion on different thoughts about what is just, what a good and proper relationship with others should be and what it means to consider one’s own life to be a good life. It involves articulating a horizon of values that are not fixed. This earnest playground to ex-plore independence and interdependence creates the opportunity to build new horizons of spirituality and ethics of professional life.

Notes

[1] ABU SAIFAN, S 2012, Social Entrepreneurship, definition and boundaries, Technology Innovation Management Review, February 2012: 22- 27.[2] DIJK, Yrra van, (2006), Leegte, leegte die ademt, Nijmegen: Vantilt, about reading whitespace in modern French poetry. [3] TAYLOR, Charles, (2010), Een seculiere tijd, (Dutch transl), Rotterdam: Lemniscaat, p. 3[4] As defined by SPES: the multiform search for a transcendent or deep meaning of life that connects people to each other and brings them in touch with God or ‘Ultimate Reality’. Within this definition there is room for differing views, for spiritualties with and without God and for an ethics of dialogue or ‘active pluralism’.

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[5] TAYLOR, Charles, (1989), Sources of the self, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press[6] Training “Religious diversity and anti-discrimination” and other modules, www.belieforama.eu, started in 2002, see also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-ilnigd-UA [7] CILLIERS, Paul, (2007), On the importance of a certain slowness, in: Worldviews, Science and Us: Philosophy and Complexity, ed. Carlos Gershenson a.o., Singapore: World Science Press.[8] HALSEMA, Annemie (2007), Horizontale transcendentie in een multiculturele wereld, in De stille kracht van transcendentie, wijsheid in beelden, verhalen en symbolen. Amsterdam SWP/HUP, p. 67 a o.

-------------------

Ine van Emmerik (53) lives by the rule: develop your talents to the fullest and exploit what you learnt to help others develop their talents. She was trained as a teacher and has degrees in Law and in Psychol-ogy. After more than twenty years as a manager and HR-consultant in several national companies she started her own business, Extravaleren, in 2000 (www.extravaleren.nl). As a business consultant, coach and researcher, she focuses on the learning abilities of individuals and or-ganizations and guides them to seek their inner wisdom. She initiated and co-edited “The silent force of transcendence, wisdom in images, stories and symbols” Amsterdam, HUP/SWP (2007), an interdiscipli-nary cooperation of scholars and professionals. Her current research in a PhD focuses on the “slow learning” of professionals in complex work situations.

She is partner/consultant in the European Gruntvig program to-wards an inclusive Europe on issues of religion and belief, Be-lieforama (www.belieforama.eu)

× × ×

György Ernyei and László Podmaniczky (St. Stephan University Gödöllő, Hungary)

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Public-goods oriented agricultural business models with higher awareness

Agriculture – mainly due to the significant role of the natural resource use – has a special position among the sectors of national economy. To date those agricultural opportunities in business strategies only to a less extent have been utilized.

The origin of the problem goes back to the meaning and understanding of economic activities. That is defined as a transformation process of inputs into outputs in all production and service activities. The goal is to achieve higher economic value of outputs than the value of inputs. However, agriculture uses such inputs which have no monetary value, these are mainly natural resources (rainfall, temperature, sunshine) without market price. Moreover agriculture produces such outputs which are not valued due to the lack of market prices, e.g. improvement of soil fertility because of some crops, or over use of fertilizers and chemicals results in environment pollution). The question is how we could harmonize economic aspects with those inputs and outputs which are not under economic influences.

There are possibilities and challenges for solutions both on the input and on the output side. On the input side the solution could be to formulate strategies to improve the rate of „free” natural resources adapting to environmental conditions. On the output side such environmental, economic and social public goods and services are to be produced which have no valuation under market circumstances. Public money sources through subsidizing system and public goods not recognized by the market will be available, if public money funds and public goods are used for payments.

The harmonization of market and non market factors is a diffi-cult and complex task. The traditional tools of economics is no longer sufficient for the solution of the problem. A new type of economic ra-tionality is required, that creates harmony between factors reflected and not reflected in market prices. In this way growth of individual wellbeing will be served also by efforts made for creating more public goods.

The above issues, supported by sustainability and spirituality concepts should be incorporated in a businesss management system

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model where the management process starts with setting adequate objectives in the framework of the planning function and then linked to the other four management functions.

In our paper first the essentials, characteristics and stepwise establishment of a multifunctional, public goods producing agricultural system model will be presented. Then, the coming European agricultural and rural policy reform will be shown, where producing public goods receive more support than now. Finally examples for public goods oriented agricultural business models will also be presented.

-------------------

György Ernyei

György Ernyei CSc in Agricultural Sciences (topic: economics and systems analysis of the vegetable oil industry) Institute of Organisation and Management of Szent Istvan University as an asso-ciate professor. He graduated at the same university and got his MSc degree of agricultural engineering and specialized MSc degree in Farm Economics and Management (topic: economics and manage-ment of orchards).

After graduation first he worked as an assistant lecturer at the Gödöllő University of Agricultural Sciences. As a FAO postgraduate fellowship student he studied at the University of New England New South Wales Australia. There he had the opportunity to follow MSc level university courses and have an experience in the practice of or-chard management and economics.

At his current workplace first he dealt with farm management for ten years. Later, he worked at the Corvinus University, Budapest as head of Department of Food Economics at the Faculty of Food Sci-ences. At the beginning of transition to market economy he was the founder of education of Economics (micro and macro) at the agricul-tural faculties of the University. He was vice president at the ICA Bruxelles (Interfaculty Agraria) and helped University Faculties of Central and East European Universities in transition to market economy. He was project coordinator for ACE (Action for Cooperation in economics) in a joint project with the University of

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Reading, England and Université Chatolique de Louvain, Belgium in the field of effects of transition to market economy in the Hungarian Agro food sector. He carried out joint research in the field of channel management at the Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA. He did research work at the Reading University in the framework of the HALP project (Hungarian Academic Link) in the field of quality management. He had research cooperation with ETH Zürich Switzerland in the field of farm planning and analysis.

Laszlo Podmaniczky

László Podmaniczky PhD in Farm Economics and Management (topic: alternative farm management and ecological land-use planning methods), works at the Institute of Environment and Landscape Man-agement of Szent Istvan University as an associate professor and deputy director and also as the head of department of environmental economics. He graduated at this same university and got his MSc de-gree of agricultural engineering and specialized MSc degree in Farm Economics and Management. Later he got his PhD in the topic of eco-nomics of alternative agricultural systems.

After graduation first he worked for an agricultural cooperative, then for a private planning enterprise. There he had the opportunity to have an experience in the practice of farm management and in the eco-logical land-use planning methods.

At his current workplace first he dealt with farm management for ten years. Later, he was one of the founders of M.Sc. equivalent de-gree for agricultural engineer specialised in environmental manage-ment. He is a regular policy development consultant to the agriculture and rural development ministry and contributor to practice oriented studies. He is member of the agri-environmental policy working group of the Hungarian National Rural Network and has good working relation with agricultural chambers and agri-environment related NGOs.

× × ×Zsuzsanna Győri (KÖVET) and András Ócsai (Corvinus University of Budapest)

Ecologically-oriented enterprises in Hungary

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We conducted an in-dept empirical research about the value-back-ground and coping strategies of ecologically-oriented enterprises in Hungary. It is a common belief that ecological orientation is a disad-vantage for the companies in competitive markets because unethical and environmentally careless behavior can bring lower cost and com-petitive advantage. Hence ecology is at odds with competition.

The paper presents theoretical arguments and empirical results suggesting that ecologically-oriented enterprises can survive and even prosper in competitive environments. In his book “What Price the Moral High Ground?” (2004, Princeton University Press) Cornell Uni-versity economist Robert Frank investigates how moral considerations influence the chances of survival of economic agents in competitive environments.

According to Frank the major benefits of ethics in business are as follows: (i) Opportunistic behavior can be avoided between owners and managers. (ii) Getting moral satisfaction employees are ready to work more for less salary.(iii) High quality new employees can be recruited.(iv) Customers’ loyalty can be gained.(v) The trust of sub-contractors can be established.

In summary we can say that firms can be compensated for the higher costs of their social responsible behavior by their ability to form commitments between owners, managers and employees and to establish trust relationships with customers and sub-contractors.We tested Frank's hypothesis in the case of ecologically-oriented en-terprises in Hungary in 2011. We selected and studied 16 well-known small and medium sized companies, namely Gere pincészet, Öko-Park Panzió, Pendits Kft, Piszkei Öko Kft., Zöldpolc, Antro Kft, Bio-Drog-Berta Kft, Idea-Chem Kft, Magnet Magyar Közösségi Bank, Kör Építész Stúdió Kft, Ceredom Kft, Körös-Maros Biofarm Kft, Hubai Kft, Ráspi Étterem és Borászat, Tiszta Forrás, and Treehugger Dan’s.

We found two preconditions which makes the survival and pros-perity of ecologically-oriented businesses possible. One is that ecolog-ically-oriented businesses are intrinsically motivated to follow their

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social, environmental and business goals. The second is that ecologi-cally-oriented businesses define success multidimensionally. Flourish-ing of their stakeholders is perceived as part of their own success. Ecologically-oriented businesses capitalize on their mutually benefi-cial relationships with the stakeholders. Intrinsic motivation and defin-ing success multidimensionally seem to be the necessary conditions for the survival of ecologically-oriented enterprises in competitive en-vironments.

------------Zsuzsanna Győri

Zsuzsanna Győri received her PhD degree in 2011 from the Corvinus University of Budapest. Her supervisor was Laszlo Zsolnai. The title of her thesis was “CSR and beyond” and her research focused on val-ues-driven business models.

András Ócsai

András Ócsai is project manager of the Innovation Centre at the Corv-inus University of Budapest dealing with promoting and preparing ap-plications for research project proposals. After graduation at CUB in 2002 he worked for several companies and also in the public sector then found his way back to his alma mater. He participated in the TÁ-MOP research project in 2011 and intends to start his PhD

× × ×

Peter Gere (Detecon International, Bonn, Germany)

Aikido in Management: Martial Arts for Achieving Harmony and Collaboration

Today we are living in an economy & society affected by the global-isation, cyberization, speediness, increasing competition and other

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trends, sharpened by the effects of the economic crisis. There is a need for a more conscious, responsible and long-term orientation – on the both individual and collective levels – to ensure sustainability.

In this context, martial arts could stand as a compass in our life. Aikido, which is a combination of spirituality and martial arts, is an ambassador of harmony and collaboration. It could be an effective self-improvement philosophy and social adaptation method to better succeed in reaching future goals on individual, corporate and social level.

Some key drivers for personal development and changing our mindset to be transported:

Creating our inner balance Respect and acceptance of people (without discrimination) Cooperative, collaborative approach Ready to taking over responsibility and make decision Better confrontation, assertive communication and conflict man-

agement Ethical & long-term ethical mindsetUnderstanding people, cooperating and affecting them ethically

could produce higher added values for the society in the long run: sup-porting the creation of sustainable management.

Management situations in multinational and multicultural environ-ment require professional people skills and understanding of interests. You should be able to come up with solutions, convince colleges, sell or brand products/services for customers, seek for feedback and nego-tiate. In all cases, you should be calm under time pressure and stress situations, overtake responsibility and able to make a decision and be responsible for the consequences.

Considering the above mentioned environment, self-confidence and a balanced personality with a collaborative and ethical approach could lead to higher success rate. And these deep characteristics could be trained and developed “indirectly” in off-the-job situations as well – for instance by aikido.

Raise your self-awareness and use the KI energy in your life eth-ically to contribute to a more sustainable economy and society.

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Peter Gere

Peter Gere graduated from Corvinus University of Budapest (MSc in Organisation, Leadership and Management, specialized in Human Resources) and from CEMS MIM Master’s in International Management Program in 2011.

Currently, he is working at Detecon International in Bonn, Germany, as junior consultant working on HR, change management & transformation projects. During the last 3 years, Peter has worked for 5 multinational corporations in Germany, Belgium and Hungary.

Peter wrote thesis on stress management at workplace with the principles of martial arts, especially Aikido. He trains Aikido since 1997 and learned from more than 10 teachers in 4 stress with an own empirical research to better understand personal development, communication and conflict management as well as leadership strategies of aikido practitioners.

× × ×

Rita Ghesquiere (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)

Sustainability and Wisdom: the Power of the Fable

In this paper we will focus on two ideas

(a) Why the fable in itself is a ‘sustainable’ cultural good?

The fable is an old literary genre/model that has its roots in the popu-lar tradition.

Like the riddle, the saying or the fairy tale, the fable belongs to what Jolles defines as ‘narrative archetypes’. They are not the result of a singular creative act, but came into being into the community as a whole. Later on the popular wisdom of anonymous authors turned into 'literary' writing. In the western tradition Aesop was one of the first who gave the fable literary prestige. Phaedrus and Jean de La Fontaine followed in his footsteps. Nevertheless until today the fable, like the fairy tale, is a global, common good. We find fables in all cultures

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over the world and often they bring/put forward a similar message of wisdom.

In the course of history the position of the fable was controver-sial. Its wisdom has been acknowledged by famous scholars i.e. Erasmus, Locke who defended the fable as an excellent educational instrument, while others rejected the fable as a ‘falsified account’ of events and hence dangerous for children. Until today the word fable in a negative sense means ‘old wives’ tales’ or ‘fibs’.

Can the long tradition of the genre foster a cultural sense of sus-tainability?

Can we trust the wisdom of the fable for personal use or for gen-eral use?

Can the wisdom of fables still convince leaders or managers?

(b) Fables about economic ‘wealth’

In the past, prominent scholars have made use of the fable to put for-ward their opinion.

The fable of the bees (Mandeville 1714) is an interesting ex-ample in this context, challenging conventional moral ideas and con-cepts. The American author James Thurber used anthropomorphic animals to satirize modern American society.

We will analyse the following fables to disclose some elements of sustainable economic behaviour:

The cricket and the ant (Aesop)The farmer and his sons (Aesop)The fox with the big belly (Aesop)The miser and his gold (Aesop)

In this fables economic sustainability is linked to wisdom, frugality, long term vision. However, in the collection as a whole, opposite and divergent values are expressed but put together, they balance each other.

Voetnoten

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Denn wir sehen dass die jungen Kindern und jungen Leute mit fabeln und Merlin leichlich bewegt, und also mit lust und liebe zur kunst und weisheit gefûhrt würden.’ ‚In: Luther, Etliche Fabeln aus Esopo verdeutscht. Luther vertaalde 13 fabels. Ze werden later opgenomen in Nathanael Chytraeus, Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo/etliche von D.Martin Luther und herren Mathesio/etliche von andern verdeutscht. (1571) Rehermann und Köhler-Zülch 1982)

-----------------------

Rita Ghesquiere

Rita Ghesquière (°1947) is emeritus professor of comparative literat-ure at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Belgium). She holds a degree in philology and has written her PhD on Phenomeno-logy and Literary Theory. Her research and publications fall within the scope of the history of European literature, juvenile fiction and spirituality. She published a Dutch literary companion on the history of European Literature: Literaire Verbeelding. Een geschiedenis van de Europese literatuur tot 1750 and Literaire Verbeelding. Een geschiedenis van de Europese literatuur en cultuur vanaf 1750 (2 vol. Leuven, Acco 2006 and 2008). Het Verschijnsel jeugdliteratuur (20007) now revised as Jeugdliteratuur in perspectief (2009) is a well known manual on Children’s Literature. Together with Knut Ims she is the editor of Heroes and Anti-heroes. European Literature and the Ethics of Leadership (2010)

× × ×

Vincent Gouwy (Osteopath DO, Belgium)

The extent of self-knowledge, it’s application; and the questioning of creating, determines the sustainability of a realization-process

A realization is a manifestation, a sharing and an experiencing of the inner state and the internal potential. The sustainability of this realiza-

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tion is characterized by two processes, of which self-knowledge forms the base. Self-knowledge involves a state of being, which determines the extent of one’s presence within himself, in relation to the internal life source and the environment. Implementing self-knowledge arises from the personal story, it includes a questioning of the happenings in life. This search brings people essentially to the existential questions of life, where the individual relationship between themselves and the transcendent has a central place.

The process of self-knowledge is characterized by inner work. This work gives the opportunity to approach and behold the limita-tions of the impermanence. Also it supports the experience and per-ception of the transcendent. This inner process, is enforced by its ap-plication, it’s a externalizing of the inner state. The significance of this inner work becomes evident to the extent of transparency between the inner state and the external world.

This individual origin-oriented focus brings one to the awareness of the inner potential. Along with this goes the fathoming of the per-sonal will and questioning the intention of doing. From this originate the question to the relationship one has, as part within the whole, to the transcendent and what creation means to the individual.

Non-sustainability emerges from the existence of inner conflicts. These obstacles can occur on a physical, psycho-emotional and spiri-tual level. By the identification with them, comes the impossibility to have a clear vision. Which causes an excessive fixation on results and achievements; and an outbalanced positioning of oneself within the whole. This can lead towards a degeneration to the inner path of truth and so restrains the sustainability.

Obtaining sustainability asks a truth-full relation to ones-self, the near environment and the transcendent. This demands the sensitivity towards vulnerability, humbleness, creativity and the reinforcement of the individual integrity. The authenticity of this inner relation deter-mines the sustainability and the inspirational strength towards others.

By regaining the internal potential, one is capable in making a difference to the twist of the mental collective, the pressure to achieve and the patterns of identification. This gives an opportunity to live within oneself, to take place within the world, without being the prop-erty of this world.

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-------------------------Vincent Gouwy

Formed in classical osteopathy Vincent Gouwy (1986°) qualified him-self within the holistic aspects of the human being and its surrounding environment. This gives him the opportunity to reinforce health from a broader perspective. In his therapeutic work he develops the origin-oriented methodic. A method which support and gives structure within the process of self-realization. In this work of becoming conscious and present, he emphasizes self-reflection, integration within the personal story, realization of the inner potential, questioning the creating and the use of the individual talents. Integrating these elements, gives the possibility to embrace the story of life.

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Nel Hofstra (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands)

Entrepreneurship inspired by Nature

Our perspectives on Nature determine what we see as nature (defini-tion and demarcation), how we evaluate and estimate environmental problems (analysis), how we evaluate and judge situations (diagnosis) and how we seek to conserve nature and to prevent future problems (applications and policies). Nature has been and is being over-ex-ploited to or beyond its very limits by numerous firms. To restrain ourselves from further destruction a steady shift from an anthropocen-tric to a more eco-centric approach develops, increasing the expansion of a body of knowledge on Nature’s operating instructions (Bioneers, Biomimicry, Cradle to Cradle, Indigenous traditions). A taxonomic categorization for assessing the relationships between humans and na-ture, based on an in-depth analysis of historical and philosophical de-velopments of ideas pertaining to human and nature interactions, has led to the construction of a typology of eco-innovations in relation to human-nature relationships.

Eco-innovations related to human-nature relationships

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Eco-Innovations

Exploitative/degenerative

Restorative Cyclical Regene-rative

Human-Nature

Contradiction Separation Connection/Connecti-vity

Unity

In this paper the conceptual classification will be used to test different types of eco-innovations by literature search, expert interviews and case studies to prove its epistemological value. The central question of the paper will be:‘’How can entrepreneurs improve and progress the development of cyclical and regenerative eco-innovations?’’

---------------------About the author:

Nel Hofstra has been a lecturer at the Erasmus School of Economics of the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands since 1986. She teaches electives in business and society, entrepreneurial market-ing, innovation and sustainability. Her recent articles are Sustainable Entrepreneurship in dialogue, published in Progress in Industrial Ecology 2007, Teaching for Sustainability 2011 and Eco-Innovations Characterized for the Journal of Cleaner Production (under construc-tion).

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Knut Ims (Norvegian School of Economics Bergen, Norway)

Personal Responsibility, Ecosophy and Deep Ecology

Inspired by Arne Naess’s writings on ecology, the paper will explore his viewpoint of the necessity of a Deep Ecological approach. Accord-ing to Naess deep ecology may be seen as proceeding in two direc-

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tions: (1) it tries to bring about a change and (2) it tries to develop an alternative philosophy, the so-called “eco philosophy”. While ecophilosphy is a descriptive science without fundamental postulates about values, ecosophy includes also the development and eliciting of norms. Arne Næss invites everybody to work out their individual ecosophy, by which he means a philosophy of ecological harmony. This kind of sophia or wisdom is openly normative, and contains value priorities, hypothesis as well as norms. Wisdom does not only include scientific descriptions and prediction, but also policy wisdom, prescriptions, and hypothesis. One norm in Arne Naess’s ecosphy T, is Self-Realization, which is understood to imply: Self-realization for all beings! In his ecosophy Naess negates the dominant metaphysics which sees humans as essentially different form the rest of nature.

Concerning contributing to change, Arne Naess walked his talk and participated directly in the societies value struggles. He admits that he had learned much from ecology as a science, but stated clearly that there are limits of science. Ecology and ecologism, the view that takes ecology as the ultimate science, cannot be a substitute of philo-sophical analysis. Any change has political implications and in Næss words “we need to fight against depolitization” of ecological science, concerned with facts and logic alone. The science in itself cannot give ultimate answers on ethical questions about how we should live.

The paper will include short illustrations of the fights for preser-vation of the Norwegian water falls in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the present fights for preservation of the Hardanger Montains from “the Monster masts” in 2011.

......................Knut J. Ims

Knut J. Ims is professor in Business Ethics at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH), Bergen, Norway. He received his PhD from the School of Economics and Legal Sciences, Gothenburg University, Sweden. He has taught courses in ethics (Ethical Action – Individual, Organization and Society; and, Business Strategy and Business Ethics) for more than a decade. He has also taught PhD courses in system development and information and management. He is a member of the Business Ethics Interfaculty

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Group of the Community of European Management Schools (CEMS), and is chairman of the board of the Centre of Ethics and Economics at NHH.

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Ove Jacobsen (Bodo Graduate School of Business.Norway)

Perspectives on Value Based Leadership

Over the last decades, an increasing number of people in business ad-ministration have accepted that all kinds of management in one way or the other is value based. As a consequence, the interest in morality and ethics has increased dramatically in both public and private sectors. Although there are various explanations, there is little doubt that the complexity of the society in addition to globalization has highlighted ethical challenges that were less focused some decades ago. This means that leaders have to deal with e.g.; environmental and social re-sponsibility, food security, climate change, poverty, corruption and other ethical topics.

Changing demands and expectations in the market, in addition to new laws and regulations, nationally and internationally, has contrib-uted to put more focus on value based leadership in many business firms. These tendencies are amplified through more column space in mass media on corruption, bribe and negative environmental effects originated from various forms of economic activities.

There are different interpretations of value based leadership, ranging from traditional neo-classical to more radical models. To un-derstand and handle today’s challenges I argue that it is necessary to make changes both in the ideas of science and of business manage-ment. One of the key issues has to do with the interpretation of ideol-ogy, values and norms in science and management. Value based lead-ership contains a combination of different phenomena: (1) the moral character of the leader; (2) the ethical legitimacy of the values imbed-ded in business visions and strategic plans; and (3) the values imbed-ded in the process of decision making and action that leaders and em-ployees engage in and collectively pursue.

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One method to uncover which values a company’s strategies and actions are based upon is to interview owners, managers and employ-ees in a company. Another method is to describe what the company actually does. As a rule, it is advantageous if there is consistency be-tween what emerges through interviews and through observation. On the other hand, to have ideals that lie ahead of actual performance could be motivating. Discrepancy between ideas and action could be a result of character weakness, but it could also be a signal indicating that change is coming.

Even if value based leadership is on its way to becoming a fairly established field of study, the question is what characterize the field of science we are dealing with. Should value based leadership be com-pared to established paradigms in management literature, where the idea is to add marginally to the established stock of knowledge or is value based leadership based on a different radical paradigm. Today there are different interpretations on what scientific foundations value based leadership should be based upon, therefore it is necessary to start with some initial remarks concerning my point of departure.

In my paper I discuss different perspectives that; • Contribute to increased awareness of moral and ethical chal-lenges in economics and business administration,• Provide a framework for justifying individual and organizational values and norms

---------------------Ove JacobsenOve D. Jakobsen (born 1952) holds a Dr. Oecon. degree (The Norwegian School of Economics 1989). He also holds master's degrees in Marketing (SLHK, Oslo), Business Administration (NHH) and Philosophy (University of Bergen). Today, Jakobsen is full Professor in Ecological Economics at Bodø Graduate School of Business/University of Nordland, where he is leader of the Centre for Ecological Economics and Ethics. Jakobsen is also Consultant at the NNL (Leadership training programs).

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Ove Jakobsen’s research and teaching have focused on topics relevant in ecological economics, environmental management and ethics for the last 20 years. He has published numerous articles and books nationally and internationally. Jakobsen is a popular speaker at courses, seminars and conferences.

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Gábor Kovács (Corvinus University of Budapest)

Spiritual orientation to nature in Buddhism

Western anthropocentric worldview has raised human beings from na-ture, and made them the dominant species over others and over the whole planet. This philosophy ended up in massive environmental crises, as in today’s world, modern societies are wholly detached from nature and “doing their businesses” in unsustainable ways – the con-sumption-based human lifestyle is depleting the scarce resources of the planet, furthermore polluting the environment in ever increasing extent.

The tradition of Buddhism takes up the opposite point according the role and the place of human beings in nature, since it denies their dominance over other species. It doesn’t constitute an anthropocentric worldview, but looks at humanity as an integral part of its surrounding environment – places them into a closely related, interdependent rela-tionship. According to its teachings, Buddhism and several modern science share the same view, that societies are inherently embedded in their environment.

In spite of that ancient Buddhist followers hadn’t had as much impact on the environment as modern societies have, one can find very strict regulations according the right behavior towards nature in the spirit of non-harming – all of them that we can refer as ancient en-vironmentalist precepts.

In this way, the respect towards nature stems not just from an on-tological point, but from practical regulations as well.

The heart of Buddhism is an ongoing spiritual perfection: the threefold practice. The observation of precepts and the compliance of virtues are the first step of it, which is leading to a non-harming,

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peaceful lifestyle. This allows meditation and the calming down of hu-man mind that results in the further strengthening of virtues and pre-cepts. This continuous practice is a positive spiral, which results in spiritual perfection and sustainability. This sustainability appears is each plane of existence – on personal, social and environmental levels –, and is articulated not as a goal, but emerging as a consequence of leading a “Buddhist way of life”, which is built around the conception of interdependence and the practice of non-harming......................

Gabor Kovacs is PhD student at the Business Ethics Center of the Corvinus University of Budapest for two years. His research topic is spiritual value-orientations in entrepreneurship. He has background in economics and management. He received his master's degree in Bud-dhist studies from the Budapest Buddhist University in 2010. He is participating in a research project about the ecological value-orienta-tion of Hungarian entrepreneurships. He is researching on Buddhist economics as well.

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András László (Eurovisioning, Brussels, Belgium)

The Forgotten Half of Sustainablity & Leadership: The Inner Di-mension/Perspective – the Sufi Approach

Essentially, the paper will explore the Inner Perspective of Leadership & Sustainability so seldom touched upon.

First, a concise introduction of Sufism and the teachings of Sufi Masters Hazrat and Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan will set the tone & frame-work within which the focus on the missing link–the Inner Perspec-tive– in the Sustainability & Leadership literature will gradually un-fold.

The introduction will highlight:

– new Settings/Dimensions of Consciousness according to Sufism

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– the Transcendent Dimension: Awakening from Personal Conscious-ness– the Spiritual Dimensions of Emotions– the Essence of Creativity: Tapping in to the Thinking of the Uni-verse– the Shift of Perspective–turning within– results in an overall trans-formation– the Search for Meaning

Within this outlined Sufi framework, the paper will continue to ex-plore the so needed LeaderShift in our age of mass collaboration & ever deepening interconnectivity.

It will point to the Ethics of Sustainability as well, and as regards Spiritual Leadership & Creativity, it will put in the forefront: the re-covering of the Soul, the Heart and the Wisdom as pivotal added value.

It will conclude highlighting and pinpointing the Essence of Spiritual Leadership/LeaderShift: to catch 'that what transpires behind that which appears'

Gandhi: „Our real power does not lie in our ability to change the world but in that of being able to recreate ourselves.”

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Imre Lázár (Semmelweis University of Medicine and Károli Gáspár University)

Reanimation of Nature

Biomedicine and modern economy share the same world view rooting in the Enlightenment and the modernity with their disenchanted scape of human body and nature. The materialist frame of reference freed the Nature from its fairies, devas, elementares and spiritual content loosing its pantheist or panentheist protection in eyes of the profit

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maximizing capitalist ethos. The same had happened with the human body loosing its spirit and soul, when medicine substituted its „spiri-tual credo” by a secular one.

We can draw parallel between Industry-Nature relationship and the pharmaindustrial, biotechnological strain which colonizes and sub-mits the human body as raw material. Consumer-orientation generate risks and side effects in both cases. These enormous risks and negative side-effects became one reason why unconditional trust in techno de-velopment failed. On the other hand the anthropological insight into different cosmologies, belief systems regarding healing, nature and economical practice with its particularist, cultural relativist framework and emic hermeneutics led to step by step shift towards a pluralistic - even multicultural - framework of understanding human being and the nature, and the economic practice.

Post-modernism, multiculturalism and the pluralisation of health market opened the door for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) proved by health economical indexes, and medical sociologi-cal and anthropological researches. This post-modern turn has been accompanied by a sort of re-enchantment of human and nature as well. Cultural phenomenological insight may be gained by participant ob-server field work among alternative healers, and groups of intellectu-als, gardeners, architects dealing with anthroposophy via emic under-standing, personal learning and embodiment. The personal experience of extended sensation, dowsing, or altered state of consciousness, postural trance states and other renewed techniques of divination be-came standard element of alternative healing arsenal. Biodynamic gar-dening, anthroposophical, spiritualized view of nature, geomantic practices offer parallel re-enchanted nature-scape. Communication with trees, elementars of nature, aura sensation, litho puncture are all means to approach the hidden, spiritual features of nature. Nature is re-enchanted and re-animated challenging the instrumentalist and utili-tarian techno-industrialized paradigm.

---------------------

Imre Lázár graduated from Semmelweis University of Medicine (Bu-dapest) as a medical doctor in 1981. While undergoing training in psy-chotherapy in the late 1980s he became interested in medical anthro-

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pology. He received his MSc in Medical Anthropology from Brunel University and his PhD in Behavioral Sciences from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, for the thesis Social-psychoimmunology. Psy-choimmunological explanatory models in medical anthropology. Since 1993 he has been teaching medical anthropology at the Institute of Behavioral Sciences of Semmelweis University. In 2000 he became the head of the Department of Medical Anthropology. Since 2003 he works as associate professor at the Institute of Communication and Social Sciences of Károli Gáspár University of Reformed Church, Bu-dapest. His research interests include human ecology, anthropology of dance, alternative medicine, medical pluralism and sacral communica-tion. He has authored a number of monographs and edited volumes in Hungarian and edited the book "Multiple Medical Realities" with H. Johannessen (Berghahn 2006).

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Hendrik Opdebeeck (University of Antwerp, Belgium)

The Islamitic & Jewisch TraditionSource of wisdom for the bridge between sustainability

management and spirituality

A central topic in exploring a new path for entrepreneurship combining sustainability management and spirituality is the urgent need for a bridge between a rational management development and wisdom. In this paper we want to explore the fundament of the richness of the Islamitic and Jewish Tradition in order to construct this bridge, with a special attention to their orientation to nature.

Because of the lack of interest in wisdom of the managerial minded Romans, in the West after Alexander The Great, no new schools of wisdom were created. History speaks of the Dark Ages, between Antiquity and Renaissance. Two great cultures transferred the ancient tradition to the Christian West: the Arab and the Jewish culture. The Jewish wisdom is both religious and philosophical. Religious Judaism has developed the foundations on which later Christianity and Christian Western culture were built. Without an

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understanding of the foundations of the Jewish tradition, Christianity is incomprehensible. After 70 AD, the Jews emigrated throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, and again began to flourish in the realm of Islam. Islam regarded the Jews and Christians rightly as a precursor of their religion, and therefore preached a policy of respect and tolerance for the Jewish and Christian minorities in their midst. One of the most interesting names of great Jewish philosophers between Antiquity and Renaissance to mention is Moses Maimonides (1135-1206). He transmitted the Greek Aristotelian tradition of practical wisdom as the mother of all virtues. Important for a sustainable entrepreneurship today is that Maimonides and other Jewish philosophers like Gabirol, along with Arab thinkers like Avicenna and Averroes, not just preserved the Greek tradition. They also wondered how in a correct and fruitful way one can consider the bridge between rational thought and spiritual traditions. It is clear that this is of central importance when sustainability entrepreneurship nowadays searches for practical wisdom.

........................

Hendrik Opdebeeck is professor of philosophy at the University of Antwerp where he is affiliated with the Centre for Ethics. He studied philosophy and economics at the Universities of Leuven and Ghent. His research interest is focused on the cultural-philosophical back-grounds and effects of globalisation and technology. He is president of the SPES-Forum with a focus on spirituality or meaningfulness in eco-nomics and society His publications in English include “The Founda-tion and Application of Moral Philosophy” (Peeters, Leuven, 2000), “Building Towers, Perspectives on Globalisation” (Peeters, Leuven, 2002), “Frugality: Rebalancing Material and Spiritual Values in Eco-nomic Life” (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2008), “Can one prevent globalisa-tion leading to ethical decay?” (CIC Edizioni Internazionali, Rome, 2009), and “The Legacy of Jacques Maritain’s Humanisme Intégral” (Garant, Antwerp/Appeldoorn, 2010)

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Arundhati Virmani (EHESS Marseille and ESC Rennes School of Business, France) and François Lépineux (ESC Rennes School of Business, France)

Sustainable Agriculture as Spiritual-Based Entrepreneurship:The Role of Navdanya in India and Beyond

A century ago, an ordinary, unknown lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi demonstrated the power of spirituality in the language of resis-tance. Notions like “soul force” (ahimsa) or “non-violence”, hitherto words confined to religious movements and groups, came to constitute and impose a new vocabulary and practices of political culture. Today, in another century and in another sphere, a similar change is taking place, with the introduction of spirituality as a frame of reference and action in the field of business. Spirituality forms part and parcel of a new approach to entrepreneurship. More so, it is part of the language of resistance to global projects of development. This paper examines the mobilization of spiritual notions in defense of sustainable agricul-ture in India through the specific case of Navdanya (Nine seeds), a network of seed keepers and organic producers in India founded in 1984 by Vandana Shiva.

It first traces and analyzes the transformation of this organization from a research foundation for science, technology and ecology (RF-STE) into a movement with distinctively Indian characteristics and a spiritual philosophy, advocating practices of non-violent farming, sharing, gifting. Today, besides covering a large network of seed keepers and organic producers over 16 Indian states, it includes a learning centre (Bija Vidyapeeth) and an Earth University. Its Earth Democracy Movement proposes a holist view of man’s relation with the planet. The organization’s growth and diversification in India to issues ranging from environmentalism to land sovereignty in India is distinguished by its identification with spiritual notions specific to an Indian political culture. These lend it a national legitimacy and sacred-ness. At the same time, by anchoring it firmly in the Indian soil and national landscape, its international reputation is both enhanced and distinguished from other organizations like Slow Food, with which it keeps close contacts.

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Next, its programs of sustainability in agriculture and environ-ment are examined from a national perspective. Navdanya has suc-cessfully mobilized a spiritual language of protest from a national anti-colonial tradition and the battles to safeguard and revive Indian rural and artisanal activities. Its campaigns like seed pilgrimage (Bij yatra) and Bij satyagraha, or Jal swaraj movement (protection of wa-ter) and Bhu swaraj (food security) recall earlier national battles for indigenous production and home industries and Gandhi’s pilgrimage (salt yatra) to the sea to produce salt in defiance of British colonial laws. We then discuss Navdanya’s growth as part of a movement of a growing international sympathy and support of the local and the re-gional against the global.

Lastly, the paper looks at the movement’s impact on questions of national agricultural policy and the place of farmers in the Indian land-scape. Although the government’s insistence on agriculture as the bedrock of national growth is now a standard slogan, discontent with its development policies focusing on technology and aid is rampant. From this perspective, Navdanya’s fight for rights and common good articulated in a language rooted in the traditional wisdom and knowl-edge of common folk holds a strong appeal. Its contestation of state policies of agricultural development and aid to farmers are strength-ened by its counter proposals for sustainable agriculture grounded on spirituality.

Navdanya offers an example of how spiritual values and tradi-tions can be mobilized to propose a vision of sustainable agriculture and defend the individual against corporate rights.

-------------------------

Arundhati Virmani

Arundhati Virmani did her Ph.D from the Sorbonne, Paris. She taught in Delhi University, University of Bordeaux and currently teaches at the EHESS, Centre Norbert Elias, Marseille. She is a business consult-ant in intercultural relations. Her focus is colonial and contemporary India, particularly recent political, cultural and religious transforma-

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tions in Indian society. Some books include : L’Inde, une puissance en mutation, (Paris, La Documentation Française, 2001) ; India : 1900-1947 (Paris, Autrement, 2001) ; A National Flag for India. Rituals, Nationalism and the Politics of Sentiment (Delhi, Permanent Black, 2008) ; Atlas de l’histoire de l’Inde (Paris, Autrement, forthcoming, 2012).

François Lépineux

François Lépineux is Professor at ESC Rennes School of Business (France), holder of the CANON Chair ‘Foresight and the Common Good’ and Head of the Centre for Responsible Business. He has re-cently co-edited three books: Business, Globalization and the Com-mon Good (Peter Lang, 2009) and Finance for a Better World (Pal-grave Macmillan, 2009), both with Henri-Claude de Bettignies; Social Responsibility, Entrepreneurship and the Common Good (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), with Carole Bonanni and Julia Roloff. François Lépineux is co-founder and past-President (2002-2005) of ADERSE, the French academic association on CSR, and co-author of the first handbook on CSR in French.

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Alpar Losoncz (University of Novi Sad, Serbia)

Are there non-trivial lessons from the crisis for the business as „non-usual“?

The ongoing socio-economic crisis is structurally determined. There-fore, it is not to be explained as the expression of routine-like negative tendencies in capitalism. In fact, it exposes the economy (and busi-ness) to the deep reconsideration. However, the offered ways of the

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solution of crisis do not open such opportunity. They remain eventu-ally within the frame of the re-regulation of unfettered finances as the presupposed cause of the crisis. But the widespread process of re-reg-ulation of finances does not contribute at all to the mentioned recon-sideration. Naturally, we do not underestimate the importance of fi-nancialisation in the transformation of the meaning of business; only do not think on moduses of financialisation as the cause of the crisis. The financialisation represents „merely“ the forms of the crisis of cap-italism. First, the financialisation deeply influences the culture of busi-ness in capitalism. In addition, the important feature here is the finan-cialisation of the relationships between business and nature, or, the fi-nancialisation of the social metabolism between the human agent and nature. The nature is reduced to the effect of financial derivatives (for example we see the case of weather derivatives etc.) and to the virtual form of business-reality. This is the clear negation of the standard de-mand of ecological movements, ecologically-based thinking and ethi-cal deliberation, namely, the strong embeddedness of business. Finan-cialisation of the nature refers to the general aspect of the human exis-tence in the context of embeddedness, that is, the measure. The exten-sive processes of the financialisation of measure refer to the spiritual misery, or the despiritualization that is to be described as the torsion and the losing of measure. The articulation of measure is to be inter-preted in the sense that business is only the subsystem of the all-en-compassing reality. This could be depicted as the concept of holon and parallax: the same thing could be demonstrated at the same time in different perspectives. From the perspective of the position within the frame of capitalism the business oriented to the maximization of profit etc. seems as the completed system. From the perspective of the out-side the business is seen “only” as the part of greater reality. There are, of course, a lot of readings of crisis: ours is the new conceptual-ization of the business on the basis of spiritualized community econ-omy. First, this needs the perspective of spiritual holon/parallax: demonstrating that from the perspective from “outside” business is deeply dependent on the greater whole. The measure could be found exactly on the basis of this spiritual holon. In addition, this explains what is at stake with spirituality within community: it refers to the in-dispensable self-transformation, to the essential work on self in the context of community-based participation. There are a lot of valuable

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practices of community-economy during the last decades and we in-tend to take these into account.

----------------Alpár Losoncz

Alpár Losoncz has studied law, economics, and philosophy. He gained his PhD in Social Sciences and Economics from the University of Novi Sad. From 1981 to 1987 he was research associate at the Faculty of Law Novi Sad. From 1988 he has been working at the Department of Social Sciences of the Faculty of Techniques. Since 1991 he is Lec-turer at the Faculty of Philosophy in Szeged University, Hungary. Since 1996 he was also Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad. He was also initiator of the Specialist Academic Studies in Novi Sad and the director of the course in relation to multiculturality in Central Europe, and business ethics. In addition he served as the Lec-turer of Alternative Academic Network in Belgrade, and he is invited lecturer at other Universities. He is the member of the European SPES –forum.

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Lidmila Nemcova (Czech Society for Ethics in Economics,The Czech Republic)

Art as a means for increasing sensibilityto spirituality and sustainability

Ideas of freedom accompanied the human kind for ages. Numerous examples can be presented: rebellions of slaves, French revolution 1789 with demands of equality, liberty and fraternity, decolonisation

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process, destruction of the “Eastern block” 1989, recent movements in the world etc. Until nowadays various false explanations of freedom (oppressing well-being and destabilizing personality) have bad con-sequences: they increase present political, economic, social and envir-onmental crises. An incorrect understanding of liberty brings lot of conflicts when unethical priority is given to individual personal profit and interest. New alternatives combine economic, social and environ-mental issues with actual safety and security aspects. Problems of sus-tainable development are to be completely respected. Unstable mod-ernity of today with so many evil examples (of high priority in media) increase lack of ability to discern Good from Evil; these terms need to be defined as well as priority properties which should be associated with a “good human being”. Various instruments can be applied to im-prove sensibility for spirituality and sustainability. No changes can be realized by using only rhetoric and legislation processes. Respect to ethical values of Europe as well as to the social teaching of the Church is to be taken into consideration.

Extraordinary occasions for art of any kind - music, creative graphic and plastic arts, literature (classic, modern incl. science fic-tion), theatre, cinema, etc. - exist to harmonise individual personal in-terests with those of the humanity well-being and Nature and also to cultivate individual spirituality and the appropriate values. Arts can be applied as irreplaceable means for making any human being better, for improving his sense for solidarity and for increasing his ethical sensib-ility.

As a significant instrument for improving ethical global climate the art should be used in the never ending education process at any level – not only to strengthen a fair relation of any human being to the Earth and to the global well-being. Also entrepreneurial environment should be adopted to increase nobleness feelings and behaviour in everybody, emphasising also the importance of aesthetical function of the beauty (rooted in the Nature). Methodological problems consist in the basic premise: any successful application will depend on personal quality, integrity and example of promoters (including intellectual él-ite, players in the markets etc.). Special field for applying art is con-nected with the popularization of science among employees. Correct presentations of sustainable development are needed to avoid false misinterpreting ideas.

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Concrete examples will be given for possible applications in-cluding areas corresponding to the Millennium Development Goals (especially those ensuring environmental sustainability).

-------------------

Lidmila Nemcova

Lidmila Nemcova graduated at the University of Economics in Prague. In her long teaching practice at the same university she intro-duced in 1991 as the first teacher in the country courses on Business Ethics. Her other fields of interest were management, co-operatives, non-profit marketing. As Associate Professor of this University she was very active in the meetings of CEMS focussed on pedagogical processes in Business Ethics. In 1997 she was as Visiting Professor at the Viadrina Universty (Frankfurt/Oder, Germany). Since 2004 she continued her teaching courses at several private universities.

She is co-founder and actually President of the Czech Society for Ethics in Economics. She is co-operating with various organisations in the Czech Republic (Czech Managerial Association etc.), as well as abroad (mostly on an international basis - e.g. member of the European coordination group in the organization for Christian em-ployees MTCE/EBCA).

She works together with her husband Vaclav Nemec in develop-ing a new auxiliary discipline of earth sciences - geoethics.

× × ×

Lisette Peulen (business consultant, The Netherlands)

Creating Connected Companies

Organizational development is the discipline that deals with the tar-geted development of the potential that is typical to each organization. In the past decades more and more companies have been hiring con-sultants to support their development. In this lecture I will argue that

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the more an enterprise chooses to align itself in all aspects and pro-cesses to its founding destination, the more abundant and self-sustain-ing it will become and the more it will contribute to the society it is part of.

Each organization was founded from a certain love. Most hospi-tals for example have been established from a love for mankind and its physical state of being. However, one hospital stems from an aca-demic background and the love for knowledge and the other hospital builds on the social engagement of a sister order. The two hospitals appear to be the same, but are in their true essence very different from each other.

From an economic paradigm we would, and do, treat each hospi-tal the same as any other. We would develop a Management Develop-ment program or an IT tool and sell it to each hospital. And we would, as we do, implement it in the same standardized way.

The same goes for the way we control each company, for the way we promote each product, etc. etc. A standardized (American-ized) way of working creates standardized, Americanized companies.

But organizations are living creatures and by birthright different from each other. Founded from a different love, located in a different geographical region, attractive to different employees with different dreams and capabilities.

From the paradigm of connectedness we acknowledge these dif-ferences, respect the individuality of each company and search for the reconnection with its own founding destination. In this connection we will find the specific answers and instructions to the specific questions and developmental needs of each company. By acknowledging the forgotten or denied spiritual dimension, a sustainable profit for all models emerges.

In the seventies Berenschot, a Dutch consultancy firm, devel-oped a model of the seven powers of change. This model that aligns with the connected way of organizational development, provides each new entrepreneur a simple self-analysis tool. Are the powers of change in place? Are they strong or weak? Without interference, in which direction do they work?

In the same connected way entrepreneurs can, by themselves and without external aid, investigate the extent to which the companies’ processes and working ways are in accordance with the natural laws

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of organization as defined by Hellinger and Weber. These laws, like for example the law of balance, are applicable by each manager in his or her own organization.

In this lecture I will go further into the concept of the 'founding destination' and both tools, and investigate the possibilities to become a connected, self-sustaining company.

× × ×

Jozef R. Raco and Revi M.H.Tanod (De La Salle Catholic University of Manado, Indonesia)

Spirituality of Catholic Entrepreneurs in A Muslim Majority Society

There are quite few studies on entrepreneurship as it relates to spirituality. Many researches on entrepreneurship are speechless concerning spirituality (Kauanui et, al, 2008). They added that some researchers tried to discover its connection but most of them failed. Those researchers could not provide a suitable explanation of the impact of spirituality on entrepreneurs’ decision to start business enterprise.

However he elaborated that spirituality should be considered as important element to understand entrepreneurship. Peple lives as entrepreneurs because they are being inspired, motivated and pushed by inner force which we call “spirit” (Anderson, 2000). Spirituality will make a person lives a fullest life with ultimate value (Macquarrie, 1972). A person’s spirit is the vital principle of animating force traditionally believed to be the intangible, life affirming force in self and human being (Anderson, 2000). Spirituality has become the ‘brand label’ for the search for meaning, values, transcendence hope and connectedness in modern societies (Carrete & King, 2005). The more spiritual, the more individual will have a sense of connection, joy and completeness (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003).

Spirituality we mean here is above and beyond specific religious belief (Hicks) eventhough spirituality could not be separated from religion (Hill et al, 2000). Spirituality is multi-dimensional construct, subjective and beyond categorization (Singhal Manish, 2006). A

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single definition of spirituality is not appropriate to describe its fullness (Krishnakumar & Neck, 2002). Singhal Manish (2006) wrote that there are more definition of spirituality than there are authors reseachers to write about it. Reducing spirituality into variables will degrade its richness and at the end lossing its meaning (Klerk, 2005 ). The inclusion of spiritual concepts on entrepreneurship will enable deeper values of business owners to surface and new models to emerge (Kauanui, et.al, 2008).

This paper aim to understanding spirituality from the entrepreneurs’ point of view. What is the essence of spiritual experiences according to the entrepreneur? How they manifest their spirituality in their activities as entrepreneurs in a Muslim majority society? Does spirituality have impact to their business? How they perceive religion? How they define success?

Phenomenological method will be used to this study. Twenty partisipants will be selected. Some criteria will be considered for selecting participants. Participants should have entreprenerial experience. They are active in religious activities and living and having business in Muslim majority society.

Analysis and interpretation of data will use Amadeo Georgi’s phenomenological approach. Research findings will indicate the essence of participants’ spirituality as they experience working as entrepreneurs in a Muslim majority society.

-------------------Jozef Richard Raco is currently working as the Director of Research and Development of De La Salle Catholic University of Manado Indonesia. He got his Doctorate degree in Educational Management from The State University of Jakarta Indonesia, Master degree in Business Management from University of East Anglia Norwich England, Master degree in Economics from Asian Social Institute of Manila, Philipines. His research interests are in the area of Entrepreneurship, Leadership and Qualitative Method. He already published two handbooks in Indonesian: Qualitative Research Method: Type, Characteristic and Specificity (Grasindo-Indonesia, 2010); and Phenomenological Method Applied to Entrepreneurship (Grasindo Indonesia, 2012, with Revi Tanod as co-writer).

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Revi M.H.Tanod is currently Rector of De La Salle University of Manado, Indonesia. He is a doctorate candidate of the De La Salle University of Manila of the Philippines. He got his Master degree in Educational Management from the same university. His research interests are in the area of Education, Leadership and Entrepreneurship. With Jozef R. Raco he published a student handbook “Phenomenological Research Method Applied to Entrepreneurship”.

× × ×

Szabolcs Sipos (Nilfisk-Advance, Budapest, Hungary)

Cost-based versus Value-based Approach to Management

The Ecological Footprint is rocketing while poverty, unhealthiness and natural disasters became more and more general. Lately, even the financial world signals that the mainstream approach is not sustain-able.

Companies and governments are multi-dimensional and highly interconnected entities where waste/non-value manifested in one site is related to weaknesses and misalignment in the rest of the system. Pure economics can hardly handle this complexity; it neglects too many intangible values and excludes too many ethical, social and eco-logical aspects. On the other hand, the high-level specialization makes it almost impossible to see the true and original purpose.

There are two main approaches. Some differences can be spotted al-ready on the surface; however, the roots are deep within…

Cost-focused approach

Value-focused approach

Also known as Western-style, main-stream

Fully aligned, Lean phi-losophy

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Key principle “The bigger the scale, the lower the unit cost.”the lower the unit cost.”

“The more satisfied the customer, the more future business comes.”

Economic conceptBusiness goal Growth and increasing

ProfitMinimize effort, maxi-mize resultDriven by price: Cheapest option wins

Stay in business and cre-ate jobsMaximize Customer sat-isfactionTotal impact: Most opti-mal option wins

Definition of cost: Price = Cost + Profitor Profit = Price - Cost

Price – Cost = Profit

Departments Unaligned, functionally segmented Specialized, driven by individual metrics

Aligned by Value StreamContribute to the com-mon goal

Communication: Top-down (the boss tells what to do)

2-way, leverage shopfloor experience

Improvement way: Cost cutting Continuous Improvement, Lean, Six Sigma, TQM

Form of action: Project (given re-sources and deadlines) Based on a stable picture

Culture, improvement is part of daily workFlexible to the ever changing circumstances

Result: People need to align to the new processPeople must fit into the organization

Process is aligned to create value for CustomerThe organization builds on the people

Human AspectsMantra „Solve problems” „Avoid problems”

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Management role Ensure that goals are metFind the best possible optionManagement by Objec-tives (measure, count)

Coach and empower peopleFind the optimal, “good enough” optionHoshin Kanri (feel, share)

Management tool: Hierarchical power and controlCompetition and self-esteem

Trust and mutual respectCooperation and mini-mize suffer

Motivation: Money and position/ statusThe result of actions is indirect to the goals

Earn resources and redis-tribute wiselyActions directly lead to the goals

General feelings: Few winners and many losersStress, frustration and fear

Balanced through creat-ing win-win situations, Commitment, challenge and satisfaction

Lifestyle: Greed, short-term planning, no visionSelfish, individually-focused actions

Simple, mindful, humbleWish to belong to a com-munity, solidaritySelf – Society – Nature in harmony

to avoid undesirable impacts sneak into our lifestyle we have to stop subordinating the human aspects to the economic concept.

The more individuals restore the harmony of Self, Society and Nature in their own life, the closer mankind will get to a culture-driven, value-focused; therefore, sustainable business approach.

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--------------Szabolcs Sipos

Energized by the daily practice of yoga and regular Pilates workouts, Szabolcs Sipos is a passionate and highly people-centric change agent with a proven record of successfully develop and deploy end-to-end improvement strategies and unite separated business units towards one common vision. Proactive and result-oriented Lean Six Sigma professional blessed with the opportunity to gain experience across Europe, the United States, India, China and Western-Africa.

Currently works as Production System Manager at Nilfisk-Advance; responsible for embedding a standardized operational approach across the EMEA/APAC region (Headquarters in Denmark, factories in China, Italy and Hungary).

Dedicated to master the skills of drastically increasing the performance of an organization through its culture and create a win-win situation where profit-driven companies can achieve their goals while being socially responsible and ecologically sustainable.

× × ×

Sophie Smit (Erasmus University of Rotterdam, The Netherlands)

Trends in Corporate Philanthropy:New and reinvented Philanthropic practices as a strategic

instrument to enhance Corporate Sustainability

New and reinvented forms of corporate philanthropy are a powerful instrument to stimulate corporate sustainability. Philanthropic actions have existed since the creation of mankind. The relevance of corporate giving increases even more in times of worldwide economic crises such as the current ones. The etymological definition of philanthropy goes back to ancient Greece (2500 BC) namely ‘The love of human-ity’.  From a holistic perspective philanthropic actions and policies of organizations can be seen as an important component of Corporate So-cial Responsibility (CSR). In modern terms, philanthropic prac-tices can be described as ‘private initiatives for public good’—balanc-

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ing the social-scientific aspect, with the long-traditional and original humanistic grounds. This paper elaborates on ‘Which new and rein-vented philanthropic practices help corporations the most at improv-ing their competitive context and the quality of the (business) environ-ment where they operate?’ By using philanthropy as a strategic corpo-rate instrument organizations can achieve various goals simultane-ously. Long-term business prospects can be improved as sustainable social-, environmental- and economic goals strengthen their positions in relation to competitors. Corporations do not only donate financial means, they also transfer distinctive capabilities that help improving their business environments (create shared value). The chosen research theme can be seen as a prolongation of the present discussion on Strategic Philanthropy and CSR with three dis-tinctive parts. The first part of the paper analyses the concept op 21st

century Corporate Philanthropy by comparing various definitions of important terms related to the subject namely: (Strategic) Philan-thropy, Charity, Corporate Citizenship, Corporate Volunteering and Corporate Giving. The second section of the paper provides an inter-national selection of new and reinvented corporate philanthropic prac-tices. Some of the most striking innovative philanthropic tools such as ‘Skills Based Volunteering’ are shortly reviewed together with rein-vented tools as ‘Episodic Giving’. In the third and last part of the pa-per, the focus is on the impact of the modern (both new and rein-vented) forms of corporate philanthropy. An exploratory qualitative perspective is used to answer two final questions namely, i) Which of the reviewed practices seem to be the most promising for sustainable (international) business models? and ii) What kind of corporate lead-ership is needed to effectively use modern philanthropic practices?The aim of this publication is to create awareness on the ‘win-win’ possibilities of new and/or reinvented corporate philanthropic devel-opments as instruments of corporate sustainability. The advantages of these instruments go far beyond their use as business tools with nu-merous uses to society, economy and environment.

------------------Sophie Smit is a Phd-candidate currently conducting research on the field Philanthropy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She started her career in 2001 as a Social-Economic re-

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searcher at the Dutch Labor Inspectorate. In 2004 she became a Project leader of national Social-Economic research projects of the Ministry of Labor & Social Affairs in The Hague. During that period she conducted several research projects on behalf of new legislation on working conditions and employer obligations. Since 2008 she has been active as an organizational consultant of several Dutch non-profit organizations

× × ×

Aloy Soppe (Erasmus University of Rotterdam, The Netherlands)

Financial Ethics After the Crisis

The internet bubble of 2001, the many discoveries of financial fraud at the corporate and individual level in the first decade of this century, and the banking crisis of 2008-10 are a clear indication of the vulnerability of the global financial system as initiated and de-veloped in the last decades of the former century. This paper re-turns to the roots of banking and finance and provides an historical overview on the interest debate in the first part. It is hypothesized that moral hazard, the compound interest mechanism and the matu-rity of capital are the hidden dangers of the current financing sec-tor. In the second part, an institutional role of charity and interest management is proposed to dampen the major negative influences of global financial competition. By reconsidering the historical questions on interest and banking, the case is made to encourage the construction of a global central bank together with a strong en-couragement of national banks and small local finance institutions that introduce donations as core elements of lending.

This paper sketches an extensive historical and theoretical frame-work that qualitatively illustrates the long-term influence of interest rates and trade in financial assets on the macroeconomic process. The approach that has been chosen is based on a moral-philosophi-cal foundation that covers a wider analytical terrain than does the modern economic theory, which is based on a strict utilitarian

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foundation. The inherent normative approach integrates principle and consequential based ethics. The primary function of money and financial capital – its role as a unit of account and exchange – is threatening to become subordinate to the creation of financial wealth as a goal in itself. Collective trust in financial markets, the major issue in finance, is at stake. The very moment that the neu-trality of money and long-term capital is attacked by moral hazard and adverse selection, the financial system loses its scientific ob-jectivity.

The objective of the paper is a long term analysis of financial mar-kets in the developed economy. After the collapse of communism – in which corporate control was dominated by the production fac-tor labour - the question at stake right now is whether financial cap-italism will be able to survive. Today, it is the production factor capital that dominates corporate control. Don’t we need alternative and more democratic corporate models in order to take care of e.g. the interest of natural environment (the third major production fac-tor) and other stakeholders?

---------------Aloy Soppe is Associate Professor at the Erasmus University in Rot-terdam. He was a stock analyst for the Amsterdam Stock Exchange at ABN/AMRO bank, and later worked as director of Soppe Currency Consultants and advisor for the implementation of option strategies in managing currency risk. Since 1987, he has worked at the Department of Finance and Investments at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In 1993, he moved into sustainability research and started teaching Fin-ancial Ethics. In 2001, he joined the Erasmus University Law Faculty to teach Financial Ethics in the discipline of Financial Law. He com-pleted his PhD with a thesis entitled: Finance as an Instrument to a Sustainable Company and publishes articles in national and interna-tional journals and books.

× × ×

Antal Szabó (ERENET, Budapest, Hungary)

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New Economic and Social order and Doing Business based on Christian Set of Values

The first part of the paper analyses the main two antagonistic world orderings and highlights their major consequences reaching to deadlock. The centrally planned economy based on the principle of socialism is collapsed by the desintegration of the former Soviet Union in 1991.

The current liberal capitalism based on the view that the economics pays too big role in the society and everything is judged on the base of its usefulness is intolerable. The "Holy Trinity" preached by the neoliberal with its magic power of liberalization, deregularization and privatization is in ruin. The world failed to learn from the lesson of the recent economic crises and the capitalism in its current form does not fit the world around us. Old democracies are bleeding, the debts and the unemployment rates are increasing the the world became more vulverable than ever before. A global transformation is urgently needed and "it must start with reinstating a global sense of social responsibility". The Christian Church and the Vatican already in mid of the 1960s call attention that the truth and charity are the two behaviours which could lead to a better and fair economic and social order. The greatest challenge of the christian social teaching is the command on love. "Love your Lord, love your neighbour as yourself" - there is no other commandment greater than these. This love is a fraternal one; your should lobe your neighbour even if he is your enemy. Translating thjis to the language of the economic ethics it incorporate the principle of the maxiam possible cooperation. The Love in truth — caritas in veritate — is a great challenge for the Church in a world that is becoming progressively and pervasively globalized. The encyclical Letter "Caritas in Veritate" of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI might be the right compass of the new world economic and social order. The encyclical tells us that it is possible to do business even while pursuing socially useful goals and acting for pro-social reasons.

The second part of the paper summarises the current knowledge on Christian entrepreneurship. The definition of enterprises by

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Harvard is "to make money and fullfil customer requirements". Christian entrepreneurs are ones who in addition to the business reals focus also in Christianity shares common goals and morals including social responsibility and sustainable economy. The ultimate goal of Christian entrepreneurs is not to make money in itself, but to have a positive impact on the society. If we want business to grow and to have success, we have to center everything on the person. We need to aim at motivation of the people by taking the indentity into account, apply the charism, start and run the business. The paper present the main entrepreneurial behaviours to to the business in Christian way. Special attention is payed to family, which is the best place where we experience the economy of love. Enterprise as well as the family is a place of solidarity.

--------------------

Dr. Antal Szabó (born in 1943) is a Hungarian citizen, Instrumentation and Process Control Engineer, Master of Digital Semiconductor Electronics, Doctor of Automation Sciences, holder of Diplom of Management Sciences, retired UN Regional Adviser, Member of the Hungarian Engineering Academy, Founder and Scientific Director of the Entrepreneurship Research and Education Network among the Central- and Eastern-European Universities - ERENET.

He served at various managerial positions at Hungarian industrial companies, civil servant and division director at the Ministry of Industry and international high-level expert at the United Nations Economic Commission of Europe.

He is a staff member of the SBDC at the Corvinus University of Budapest and he was Visiting Professor on Entrepreneurship at the Petru Maior University (Romania) for three years.

× × ×

Roland Szilas (Corvinus University of Budapest and Sapientia The-ology College, Hungary)

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Anthropological Foundations of Emerging Leadership and Hu-man Resource Management Models

Already in the works of the founding fathers of scientific management (Taylor, 1911), we can discover the central role of a specific “view of man”, which serves as the foundation of their instructions for effec-tive management. This highly reductionist anthropological conception overemphasizes the importance of monetary compensation in motivat-ing workers, strives for efficiency through the separation of organiza-tion and execution of work, and calls for the implementation of strong control mechanisms.

The ideas of scientific management continue to have significant influence on current management practices (Hammer-Champy, 1993), however they were criticized very early on the basis of their inade-quate anthropological foundations. McGregor (1960) in his famous X-Y theory has pointed out the self-fulfilling nature of different manage-rial “view of man”. He has shown that management practices that con-sider workers lazy, irresponsible and lacking self-motivation in-fact create exactly these worker attitudes at the workplace. On the contrary managers who believe in the autonomy, responsibility and self-moti-vation of their workers can rightfully count on receiving these kind of behaviors in return.

The idea of the autonomous, responsible and self-motivated worker was further strengthened by leading theorists of motivation (Herzberg, 1968), who have argued for the importance of intrinsic mo-tivators at the workplace. Another significant contribution to the an-thropological basis of management and job design came from Hack-man and Oldham (1975), who beside the previously mentioned ele-ments highlight the importance of knowing the outcomes of a work and its meaningfulness. Along these lines the purposefulness of work has received considerable attention from scholars lately, and inspired motivation theories that differentiate extrinsic, intrinsic and transcen-dental motivation (Pérez López, 1991).

Although the previous outline of management thinking on “view of man” might suggest a clear tendency and direction of development, we have to acknowledge that diverse ideas about the anthropological foundation of management coexist in contemporary business life. As researchers of organizations we can easily find examples for the appli-

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cation of the taylorian “view of man” in many factories, fast food chains or shared service centers. At the same time many small or large companies operating in sectors, where technological innovation and knowledge development play a crucial role, often view and manage their employees as creative and innovative beings who are capable of taking personal responsibility. Given this large diversity in applied “view of man”, the contemporary leadership models are also multi-tudinous. We have managers that continue to use the logic of “per-sonal interests” and the corresponding transactional leadership mod-els.

Other leaders emphasize the importance of common values of employee and employer and embrace the transformational leadership model (Lothian et al, 2009). Many leaders struggling with the chal-lenges of a diverse workforce apply the situational leadership model of Hersey and Blanchard (1998) and try to match their leadership style with the maturity of their workers. Due to the coexistence of these dif-ferent leadership approaches we can also recognize a great variety of human resource management models ranging between the “hard” HRM model of Michigan and the “soft” HRM model of Harvard (Analoui, 2007).

In my presentation at the conference I intend to present in detail the relationship between the above mentioned anthropological founda-tions, leadership and human resource management models. As a final contribution I will analyze how an anthropological base emphasizing purposeful existence and transcendental orientation (Alford-Naughton, 2001) can be connected to the distinctive servant leadership model (Greenleaf, 1998) and a new conception of the employer-employee re-lationship.

References

Alford, J. H. and Naughton, M. (2001): Managing as if faith mattered: Christian social principles in the modern organization. University of Notre Dame Press

Analoui (2007): Stratagic Human Resource Management. Thomson Learning. London

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Blanchard (1998): Situational Leadership. John Wiley & Sons.

Greenleaf, R. K. and Spears, L. C. (1998): The power of servant lead-ership. Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Hackman, J. and Oldham, G. R. (1975): Development of the Job Diag-nostic Survey, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 60(2)

Hammer, M. and Champy, J (1993): Reengineering the Corporation. A Manifesto for Business Revolution, New York

Herzberg, F (1968): One more time. How do you motivate employees. Harvard Business Review.

Lothian et al. (2009): Insights Transformational Leadership Reference Book, BPR Publishers

McGregor, D. (1960): The Human Side of Enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company

Pérez López, J.A. (1991): Teoría de la Acción Humana en las Organizaciones. Rialp, Madrid.

Taylor (1911): The Principles of Scientific Management. New York

------------Roland Ferenc Szilas is Assistant Professor at Corvinus University Budapest, Institute of Management, Faculty of Organizational Behav-iour and Lecturer at Sapientia College of Theology, teaching Manage-ment and Organization, Human Resource Management and Organiza-tional Development. His main research interests include virtue ethics, organizational justice, workplace stress, political economy and work organizations.

Recent publications: “Workplace stress and organizational justice” in: Stratégia és Menedzsment, Budapest, 2011 AULA; “Work stress and organizational justice. Analysis of a discourse on workplace problems” (SCOS Standing Conference on Organizational

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Symbolism, From Philosophy of Science to the ‘Praxis’ of Organizations 2010)

× × ×

Gergely Toth (KÖVET, Budapest, Hungary)

From Moral Economics to Bionomia

In this paper we examine the almost invisible line of moral economics from Aristotle to Amartya Sen. I strongly emphasize the role of world religions from Thomas Aquinas and Catholic Social Teaching as manifested in 14 documents from Rerum Novarum (1891) to Caritas in Veritate (2009), through buddhist economics, to the recent speech of the English chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks. Islam economics will have a special focus, in the paper we cover Ibn Khaldun, who pub-lished his work in 1375, described supply and demand, work distribu-tion and social cohesion – 401 years before Adam Smith.

We also grasp the other, more visible school, utilitarian econom-ics, from the mercantilist ancestors to the Chicago School. This school, what we also call mainstream seems to be in his heydays, en-joying a monopoly in business economics and education, scientific lit-erature, Nobel-prizes. In a somewhat controversial way the only seri-ous challenge of this school presented by socialism and communism has strengthened this spiritual monopoly status after all. Most people think that if A (utilitarian economics) is opposite to B (socialism) and B fails, than A must be “true”, “real”. Might be. But it is also feasible that C (moral economics) is the most proper answer to the problems of our age.

We do not go into detail into these problems, which can be sum-marized as unsusatinability. Instead, we show that the utilitarian school has “overwon itself” and overgrew society. As E.F. Schu-macher described in Small is Beautiful in 1973, economism became the name of the game. I go further and show that economism has be-come a quasi religion, which all nations (except Bhutan) share, with no respect to its formal religion, or the degree religious aspect play in everyday governance. I show the caricature of this quasi-religion: the

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ten commandments, the wholly trinity of three impersonal concepts (efficiency, competitiveness and growth) and a half-credo.

But overwinning is sometimes more dangerous than losing a game. The high potential of ecological catastrophes is not denied any more, what’s more, being green has become utmost trendy in the current decade. Social emergency is less visible, but is clearly felt by people in rich and poor countries likewise. However, in a world of the eco-nomism belief system, these are only of secondary and tertiary import-ance. As long as the system can deliver accelerated economic output, it is legitimate. But exactly this was questioned in 2008 and since. Less and less experts, managers and outsiders believe even in a re-formed recipe. Paradigm change is on the doorstep.

But where and how and who? Can we expect environmental or ecological economics to really internalize all externalities? Will it be Factor 10 or the Blue Economy? Do religions have the mental capa-city and moral power to be the leaven in an increasingly secular world? My answer is yes to all. As the next step to bring about paradigm change I propose bionomy, an economic theory, which con-tinues the traditions of the moral school but uses the principles (and language) of natural science. Bionomia is a new kind of economics, which is based on the thorough study of the laws of life, with the pri-mary objective of serving life, especially human communities.

----------------------Gergely Tóth

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Gergely Tóth is Hungarian born 1970, economist (M.Sc. in Business Administration, Ph.D. in environmental management). Studied and worked in the USA, Holland, Germany, Romania and the Baltic States. Fluent in Eng¬lish and German.

Tóth Gergely and others established the KÖVET Association for Sustainable Economies in 1995. Served as executive direc¬tor till 2006, since then as secretary general. He also worked as the executive director and then vice president of the Hamburg based International Network for Environmental Management (INEM) between 2000 and 2005. Since 2006 he teaches at Georgikon Faculty in Keszthely, of the University of Pannonia, as an associate professor. Also teaches Chris-tian Economics at the Sapientia College of Theology of Religious Or-ders in Budapest.

His main work is The Truly Responsible Enterprise, which has been published in seven languages. His current field of interest is moral economics and working out an economic theory of sustainable development called Bionomia.

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Imre Ungvári-Zrinyi (Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, Romania)

Spirituality as motivation and pespective

We consider spirituality that kind of motivation and broader, meaning-seeking perspective, wherever it may come from, which determines people to concerns that are much beyond their nearest material interests. The cause of this deeper insight and more essential commitment could be equally experince, piety and recognition – important is to endow us with such a ceritude that makes us able to rethink our priorities. This state bears the possibility for anyone to become wide-open to and reach a certain level of perfectibility. In this respect, spitrituality means that way of viewing life and him/herself, which allows man to find him/herself in the range of living, becoming open to his/her own freedom and to the meaning-constituting element of coexistence. To coexist with other people and other beings, to understand our relations from the point of view of the totality of being means to share a superior reason which exists in us and through us.

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We call this ability of discovering reason the openness to spirituality. The aim of our paper is to proove that sharing this reason is possible only when going beyond our narrow particular interests. Openness to spirituality as the forming and carrying on of perspectives deriving from specific but different starting points is the prolific condition of coexistence which offers linking points for countless forms of senseful growth. This way, openness to spirituality offers favourable terms for all forms of coexistence and colaboration, for ex. coexistence of different cultures, or coexistence with nature in certain cultures, furthermore, a condition for all joint human entreprises including business entreprises.

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Imre Ungvári-Zrínyi

Imre Ungvári-Zrínyi was born in 1960, in Târgu Mureş, Romania. He is an Associate Professor in General and Applied Ethics at the “Babes-Bolyai” University Cluj, Romania.He got his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Values in 1999.

His basic publications include the following:

Introduction in Ethics. 2006, Bucharest, Ed. Didactică şi Pedagogică

Basic Concepts of Applied Ethics. Bioethics, Business Ethics, Ethics of Public Service, Media Ethics. 2007, University Workshop, Bolyai Society, Cluj.

Moral Philosophy. 2008, University Workshop, Bolyai Society, Cluj.

Dialogic Ethics for Business. 2009, In: Zsolnai, L., Boda, Zs. & Fekete, L. (eds.) Ethical Prospects - Economy, Society and Environment, Springer Verlag.

Factors of Crisis and/or Perspectives of Responsibility. 2011, In: Imre Ungvári-Zrínyi –Veress Károly (eds.): Experience of Crisis and Ethical Perspectives, Cluj University Press.

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Laszlo Zsolnai (Corvinus University of Budapest)

The Market Disclosing of B/being(A Heideggerian Approach to Business)

Despite of Heidegger’s warning not modern technology but modern business destroys Being and beings.

In his famous paper "The Question Concerning Technology" Heidegger compares and contrasts the old wooden bridge that lets the river run its course with the modern hydro-electric dam that turns the river into an energy reservoir. (Heidegger, M. 1949) The former is an example of gentle, non-violent technology while the latter represents rape or violation of nature. The ancient technology was the gentleness of "bringing forth" rather than the violence of making happen. (Young, J. 2002)

Heidegger believes that the methapysics of modern technology makes our technology so dangerous. However, without modern-day business this metaphysics cannot become feasible and effective.

The metaphysics of modern-day business can be reconstructed as follows:(i) to be is to be an item of marketable resource(ii) to be is to be either an object available for productive activity for the market or else a subject who makes use of such objects in such activity(iii) the only way to think is calculative thinking which considers and measures every beings as a marketable resource.

I suggest to call the disclosure of things as marketable resource 'the market disclosure of B/being'. The world-disclosure is governed by the imperative to present reality not as it is in itself, but to present it, rather, in ways that are marketable.

With its exclusive focus on profit-making modern-day business tends to violates the integrity and diversity of natural ecosystems, au-tonomy and culture of local communities, and chances of future gen-erations for a decent life. (Zsolnai, L. 2011)

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Violence, violation or 'stetting upon' is more than mere harm or damage. Violation is not simply harming beings. Violation is essential harm, harm to the 'essence' of beings, their quidditas or whatness. Ju-lian Young argues that "violation is, one way or another and to one de-gree or another, preventing something being or becoming what it is. A woman is violated when she finds herself forced to live not as a per-son but as a mere sex object - a mere sexual resource. A forest, an in-tricately and finally balanced ecological system, is violated when its exploitation as timber no longer allows it to be the ecological system that it is. (Young, J. 2002, pp. 52-53)

What we need is gentle, care-ful ways of doing economic ac-tions. This require substative economic thinking. (Polanyi, K. 1977) The first criterion is to have some intrinsic motivation while the sec-ond criterion is to measure success in broad value categories beyond money.

We should try to keep the sense of the world as 'brought forth', as the self-revelation of the divine, and should not destroy the sense of it as a sacred place - as the face of God. A place to be reverenced and cared for. As Schelling saw, Heidegger observes, caring for things 'de-mands immanence in God'.

References

Heidegger, M. 1949: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper & Row, 1977, New York.

Polanyi, K. 1977: The Livelihood of Man. Academic Press. New York.

Young, J. 2002: Heidegger's Later Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.

Zsolnai, L. 2011: "Redefining Economic Reason" in Hendrik Opde-beeck and Laszlo Zsolnai (eds.): Spiritual Humanism and Economic Wisdom. 2011. Garant, Antwerp/Apeldoom. pp. 187-200.

----------------Laszlo Zsolnai

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Laszlo Zsolnai is professor and director of the Business Ethics Center at the Corvinus University of Budapest. He is chairman of the Busi-ness Ethics Faculty Group of the CEMS (Community of European Management Schools−The Global Alliance in Management Educa-tion). He serves as editor of the "Frontier of Business Ethics" book se-ries at Peter Lang Publishers in Oxford. With Luk Bouckaert he founded the European SPES Forum in Leuven, Belgium.

Laszlo Zsolnai’s books include the following: "Ethics in the Economy: Handbook of Business Ethics" (2002. Oxford, Peter Lang Academic Publishers), "Spirituality, Ethics and Management" (2004. Kluwer Academic Publishers), "Business within Limits: Deep Ecol-ogy and Buddhist Economics" (2005. Oxford, Peter Lang Academic Publishers), "Spirituality as a Public Good" (2007. Garant), "Frugal-ity: Rebalancing Material and Spiritual Values in Economic Life" (2008. Oxford, Peter Lang Academic Publishers), "Europe-Asia Dia-logue on Business Spirituality" (2008. Garant), "Responsible Decision Making" (2008. Transaction Publishers), "The Future International Manager: A Vision of the Roles and Duties of Management" (2009. Palgrave Macmillan), "The Collaborative Enterprise: Creating Values for a Sustainable World" (2010. Oxford, Peter Lang Academic Pub-lishers) and “The Palgrave Handbook of Spirituality and Business” (2011. Palgrave Macmillan). His website: http://laszlo-zsolnai.net