Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose/On-the-Job Spirituality/Rethinking the Purpose of Business
Mahan, Brian J. & Roche, Marianne E. & Baker, Thomas
SOMETHING MISSING Forgetting Ourselves en Purpose Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition Brian J. Mohan On-the-Job Spirituality Finding God in Work Marianne E. Roche Rethinking the Purpose of...
...Perhaps that's what we're missing overall in these books: some real life or some real companies, some actual people and examples, some sense of how much fun and conflict, and how many difficult choices, work brings us...
...If they really are the answer, you wouldn't know it from Rethinking the Purpose of Business, an earnest but (for this rather practical businessperson, anyway) rather arid collection of essays on what Catholic social teaching has to say about business and corporations and our role in them...
...How do we know how much money is enough for us...
...She offers a series of brief meditations on how we can center ourselves amid stress and chaos, how we should be mindful of our actions, and other disciplines...
...Despite the absence of real businesses or businesspeople, the book does come to life once or twice...
...When should we stay working for a company we dislike, and when is it time to get out...
...Not exactly plain English-sounds more like the Trinity than any place I ever worked...
...I'd like to cut my fellow parishioners some slack, however...
...SOMETHING MISSING Forgetting Ourselves en Purpose Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition Brian J. Mohan On-the-Job Spirituality Finding God in Work Marianne E. Roche Rethinking the Purpose of Business Interdisciplinary Essays from the Catholic Social Tradition Edited by S. A. Cortright and Michael /. Naughton University of Notre Dame Press, $35, 360 pp...
...Because despite years of Catholic Action, Catholic social teaching, and a once-thriving Catholic labor movement, our church's proclamations, books, and workshops on work seem to have lost touch with people who actually do work...
...I've often thought that a good start would be translating the titles into English...
...But overall the book isn't on target for a broad parish or business audience...
...If you were suspicious, you could see a deep dualism lurking here-people cordoning off the work they do from their "Sunday" selves...
...I'm glad she got a new job she's happier with, but surely it's possible to write about business in a way that recognizes many people work long hours, as she once did, and actually enjoy it...
...It's most clearly summarized in John Paul H's belief that business exists not simply to make a profit, but finds its purpose "in its very existence as a community of persons...
...In this current mini-revival in books on the topic of faith and work, we could use, frankly, a little less faith, and much more work.aith, and much more work...
...It's clearly time for some new tools to use in thinking about and improving the career, management, and economic decisions we all make...
...How do we decide which employees stay and which don't, in an age when ruthlessness is "in...
...There's very little about how much fun it can be to work with other people, how satisfying it is to build a business that provides employment-or even how you can possibly support a family as a shelver...
...Why the resistance...
...This concept of recruitment is a strong focus for a discussion group, a retreat, or some simple reflection...
...The answer, unfortunately, is: Not much...
...The old Catholic "observe, judge, act" paradigm for interacting with the world only goes so far as a model, and is no longer common parlance in any case...
...Still, Mahan has an engaging personality and style that overcome many of these shortcomings...
...Instead, the book conducts a grim autopsy of the stakeholder theory of the corporation, a tired mainstay of business school "principles" courses for decades...
...Yet over time, by recalling these moments and making sure we don't miss new ones, we gradually gain some insight into where we're headed next...
...Her view of work is more negative and cautionary than most people will feel matches their experience...
...We are also eager to warn people (simultaneously) how bad it is to exploit the poor and make decisions solely on money...
...In between these two poles-neither of which resonates with the experience of most working people-we are less good at helping them see and react to the world they actually face...
...It's no accident that all these books are written by academics or those who have sworn off business entirely...
...Marianne Roche's On-the-Job Spirituality, on the other hand, is like reading a cookbook by someone who has sworn off food...
...This is a teaching from which the church's own top management has declared itself exempt, another reason we don't hear much about it...
...I wonder if another reason they shunned this topic isn't their fault at all...
...Yes, we are eloquent talking about work abstractly and theoretically-about how work enables us to participate in the process of creation, about how all work is holy...
...Dead last, from a list of nearly two dozen, was the idea of discussing the work we all do from the perspective of faith...
...Not that businesspeople themselves are always the best people to reflect on what they do: they're just as likely to produce self-serving sanctimony as the rest of us...
...I have struggled with and ultimately abandoned this American value system," says Roche, a lawyer who gave up that career (temporarily, it appears) to work as a shelver in a bookstore...
...In addition, Mahan's editor should have saved him from some overly fancy vocabulary and name-dropping (William James hits with a thud at one point...
...Stakeholder theory says companies are responsible to other constituencies besides their shareholders: employees, customers, suppliers, and even society as a whole...
...Even the stumblers, he reminds us, have had what he calls "epiphanies of recruitment"-moments in our lives when we feel called to participate in some genuine act of service or altruism...
...Still, it might be a starting point to examine some contemporary business trends and ethical dilemmas...
...Lastly, we regularly hear that the church's social teaching is the answer...
...McCann connects subsidiarity to the work of management expert Peter Drucker, a welcome attempt to relate the church's thinking to an author some businesspeople actually read...
...Mahan provides great literary and scriptural illustrations, and a few genuinely memorable turns of phrase...
...Most of the time, we reject those calls, especially if they involve radical change...
...On that front, Brian Mahan's Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose is the most interesting book in this group, because he at least offers a challenging way to reflect on the callings we have chosen or stumbled into...
...Even the editors confess in their epilogue that the stakeholder concept is going nowhere, which makes one wonder what made it the focus of so many of the essays...
...Sometimes, all we need is a change...
...rather than the grubbier world of money, hiring, and firing that the rest of us live in...
...Alas for its proponents, stakeholder theory remains just that: a theory that no business has ever managed itself by for more than a day or so...
...f homas Baker 0 recent survey we conducted in our affluent suburban parish asked people which topics they'd most like to address in some adult-education groups...
...In only ten pages, the first essay (by the French Jesuit Jean-Yves Calvez and the book's coeditor, Michael Naughton) sets out everything that can be found in the church's documents about corporate or business life...
...Does it matter what career we choose...
...So that might be part of the reason for the survey's sad result...
...For one thing, it originated as a seminar for college students, not working adults, and is obsessed with issues of status and peer pressure (Should I go to Yale Law School...
...An article by Dennis McCann of Agnes Scott College reviews the Catholic social principle of subsidiarity-the requirement that every decision in an organization should be made by the smallest and most subordinate group competent to make it...
...If only people knew about this great jewel of our tradition," academics lament, as they wonder why the social encyclicals aren't more widely known...
...Certainly there are lines that many people resist crossing in any religious discussion or homily, and anything involving money is one of them...
Vol. 130 • March 2003 • No. 5
