Summary of Managing as If Faith Mattered
 

Challenging the often-practiced double standard of private and public moralities, Managing as if Faith Mattered bridges what is for some managers and employees a fault line between their work and their faith. Recovering a rich social tradition found within Christianity, they connect the well-developed and developing ideas of the common good, virtue, and social principles with concrete management issues such as job design, just wages, corporate ownership structures, marketing communication and product development. As Bob Wahlstedt, former CEO of Reell Precision Manufacturing states in the Foreword to the book, “Michael and Helen combine the results of their theological inquiry with the experience of practitioners to make a compelling case for the integration of spiritual principles, values and insights with management theory.” This book will challenge both those who think that the Christian tradition has nothing to say to modern business and those who think that nothing more than a personal living-out of their faith in the work situation is needed.

This book is in three parts. The first part, and in many respects the most difficult, concerns establishing the engagement between the Christian social tradition and management. Chapter 1 begins by setting the discussion of Christian social thought and management with the existential problem so many of us face in our work: the context of a divided life, and suggests ways that Christian thinkers and managers have used to overcome this division. In Chapter 2, we provide a critique of the two dominant accounts of organizational purpose, the shareholder and stakeholder theories of the firm, from the perspective of the common good.  Next, in Chapter 3, we examine the re-emergence of virtue as a theme in organizational literature, and consider the virtues needed in business in the light of the Christian moral tradition. Throughout this section, the discussion revolves around the two fundamentals of the Christian social tradition that provide the basis for an engagement with the management disciplines: the nature, value and development in virtue of the human person, and the promotion of the common good. Lacking members who practice personal virtue, organizations fail to flourish in a fully human way; apart from a deliberate, common pursuit of the good, the human person at work is unable to pursue more than a “divided life,” where the implications of faith cannot be lived out at work.

The second part of the book makes the engagement of Christian social thought and management by examining specific, concrete management issues. Chapters 4-7 are devoted to the skills--broadly defined--which are the prerequisites for operationalizing a vision of the common good in today’s business organization.  In this section, therefore, we relate the pursuit of the common good to four critical management functions, and we attend to specific issues within each function’s purview. In Chapter 4, we inquire into the reasons operations/production management has paid so little attention to designing jobs that help people to grow and discuss possible ways of redirecting job design to be more consonant with the Christian tradition.  In Chapter 5, we explore the tendency of human resources management to instrumentalize human relations when determining employees’ pay and of ways to place strategic concerns in a wider perspective, in light of the Christian tradition.  In Chapter 6, we examine the role of finance, its failure to promote the distribution of capital ownership, and possible alternative mechanisms for promoting such distribution.   In Chapter 7, we discuss different philosophies of marketing and marketing practices within this function, providing a critique of some approaches and a positive evaluation of others.

In part three, we explore what is necessary to sustain the engagement. This part of the book serves as what G.K. Chesterton might have called an “Afterword, In Defense of Everything Else.”  We take up, in Chapters 8 and 9, the question of an authentic spirituality of work.  We are fully cognizant that apart from an authentic spirituality of work, our argument for the integration of faith and work is a dead letter.