Abstract
The paper argues that a spiritual turn in business management is needed. With its instrumental rationality and extreme materialistic orientation today’s business management produces large-scale ecological, social, and ethical “ills”. Business management needs a more spiritual foundation to solve the failure of rational and materialistic management. The contributions by S. K. Chakraborty on Vedantic ethics and management have vital importance to make the required changes in management. The paper presents real-world examples from India and Europe to show the feasibility of spiritually inspired business models. The main conclusion is that spirituality and rationality are not antagonists in good management but materialistic value orientation cannot be reconciled with spirituality.
The presented cases in this paper are from the author’s book “Post-Materialistic Business: Spiritual Value-Orientation in Renewing Management” (Palgrave, 2015). Some arguments are used from the author’s paper with Katalin Illes “Spiritually inspired creativity in business” (International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 195–205). The paper is also benefited from the author’s decades long collaboration with Luk Bouckaert (Catholic University of Leuven).
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Zsolnai, L. (2022). Spiritual Turn in Business and Management. In: Mukherjee, S., Zsolnai, L. (eds) Global Perspectives on Indian Spirituality and Management . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1158-3_6
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