Search results for ""Author Michael J. Naughton""

Rethinking the Purpose of Business challenges reigning shareholder and stakeholder management theories using philosophical and theological dimensions of the Catholic social tradition. In this useful book, the contributors, including management theorists, moral theologians, economists, ethicists, and attorneys, debate complicated issues such as the ethics of profit seeking, equity and efficiency in the firm, the shareholder value principle, social ethics of corporate management, the principle of subsidiarity, and modern contract theory. While the contributors to this thought-provoking volume share a respect for the power of markets, they also assign value to community, common goods, and personal virtue. Essays combine organizational and management theory with philosophical and theological accounts of human purpose. A central argument of this collection is that the tradition of Catholic social thought provides principles that enable fruitful conversations across disciplines regarding the purpose of business and economic activity. Contributors Michael J. Naughton, Jean-Yves Calvez, Helen J. Alford, O.P., Charles Clark, S. A. Cortright, and Ernest Pierucci discuss the human implications of current shareholder and stakeholder theories. Robert Kennedy, James Gordley, and Dennis McCann assess the communitarian and personal principles of traditional Catholic social teaching as they relate to organizational and managerial theories. Peter Koslowski, Domènec Melé, Lee Tavis, and Timothy Fort consider how Catholic social principles ought to reshape our understanding of the firm. Jeff Gates, James Murphy, and David Pyke consider how concrete practices in ownership and job design should be affected.

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The specific concern in What We Hold in Trust comes to this: the Catholic university that sees its principal purpose in terms of the active life, of career, and of changing the world, undermines the contemplative and more deep-rooted purpose of the university. If a university adopts the language of technical and social change as its main and exclusive purpose, it will weaken the deeper roots of the university’s liberal arts and Catholic mission. The language of the activist, of changing the world through social justice, equality and inclusion, or of the technician through market-oriented incentives, plays an important role in university life. We need to change the world for the better and universities play an important role, but both the activist and technician will be co-opted by our age of hyper-activity and technocratic organizations if there is not first a contemplative outlook on the world that receives reality rather than constructs it.To address this need for roots What We Hold in Trust unfolds in four chapters that will demonstrate how essential it is for the faculty, administrators, and trustees of Catholic universities to think philosophically and theologically (Chapter One), historically (Chapter Two) and institutionally (Chapters Three and Four). What we desperately need today are leaders in Catholic universities who understand the roots of the institutions they serve, who can wisely order the goods of the university, who know what is primary and what is secondary, and who can distinguish fads and slogans from authentic reform. We need leaders who are in touch with their history and have a love for tradition, and in particular for the Catholic tradition. Without this vision, our universities may grow in size, but shrink in purpose. They may be richer but not wiser.

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