Moses L. Pava’s research while affiliated with Yeshiva University and other places

The assumption of this chapter is that capitalism’s future depends on our ability to nudge, legislate, educate, and allow for new forms of capitalism to emerge. For the purposes of this chapter, I will refer to this emergent entity as next stage capitalism. “Next stage capitalism” is a term of art that is used here to include the many and various serious proposals about capitalism’s future. The single theme that runs through all these new proposals and ties them together is the call for business to begin to serve the public interest, not indirectly, but by conscious design. While this movement is not yet mainstream, nor is there a single philosophy or organization that fully articulates it, the basic outline of a next stage of capitalism is becoming more legible with each passing year. A next stage capitalism requires justification through fair and open dialogues centered on human values. Or, putting it negatively, in the absence of human values, the concept of corporate values makes no sense, and in turn, in the absence of corporate values, how are corporate purpose or purposes going to be generated, understood, and ultimately justified in a credible way to stakeholders and citizens? This chapter will explore just one of the many implications for the emergence of next stage capitalism. This is the increasing need to teach business students to become fluent in the language and use of values in business. In the simplest formulation, the goal of introducing values into the business school curriculum is to help students learn to work in Purpose-Based Corporations. This means they will have to learn how to 1-think and speak together about, 2-plan, 3-build, and 4-sustain a future world in which they and subsequent generations will not just survive but will love wholeheartedly. Or, in more colloquial and less grandiose terms, the point of teaching students about values is to provide them with some additional tools to create and sustain good enough businesses so that we can all work and live together in relative peace and harmony for the near future.

Traditional corporate accounting, defined here as the publication of a balance sheet and income statement, is broken in the sense that these traditional statements no longer provide useful information to investors and others. This may be surprising to some readers as it has not always been the case, but there is ample and growing empirical evidence to suggest that today it is. The purpose of this chapter is to propose that it is time for the accounting profession and businesses to adopt a much broader concept labeled here as corporate accountability. It is defined as the public and systematic communication of information to justify an organization’s actions (past, present, and future) to various stakeholders. Baruch Lev and Feng Gu have suggested the Economic Resources and Consequences Report as an important example of how this might be done. Hewlett-Packard (HP) provides a good real-world example of a company moving in the right direction, but not without its own flaws. Nevertheless, HP’s example provides several useful lessons on how companies can move beyond the status quo. The problem of the lack of sound corporate accountability is particularly important given the main theme of this volume which posits the potential emergence of a Next Stage Capitalism. The thesis of this chapter is that without a broadening concept of corporate accountability there is little hope for significant positive change to gain real traction and it will be impossible for companies to demonstrate a social purpose beyond profit maximization in a credible way to outside stakeholders.

For next stage capitalists, today’s crisis in confidence is not a structural problem but a much deeper human one. What is it that, upon reflection and dialogue, that we truly value? Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, among many others, have recently suggested that perhaps what we really value is kindness. The thesis of this chapter, as odd as it may sound to traditional capitalists, is that a fundamental cure for capitalism is more kindness in business, be it dutiful, strategic, or simply kindness for the sake of kindness. Such a thesis is not meant to be controversial in the least. Quite to the contrary, this modest thesis is designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience be it religious, spiritual, or secular.KeywordsAdam SmithKindnessDutiful kindnessStrategic kindness

Capitalism’s most essential problem is not an economic problem at all, but it is primarily a problem concerning human values. As odd as it may seem, especially for those of us who studied at business schools, the fundamental tasks for today’s capitalists are to identify, reflect, and understand the rich and complex variety of values necessary for human flourishing and to consciously design and to co-create organizations that will produce enough wealth for everyone, on the one hand, and to contribute to the development and well-being of workers, consumers, and society, across a hierarchy of various needs, on the other hand. The thesis of this chapter is that these new tasks demand a new level of consciousness, one informed not only by business, but by a broad and varied spectrum of philosophies including world religions and spiritualities. The specific purpose of this chapter is to explore the potential contributions of a broadly expanded conception of Jewish business ethics to the task of contributing to the continued emergence of a new kind of more self-conscious capitalism.KeywordsNext stage capitalismConscious capitalismConstructivismJewish ethics

The first section of this chapter begins with a summary of the case of Aaron Feurstein and his decision to rebuild his Polartec factory in Massachusetts and to continue paying his idle workers after a devastating fire destroyed most of his production facilities. The next two sections of this paper will explore two highly divergent interpretations. The first version is the standard one taught in business schools and emphasizes Feuerstein’s overly emotional reaction to the fire and the need to apply the tools of rational-decision making, even in the face of powerful intuitions to act otherwise. The second interpretation is less focused on explaining the ultimate outcome and is more interested in providing a deeper description of how Aaron Feuerstein may have understood the human meaning of his decisions to keep the employees on the payroll and to rebuild in Lawrence, MA. In the simplest terms, Feuerstein, motivated by his commitment, care, and compassion towards his long-time employees, in a bold defining moment, knowingly chose to surrender to the traditional value of kindness. The third section explores how one might go about choosing between these two divergent interpretations. It turns out that in choosing between interpretations it is our own values and beliefs and our own vision of business and its possibilities that are in play. Finally, the concluding section of the paper shifts its focus forward and considers the future of kindness in business. To the extent that every act of kindness is and must be justified in purely strategic terms, we might continue using the term kindness, but its original significance will continue to atrophy to the point where the word itself becomes hollow and meaningless. On the other hand, if businesses legitimate themselves to the public because of the wealth businesses produce and because of the voluntarily cooperative ways in which the wealth is produced, genuine kindness in business will potentially flourish. But this second possibility will happen only to the extent that our society truly does value kindness for its own sake.KeywordsJudaismKindnessCareCompassionRational decision-making

Humanistic management theory and religiously grounded business ethics are both important research avenues for the study of business management. This paper links these two domains by examining to what extent a religiously grounded business ethics can potentially contribute to the broad and burgeoning literature on humanistic management through an exploration of the case of Jewish business ethics. Specifically, this paper examines three distinct ways of doing Jewish business ethics. These three ways are labeled here as traditionalist, integrationist, and constructivist. Each of these distinct paths begins with a different conception of the fundamental relationship between Judaism and business. Traditionalists believe that the creation of wealth is a legitimate practice, but only because Judaism says so. Integrationists, by contrast, consider wealth creation as a legitimate practice on its own terms. From this perspective, wealth creation is viewed as a positive human activity, independent of its grounding in religious thought. Judaism contributes to wealth creation by setting and guarding its appropriate boundaries and limits and by serving as an external source of morality and meaning, often invoking broad aspirational Jewish values like tikkun olam (repair of the world). Finally, constructivists agree with the integrationists about the stand-alone value of wealth creation. Constructivists push even further, though, and assert that business is not only a legitimate practice, but it is a potentially meaningful one. Business is imagined as an ongoing and open-ended constructive project, one that includes a broad and complex set of human values including wealth creation, but potentially other values like covenantal leadership, kindness, everyday redemption, and other higher purposes. Here, business is no longer viewed merely as a source of material wealth for society but business is envisioned as a potentially important location and source of human meaning and fulfillment. For the constructivists, the role of Jewish business ethics is not to judge business from the outside, but it is to actively participate and contribute to an expansive dialogue with other business ethics voices, centered on the construction of new and evolved forms of business as a human enterprise.