Current trends in humanism and business

Abstract

Introduction Familiarity with current trends in a field is not only interesting as an aid to understanding our world or as a form of erudition, but also helps to guide speculation about the future. Extrapolating a future based on current trends is often better than prophesying without considering the evidence at hand and the main historical drivers of the present. This is the case for all human activity and, more specifically, for humanism in business. “Humanism,” wrote Jacques Maritain (1996), “essentially tends to make man more humane and to manifest his original greatness by making him participate in everything in so far as it enriches him in nature and in history. It requires time that man develops virtues which he possesses, his creative strength and his rational life, and that man works to convert the forces of the physical world into tools of his freedom.” These words contain provocative ideas, which lead us to question to what extent business and humanism cross paths. In this respect, some questions arise: Does business respect the sovereign human rights of people? Do business institutions or companies make the people who participate in them more human? Does business give people the possibility to participate in organizations in accordance with their humanity? Does business foster the growth of individuals as human beings? Does business favor aspects of human potential such as creativity, rationality, and character?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.