Management and the Gospel

Luke's Radical Message for the First and Twenty-First Centuries

B. Dyck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137280886
• eBook ISBN: 9781137315861
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The goals of Management and the Gospel: Luke's Radical Message for the First and Twenty-First Centuries may appear to be simple: it describes what management theory and practice looked like in the first century, uses this as a lens to examine what the Gospel of Luke says about management, and draws out implications for today. However, the book is quite profound in finding that management is a dominant theme in the Gospel, that its message is consistently counter-cultural, and that Luke contains a four-phase 'how to' process model to help readers to implement change. Readers will acquire a new way to understand the Gospel as well as the moral foundations of modern management.

NOTES

I INTRODUCTION

1. About 2 billion people, or one-third of the world’s population, consider themselves to be Christian, and there seems to be considerable interest in what Jesus might have to say about management (Adherents, 2007). For example, Jesus is ranked third in Hart’s (1992) list of most influential people in history, and is listed in Pollard’s (1997) 100 Greatest Men. The scriptures associated with Christianity also seem to be of some interest. It is estimated that at least 2.5 billion Bibles have been sold (Terego & Denim, 2006: 146), and the total number in print increases to up to 6 billion if all the free copies that have been distributed are included. In second place are the Qu’ran and the Quotations from Chairman Mao (The Little Red Book) each at about 800 million copies (Greise, 2010). By way of comparison, sales of the Harry Potter series have been estimated at over 500 million copies.

2. See Frey (1998), Golembiewski (1989), Herman (1997), Hershberger (1958), Jackall (1988), Jones (1997), Nash (1994), Naughton and Bausch (1994), Novak (1996), Pattison (1997), Pfeffer (1982), and Redekop, Ainlay, and Siemens (1995). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was first published in 1903 (Weber, 1958). Max Weber (1864–1920) is considered to be one of the principal architects of the modern social sciences, along with Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). In addition to being the father of organization theory, Weber’s work has been rated as the most important in total and for Organizational Behavior in particular (Miner, 2003), and he continues to be recognized as one of the leading moral philosophers of management (Clegg, 1996). It is not surprising then that Weber continues to be among the most highly cited in scholars in management journals, being mentioned in 15 percent of all articles published in two top journals (Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Studies) between 1980 and 2002 (Lounsbury & Carberry, 2005: 508). In comparison, the most-cited active author between 1981 and 2002 (Kathleen Eisenhardt) in 30 leading management journals is cited 3,628 times in 26,209 articles (if these cites were distributed so that there was no more than one cite in each article, then Eisenhardt’s work would be cited in 13.8 percent of these articles) (Podsakoff et al., 2008: 655, 682).

3. Weber (1958: 182). The secularized materialistic-individualistic ethic that underpins modern management is thoroughly engrained in “the modern economic order” and has an “irresistible force” that determines the lives of everyone born into it (i.e., “not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition”): “Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt” (181–182).

4. For example, Weber (1958) notes that the “individualistic” and “acquisitive manner of life” associated with the modern economic order has been so thoroughly secularized that “it no longer needs the support of any religious forces, and feels the attempts of religion to influence economic life [to be] an unjustified interference” (72; see also 83, 182, 240; cf. Dyck & Schroeder, 2005).

5. For example, a content analysis of the first ten decades of articles in the Journal of Biblical Integration of Business found that the dominant overarching theme among the most-frequently cited biblical passage was “the contrast between the ways of God and the ways of the world” (Dyck & Starke, 2005). Similarly, as we will see in chapter ten, references to biblical ideas such as “the kingdom of God” in secular scholarly management journals are almost always countercultural to the dominant contemporary paradigm (see also Dyck, forthcoming).

6. The past decade has seen a “remarkable growth rate” for sales of books in the religious market generally (Elinsky, 2005: 11; in the United States self-proclaimed evangelical Christians account for over 40 percent of overall religious sales, Catholics 17 percent, and Christian/Protestants 14 percent), and in the growing number of books integrating faith and business issues in the popular press. Overall, sales in the Christian retail industry have grown from $3 billion in 1996 to $4 billion in 2002 and were expected to be about $9.5 billion in 2010, according to Hirdes, Woods, and Badzinski (2009). Similar interest is also evident within the academic community, where this millennium has seen the development of the “Management, Spirituality and Religion” interest group within the Academy of Management (the world’s largest and most respected secular scholarly management association) and the launch of a number of related journals such as: Journal of Religious Leadership (started in 2002), Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion (started in 2004), Journal of Biblical Perspectives in Leadership (started in 2006), Journal of Religion and Business Ethics (started in 2010), Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research (started in 2010). Finally, there is a host of excellent work that has been written at the intersection of faith and business, though none of it is as thoroughly grounded in a first-century understanding of management as presented in this book, including: Alford and Naughton (2001), Bakke (2005), Delbeq (2005), Dodd and Gotsis (2009), Miller (2007), Mitroff and Denton (1999), Sandelands (2010), van Duzer (2010), Volf (2001), Wood (1991), and Zigarelli (2002). For some interesting research looking at modern-day organizations as secular religions, see Ashforth and Vaidyanath (2002).

1 OVERVIEW OF THIS BOOK

1. These variations are interchangeable for present purposes.

2. Similarly, the word “management” can be traced back to the French word for “house” related to the English word “manor.”

3. As will be elaborated in chapter five, modern commentators speculate that perhaps the rich man felt outsmarted by the manager, and grudgingly conceded that the manager had beat the rich man at his own “game.” Or, perhaps Jesus praised the manager not for unilaterally scattering the rich man’s wealth, but rather for being shrewd; Jesus would like it if everyone was shrewd for Godly purposes like this manager was shrewd for his self-serving purposes. However, if Jesus had wanted to make this point, surely he could have done so in a less awkward manner.

4. For example, this is unlike Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925), where Jesus is described as “the founder of modern business” (159), and which has been called the second most-read life of Jesus ever written in the United States, with two hundred and fifty thousand copies sold in 1925 and 1926 alone. The book even resulted in a silent movie of the same title (Elzey, 1978). This is also unlike Laurie Beth Jones’s (1995) best seller Jesus CEO, which presents Jesus as a “‘ CEO’ who took a disorganized ‘staff’ of twelve and built a thriving enterprise” (Jones, 1995: back cover).

2 A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO THE GOSPEL OF LUKE

1. Weber (1958: 182).

2. Actually, I had initially intended to focus my study on the material that is found in the so-called Q source, which predates and is consistent with the Gospels. I changed my mind after ta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• I   Introduction
• II   Problem Recognition: How Interpreting Luke via a First-Century Management Lens Challenges the Conventional Interpretation of Two Key Management Parables
• III   Action Response: Performing a Comprehensive Examination of Passages in Luke Related to Each of the Three Dimensions of the First-Century Management Lens
• IV   New Way of Seeing: Management, the Kingdom of God, Salvation, and the Holy Spirit
• V   Institutional Change: A Four-Phase “ How to” Process Model for Putting into Practice Management Principles Described in Luke
• VI   Implications for Twenty-First-Century Management Theory and Practice
• Final Thoughts
• Appendix A   Analysis of the Chiasm in Luke’ s Journey Narrative
• Exhibit A1   Overview of the Empirical Study Examining the Plausibility of the Chiastic Pairings
• Appendix B   Usage of Kurios in Luke to Describe God and Jesus
• Notes
• References
• Index of Scripture Passage
• Subject Index