The Enterprise at the Service of Society in the 21st century

Abstract

This Special Issue is a collection of papers presented at the 32nd Annual Conference of the European Business Ethics Network (EBEN), which took place in Valencia (Spain) on 12–14 June 2019 and was entitled “Enterprise at the Service of Society”.

It is no secret that we live in a time of profound and rapid change: we hear talk of Industry 4.0, artificial intelligence, digital transformation and teleworking, but much less about the service that enterprises can provide to society. For ages, business ethics literature has paid significant attention to business in society, often emphasising corporate social responsibilities (Crane et al., 2008; Garriga & Melé, 2004; Laasch et al., 2020) and, more recently, the necessity to contribute to sustainability (Blackburn, 2015). These approaches reflect different underlying perspectives, motivations and philosophical grounds. There is often an emphasis on business and economic results (Farver, 2019), but a sense of commitment can also exist without omitting the return on investment. Philosophical grounds generally include stakeholder theory (Freeman et al., 2018; Harrison et al., 2019), contractual views (Francés-Gómez, 2018) and, more recently, a common good-based approach (Arjoon et al., 2018; De Swaan, 2020; Melé, 2020).

The general idea that companies have an obligation to serve society and the planet has not been sufficiently explored in the business ethics literature. Searches for the keyword “service” are more likely to yield results related to particular “services” such as “financial service”, “healthcare service”, “customer service”, “public service”, etc., cases in which the term “service” tends to correspond to a department or functional division within a company. Only the literature specifically focused on leadership seems to have established the term “servant leadership” as a theoretical construct to identify a particular ethically defensible form of leadership (Greenleaf, 2002). However, it is worth noting that in this case “service” is used as an adjective, not a noun. With the hope of explaining what we consider to be a shortcoming, and propose alternatives, we intend to explore—in a cross-cutting and comprehensive manner—the service that enterprises should provide to society.

It is true that enterprises emerge in society, develop in society and utilise structures of society that provide them with political and financial stability, as well as legal safeguards. They also enjoy the benefits of citizen education and training, as well as energy, communications and transport infrastructures. In return, in fruitful symbiosis, the enterprise channels an essential service to society by, for example, providing employment, generating wealth and paying taxes. Many set aside a portion of their profits to social actions. In fact, enterprises help society in many ways that are perhaps less apparent or quantifiable: they generate knowledge, develop culture, facilitate learning and collaboration in organisations, make products and services accessible, act as a conduit for creativity and innovation at the service of society, care—or should care—for the environment, facilitate an array of human relationships and provide social cohesion, research new products, take on challenges, facilitate the ability to find meaning in work, favour the development of other supplier companies and customers, etc. It is of course possible to construe these actions and attitudes as a response to an implicit contract between society and business (cf. Francés-Gómez, 2018). However, this analogy must often be overly broadened in order to encompass all the instances and types of contributions that businesses can or do provide to human communities and to describe the exact place that firms occupy in society. Remarkably little attention has been paid to the undeniable fact that businesses should and do serve society, as well as to the possible ethical, managerial and critical implications of this fact.

As all human issues can be improved, despite the increasing societal awareness regarding care for the environment, it is worth asking whether enterprises have made the necessary transition—not in a cosmetic way, but rather with an ethical grounding—to implementing corrective measures that allow for increasingly dignified working conditions that contribute to personal development with an appropriate balance between work and family life. Business activity is therefore not only a matter of economic benefits, but also contributes, in turn, to make this wealth “fair”, since the benefits are obtained from the measured and sustainable exploitation of natural resources: it must implement the so-called circular economy. The enterprise must also facilitate fair competition by preventing oligopolies or monopolies that contribute to corruption, fraud in connection with public authorities, the vulnerability of citizens, artificial price increases and other issues that unquestionably constitute a scourge that curtails any social growth in many countries. Reflecting on the business-society relationship is fortunately not new, although important questions for the future remain to be clarified and the debate on them continues, especially if we look in terms of service.

The issues mentioned in the previous paragraph can be summarised in the idea that businesses contribute to the common good of society through their specific productive, commercial and organisational activities, this notion of the common good tracing back to Aristotelian and scholastic roots (Melé, 2002; Sison & Fontrodona, 2012; Smith, 1999; Wong & Rae, 2011). Businesses contribute to the creation of these essential common goods and this role constitutes the foundation of their ethical justification and duties to society. The notion of service is implicit in this literature, but it is important to bring it to the fore and discuss its potential implications for business ethics in practice. Understanding the creation of common goods as a service for society seems to be an underdeveloped concept in the existing literature concerning the common good as the moral foundation for business ethics. A reflection on how contributing to the common good is a service to society should clarify the ethical relationship between business and society.

The proper relationship between society and business is routinely described as a relation of dialogue (Arenas et al., 2007). What Garriga and Melé (2004) termed “integrative theories”, that is, CSR theories that assume that business must respond to social needs, rely for the most part on dialogue—sometimes labelled “multi-stakeholder dialogue”—as the proper way for corporations to understand social needs and start defining their policies in response. However, dialogue tends to play an instrumental role. It is merely a way for the manager to clarify issues, limit risks and avoid mistakes. The exception may be the so-called “political approach” to CSR (Heath et al., 2010; Pies et al., 2009), in particular those theories drawing on Habermas's and Apel's discourse ethics (Luyckx & Janssens, 2016; Palazzo & Scherer, 2006), where idealised dialogue is used as a philosophical method to discover what justice requires. But even in this case, and perhaps to an even greater extent, dialogue partakes in theories that aim to establish rights and duties among equals. The notion of service is absent from them. In our view, the idea of serving society may contribute to this literature by adding motivational force to the conclusions of discursive reason and actual agreements. Without a notion that business must be of service to people, what would be the reason to start a multi-stakeholder dialogue in the first place?

Furthermore, what could be called a “sense of service” maintains a dimension that goes beyond the organisational sphere, a personal dimension that is projected on the leadership factor and that can be conceived as the virtue required by leaders who wish to serve, that is, who put the act of serving before any other activities (Melé, 2020, p. 196). The latter issue connects with the servant leadership model proposed by Robert Greenleaf, whose epistemological premise is that it begins with a natural feeling of wanting to serve. And, moreover, to serve first and foremost. This conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead, an aspiration that manifests itself in ensuring that the needs of those being served are being met (Greenleaf, 2002, p. 27). And, even further, the touchstone of this understanding of leadership would be the following: “Do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?” (Greenleaf, 2002, p. 27).

Throughout this Special Issue, we have chosen to include three thematic blocks: the first is defined by its explicit appeal to the common good, which is conceived as a benchmark in the actions of managers of enterprises involved in both the collaborative economy and financial institutions, as well as interactions between stakeholders and managers of sustainable banking institutions within the “Global Alliance for Banking on Values” (GABV). The second block includes articles analysing how the notion of service emerges from dialogue in different contexts and may help direct CSR policies in an effective way. Finally, the third thematic block focuses on servant leadership.

Within the framework of the first thematic block, Morales-Sánchez et al. propose a theoretical and normative study that analyses the conditions of possibility by which the so-called “collaborative economy” could contribute to the common good, despite the risks that such a proposal entails. For their part, Chivite, Vázquez and Chivite conducted a field study covering 278 companies in the collaborative economy sector and considered the appropriateness of conferring an ethical substrate to the platforms on which they operate. With regard to Guitián's contribution, it is worth mentioning that he appeals to the doctrine of the Catholic Church as an institution that can rectify the actions of the managers of financial institutions which, having a profit motive, do not always combine their social utility with customer service in times of financial crisis (Dembinski, 2009). With regard to the appeal to the common good, Naranova-Nassauer's contribution explores the interactions between stakeholders and the managers of sustainable banks in the “Global Alliance for Banking on Values” (GABV), noting that the degree of interaction remains at a merely conventional level and therefore far from the vicinity of the common good.

In relation to the second thematic block—which aims to facilitate a dialogue between enterprise and society—Horiguchi advocates, through comparative case studies, overcoming the contradictions underlying attempts to make corporate social responsibility explicit in Japanese companies, conceived as “micro moral unity”, even where implicit CSR policies exist within them already. For her part, Cornea considers the impact of corporate responsibility policies in environments where employee layoffs are advocated. With regard to the appeal to a dialogue between enterprise and society, Mion and Tessari investigate new forms of social service organisations through a case study of 33 Italian non-profit organisations with common ethical values and a religious charisma called upon to establish themselves as agencies capable of developing virtuous and sustainable communities, insofar as they have a clear and well-defined purpose and adequately defined criteria for the selection of new members.

Lastly, the third thematic block—which incorporates the servant leadership factor as a galvanising element that strengthens the vocation of service to society inherent in every enterprise—starts with the contribution of Speece et al., who conducted research on spirituality based on compassion and honesty, as experienced first-hand by women small business owners in Thailand. For their part, Pablo Ruiz-Palomino et al. carried out research based on a large sample of businesses in the hospitality industry in Spain using quantitative techniques through multilevel structural equation modelling. In turn, this included items such as “servant leadership”, “organizational citizenship behaviour” (OCB) and “team-based internal social capital” in order to explore the impact of individual and organisational attitudes on the process by which servant leadership produces better results in work groups (team performance) and, ultimately, better opportunities for individual flourishing and a contribution to the common good. Finally, with regard to the appeal to servant leadership, Scalzo et al. provide a theoretical foundation for business ethics and servant leadership based on the transcendental anthropology of Leonardo Polo and the personalist philosophy introduced by Emmanuel Mounier.

We hope that this Special Issue will serve as a spearhead to develop further academic and interdisciplinary conversations in relation to the major issues that should guide the endeavours of modern organisations. To achieve this goal, it will be necessary to generate an intersection between the contributions of the academic world and the professional experiences drawn from the day-to-day lives of the organisations' managers. In other words, the multiple facets of service to citizens and society as a whole will emerge inasmuch as the commitment to service within any organisation is not a flash in the pan, but the result of a cooperative effort between academics and managers.