Corporate Spiritual Responsibility: Four Sources of Inspiration and A Visual Link Among Them
摘要
Corporate spiritual responsibility as a concept is ultimately derived from the sense that corporations, as much as individuals and communities, should feel a sense of obligation to engage the populations toward which they reach with a sense of the human qualities of those populations—to recognize that they must be driven by more than mere profit motives. One may find an important series of articulations of how humans need to act toward other humans—and why—that are easily enough applied to a corporate setting. The paper offers some of these articulations from Socrates, Plato, the Talmudic teaching, Bhagavad Gita, and Martin Buber. The author also discusses the painting by the Mumbai-born and-raised Jewish artist, Siona Benjamin, called Tikkun Ha-Olam—its imagery Hindu, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—that is intended to express how this concept spans traditions. In symbolically visualizing their positive interaction, she suggests that they can be part of the perfecting of the world in which process humans—whether as individuals and communities or as corporations—can and should be engaged. This spiritual imperative finds expression in other traditions as well, and can—and in some cases does—express itself in corporations sensitized to the spiritual responsibility expressed in discussions both sacred and secular.