Christ and Business Culture

Book excerpt: This book reports the results of a research project that spanned more than a decade. Integrity is the foundation of business. However, the marketplace is highly competitive and sometimes hostile to basic moral aspirations. It is not easy for Christian executives to remain faithful to their Christian values in the business world. This project interviewed a total of 119 Christian executives in Hong Kong. They were known among their peers as committed Christians. Based on their stories recounting the challenges they faced in the marketplace, the authors managed to collect a total of 539 critical incidents that illustrate how they responded when they sensed their integrity was on the line. This study makes use of H. Richard Niebuhr’s framework on Christ and Culture, and also the Negotiation Styles Framework in the negotiation literature. When putting these two frameworks together, the new integrated framework enabled us to understand the Christian executives’ responses to ethical challenges and their implications to profitableness. This book demonstrates the usefulness and limitation of positive science, and the importance of normative reflection in handling ethical challenges. Based on positive science findings, we can see Christian executives’ typical responses as these are shaped by external circumstances such as doing business in China or operating within a Christian corporate culture. Based on normative reflection, we can see that not infrequently when taking all possible factors into consideration Christian executives may pick atypical ways to respond to ethical challenges. In handling such challenges, it is important to understand both positive science and normative reflection. Christian executives may benefit directly from the insights in this study to better prepare themselves for the ethical challenges in the marketplace. Interested readers who are not Christians can also use these insights to compare and contrast, as well as develop further, their own ways of conducting business with integrity.