Wojciech Gasparski, The Story on Business and its Responsibility
Prof. dr hab. Wojciech Gasparski
The issue of socially responsible business is not a new one. Some of its contemporary sympathisers remember the Gospel of Wealth by Andrew Carnegie, other consider it as public relations dressed in another word garment, while management scientists claiming it is a managerial theory argue with ideologists blaming it to be a 'doctrine'.
Between opponents and advocates of the theory there is an ongoing controversy related to the contemporary business legend. Opponents consider business as a sui generis vending machine to which one put her money to augment it supporting this with ideology diminishing the importance of social context business operate within. Supporters consider business in terms of human action taking into account its praxiological dimensions - effectiveness and efficiency - which expressed in monetary units turns to be economical, and axiological dimension - ethicality - creating collectively the 'triple E'.
Some of the supporters as well as critics of the stakeholder theory are involved in ideology. It forces critics to throw out the baby with the bath water, while what is necessary is to separate theory from ideology. Ideologists on the both sides, however, are unable to do that. It is a task for theoreticians and unbiased practitioners whose wisdom is so important in any kind of action business action included.
Experts in system theory approach the issue with calm and without emotion pointing out context of any kind of human actions performed in collective collaboration. School education divided into lessons of mathematics, biology, history, etc., do not prove that the reality is of such a nature, although many school students suppose the world is cross-ruled, and some of their parents and teacher believe in that even. This belief lasts for a long period after the school education, sometimes for whole life. Yet the real world is not a collection of fragments but the whole of interrelated and interdependent parts, elements, components, units and so on.
Joseph Maria Bochenski - a philosopher of the famous Lvov-Warsaw school of logic, Dominican friar, rector of the University of Fribourgh, Switzerland - pointed out the systemic nature of the enterprise. He identified two types of aims: 'immanent' related to what is done, and 'transcendent' related to for what that is done. Achieving the immanent aims is the necessary condition for performing the transcendent aims. It means that a firm must to produce - for it is its immanent aim, and has to exist, as well as has to be strong enough to continue, and finally it has to operate rationally.[more...]
