Managing As If Faith Mattered: Christian Social Principles in the Modern Organization

Managing As If Faith Mattered, the inaugural volume in the Catholic Social Tradition series, defines the proposed thrust of the new series: to study the very best of what the Catholic social tradition has to offer in response to the pressing issues and problems of our times. Challenging the often-held double standard of private and public moralities, authors Helen Alford and Michael Naughton bridge the fault line between work and faith by engaging current management issues with that tradition.

Alford and Naughton address issues essential to the interface between enterprise and ethics: integrity, personal responsibility, and human solidarity. They consider the practical realities of managers within their economic and human resource environments, and discuss such concrete management issues as job design, just wages, corporate ownership structures, marketing communication, and product development. In their hands, economic and social challenges become opportunities to integrate their beliefs and to make decisions based on the tenets of Catholic social tradition.

Undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in management, business, theology, and ethics will find it an excellent text, and real-life managers will benefit from the practical wisdom it contains.

Helen J. Alford, O.P., is dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and co-director of the Ethical Leadership International Program at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Rome, Italy.

Michael J. Naughton is director of the John A. Ryan Institute for Catholic Social Thought at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.