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Abstract
The business culture and laws of the U.S. stress the obligation of corporate managers to maximize the profits of the firm's shareholders. An excessive focus on profits, however, can deny managers any meaningful sense of vocation. It reduces the role of managers, and those who they manage, to mere cogs in the productive processes of their firms. Managers informed by the Catholic social tradition can exercise their responsibilities with a sense of vocation. Catholic professional schools, including law schools, should foster the sense of vocation in graduates by presenting the fundamental principles of Catholic social teaching early in the curriculum and inviting students to apply these principles throughout their studies.
Introduction
The notion that conducting the "business of business," to use a popular American expression, involves a "vocation" in the same sense as the pursuit of a religious or family life, would likely strike contemporary Americans as peculiar. Professionals historically associated with public service, such as teachers, social workers, physicians and nurses, have been identified in the public mind with a calling or vocation. By contrast, managing the productive enterprises that build the goods and provide the services sought by consumers lacks the aura of public service that is often associated with a vocation. As a result, what many individuals spend considerable time doing throughout their productive lives seems divorced from transcendent meaning. One is "called" to serve the poor, teach the young, and minister to the needs of the sick, but not to make safe, efficient and affordable products. Consumers, capital markets, bureaucrats, organized labor, and the law discipline businesses. Business managers,1 as well as the work forces that build and distribute material goods, satisfy the demands of consumers and make investors wealthy, but they seem to have little more to do with society's well being. They have professions, careers, or perhaps they just work, but they are not "called" to what they do. The sense of vocation is missing.
The laws regulating business organizations throughout the U.S. tend to reinforce the idea that business managers should focus on the economic bottom line. Modern corporate law allows some charitable giving,2 and several states permit business managers to consider the interests of constituencies other than shareholders,3 but the general rule is that...