by Antonia Swinson

ONE interesting discovery I have made in my career, is that making any connection between religion, money and business tends to bring the mildest people out in lumps. Whether practising or not, general public opinion feels religion should remain safely ring-fenced from mainstream commercial life. It’s a belief in recent years reinforced in the West as some Christian denominations face Wall Street-scale challenges of poor management, corruption, plunging client numbers and economic meltdown.

Yet last week, I was invited to address a group of senior managers in the financial services industry on the subject of life-work balance, an event hosted by Oasis (http://www.oasisedinburgh.com), an interdenominational group serving Edinburgh’s west end business community. I found myself addressing a large group of actuaries, fund managers and lawyers, many non-churchgoers, yet all keen to explore the fit of spiritual values within business.

That an enduring Judaeo-Christian values system continues to have a background cultural significance to business in Scotland, I suggested is perhaps a symptom or even a cause of our rare social cohesion. Was it the extraordinarily powerful theocracy Scotland experienced before the Enlightenment, which created the social conditions which produced so many leaders of the 19th century ‘salvation economy’, such as Robert Owen and his protégé, Cunard chairman George Burns, who instilled Christian morality and
civic pride into red-blooded capitalism? If so, how ironic therefore, that it was the Scots diaspora to North America which contributed to the enduring dominance of the Protestant work ethic and which, still, drives our creed of presenteeism in the workplace and poor work-life balance. It was an interesting lunchtime.

Interestingly, Scotland’s enduring belief in the importance of community is often more cause for despair among business communities than celebration. For in the teaching of economics, neoclassical theory driven by mathematical analysis has ruled for the past 70 years, placing the individual and profit rather than community and common good in the centre of the business equation, conveniently ignoring the fact that the father of modern free-market capitalism, Adam Smith, was also Professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University and firmly placed his theories in a strong ethical and community framework.

This orthodoxy endures, in spite of a growing interest in ethical investment and
corporate social responsibility, not least among young people. In the environments of any MBA course, heaven help you if you admit to reading the great Henry George classic, Progress & Poverty, even in the bath. And so the disconnect between the spirituality and the economics has seemed complete.

Until now. September 11, ballooning debt, famine and disease in the Third World - exacerbated in Malawi for example, by policies of the IMF, which takes out more money from the Third World than it puts in - plus increasingly fragile Wall Street conditions, graphically described in Wednesday’s FT as ‘the mother, father and Auntie Madge of head and shoulder patterns!’, are all contributing to signs of a tectonic generational shift, which could yet turn neoclassic economics on its head and put spiritual values once more into the heart of business. Whether Scotland’s business community and policymakers can take advantage of this, while continuing to flex our entrepreneurial muscles, will be fascinating to see.

This month, a five-day international interfaith conference takes place in Oxford on globalisation (http://www.commongood.info), to explore how spiritual teaching can influence business. Convener Kamran Mofid’s new book Globalisation for the Common Good (Shepheard-Walwyn, £12.95), further claims that neoclassical economic theory is on the verge of intellectual and financial bankruptcy for it has ruthlessly excluded institutional standards of behaviour, while promoting a creed of greed, at the expense of people and environment. Now you can read similar sentiments by George Monbiot among others, but Mofid unashamedly puts the need for God and spiritual accountability at the heart of economics, whether clothed in the ethical teachings of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism or Islam.

He compares the biblical Promised Land where there is social justice, with the ‘Waste Land’, engineered by current economic practice to endure rising sleaze and racism, weakened nation states and polarisation of wealth with the rich being paid and rewarded more while the poor are paid less, while any standard of living in the developed West is paid for by a hellish work-life balance and impoverished family lives. I remember interviewing a young accountancy lecturer recently at Aberdeen University, who explained his theory that the UK’s £768bn personal debt habit is the 21st century equivalent of being in domestic service, a means of mass social control. So, just who are upstairs and whom does our bondage suit?

We are living in extraordinarily challenging times. On Wednesday alone the press reported on the EC’s 20bn spending habit due to stress at work, Vivendi’s outgoing chief, Jean-Marie Messier’s £11.5m package for presiding over a junk rating and the updated estimate of Aids deaths in Africa - 68 million in the next 20 years. I also received an e-mail from the US-based Campaign for Labor Rights, detailing the latest proof of alleged sweatshop conditions in supplier factories for Prinault-Printemps-Redoute for its Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent brands. In Tirupur, India, workers have been earning 10 cents per hour, working 13 hours a day, six days a week, less than one-fifth of the amount needed to support a family. Très bon chic, bon genre.

You don’t have to be particularly religious, nor less than passionate about business and wealth creation, not to believe the big picture systems governing our lives must be reformed. Whether or not the world’s faiths discover new leadership in the sphere of unrighteous Mammon, I suspect these communitarian economists, excommunicated for years in academic limbo, just might be set for a stock re-rating.