Spiritual Capital as Practical Wisdom for Management

The social sciences are replete with a mature literature and treatments, both empirical and theoretical, on culture and economic development (see the “Annotated Bibliography” on this topic by Fred Van Dyke, AuSable Institute, Madison, WI, 1996). The concepts of social capital and human capital are by now rich and extend beyond economics to management, human resources, political science, and sociology. Indeed, both have become in recent decades important, twin pillars in capitalism and democracy. They each operate at individual, corporate, societal, and global levels. Spiritual capital has come to prominence in recent years due to the combination of three related trends: the failure of secularization/modernization theories to account for reality, a rise in religiosity globally, and the lack of ethics and virtue evidenced in the financial crisis and an ongoing plague of corporate scandals. Conceptions of spiritual capital on offer range from those by Fogel to Coleman to Berger and Putnam (see reference section of this chapter) and appear more regularly in the economic and social science literature and popular accounts. In that sense, the concept of “spiritual capital” is truly emerging.