Engaging Ideas: Can Christian Business Scholarship Inform Business Practice?

Abstract

This paper systematically reviews and critiques all the scholarship presented to date in the Journal of Biblical Integration in Business which is specifically focused on business practice. We employ a conceptual framework which parses the sources of normative advice and attempts to delineate the type of normative advice as being for our heads, hearts or hands. A particular focus is given to the “hands” portion of the framework when we look at the various normative perspectives regarding how business should be practiced by Christians. We also consider the sources for those perspectives (e.g., general versus specific revelation), the role of practitioners in their development, and the breadth of areas still in need of study. Finally, we suggest specific actions that consider the limited resources focused on explicit Christian scholarship, the particular (but not exclusive) Christian call to scholarship that matters in practice, the variety of backgrounds and skills aspiring Christian scholars possess, and the unmet needs of practitioners that only Christian business scholars may uniquely meet. We challenge ourselves to be more engaged, more empirical, and more explicit in our Christian business scholarship.