Abstract
I was increasingly troubled and provoked as the Saturday morning plenary session unfolded at the CBFA conference back in October of 2010. The plenary session was a panel discussion/presentation entitled “Business as Mission: A Discipline Gathering Momentum.” The title of the session itself was enough to grab my attention and get me in my seat. As I settled into that seat I asked myself some questions: “Is business a mission, or is business simply business?” and “If BAM is an academic discipline, what does that mean for my plain old discipline of ‘business as business’?” Once settled, some of the thoughts espoused by the panel (among them, that “BAM is an academic discipline worthy of major programs of study” and “the Great Commission and church planting go hand-in-hand with business enterprise”) were almost enough to make me literally fall out of my seat. That moment, coupled with the invitation from JBIB to respond to Steve Rundle’s fine context-setting paper for this special issue on organizational hybridization, catalyzed this response. Interestingly, the very concept of organizational hybridization itself prompts response on my part, as discussed in more detail later in this paper.
