Protestant Business Ethics Through a Matrix: the Bible, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Management-Labor Relations

Organized labor has been largely absent from discussions of management-employee relations in Protestant business ethics, which lacks a magisterium that would encourage such discussion. Given the Protestant reliance on the Bible as the main moral source for Christian business ethics, any effort to incorporate labor into business ethics needs to link the Bible to how business organizations function and to the history of labor management relations. This article first grids out Protestant approaches for using the Bible, then explores ideas drawn and developed from H. Richard Niebuhr, a U.S. theologian active in the middle of the twentieth century. His ideas of responsivity, center of value, covenant, contingency and influence are applied using fields of organizational knowledge, while being connected with the Biblical and labor history. The virtue of this ‘integrative-interpretive’ approach is that it permits determinative judgements to be made from within a thematically cohesive framework of analysis.