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[Expositions 13.1 (2019) 20–30] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Integrating Non-Profit Leadership and Social  

Entrepreneurship into Catholic Business Education 

 

NICHOLAS J.C. SANTOS, S.J. 

Marquette University 

 

 

Here is the Twitter version of my thesis: If Catholic business schools are to prepare their students 

for careers in non-profit and social entrepreneurial organizations as well as for-profit organizations, 

it will result in Catholic business education becoming more Catholic. 

And here is a longer version: Integrating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship 

education into the traditional business school curricula enhances the value offering of the Catholic 

business school. However, given that many non-Catholic and secular business schools have stellar 

programs in non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship, what is the distinctive rationale, if 

any, that we as Catholic business schools might have for such integration? Here, my answer is that 

the integration of non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship education into traditional 

business education enables the Catholic business school to provide a business education that is 

better aligned with Catholic Social Thought (CST), particularly with respect to its vision of 

economic activity as contributing to the common good. So, let me begin with some context. 

We live at a time of amazing technological, medical, and scientific advancement. We have 

nanotechnologies, self-driving cars, robotics, machine learning, blockchain technologies, etc. And 

yet, the sad truth that confronts us is that a vast majority of the world have no access to these 

advancements and in fact wage a daily battle for survival. In 2017, Oxfam issued a report stating 

that eight men owned the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population.1 

This level of inequality is undoubtedly staggering, but what is even more discomforting is the 

substantial number of people who have no access to clean water, sanitation, nutritious food, 

healthcare, transportation, etc. Consider some of these statistics: 

 

 About 5.4 million children under the age of five die each year, roughly about 

15,000 deaths per day. More than half of these are from conditions that could 



21 Santos 

be prevented or treated with simple interventions. About 45% of these deaths 

are from malnutrition.2  

 An estimated 2.8 billion people do not have access to clean cooking facilities. 

About 2.5 billion rely on solid biomass. 120 million use kerosene, and 170 

million use coal; both of these known to cause health problems.3 

 As of 2015, 2.3 billion people lacked a basic sanitation service with about 892 

million practicing open defecation.4  

 As of 2016, 1.1 billion people or 14% of the global population did not have 

access to electricity.5 

 According to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, as of 

January 2018, Pennsylvania had an estimated 13,512 people experiencing 

homelessness on any given day.6 

 

Those of us involved in Catholic business education cannot be unmoved by this situation. And 

yet, the dominant business education paradigm, which is aimed at preparing our students for 

careers in for-profit organizations, does not allow us adequately to do anything about the dire 

situation of the world around us except in a very peripheral way: service-learning projects, 

immersion experiences, faculty consultations, etc. 

Let me illustrate this point with an excerpt from the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton 

Friedman, in a much-debated article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine dated 

September 13, 1970 and titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase its Profits.” 

Friedman begins that article thus: 

 

When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of 

business in a free-enterprise system,” I am reminded of the wonderful line about 

the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all 

his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they 

declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting 

desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously 

its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding 

pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of 



Integrating Non-Profit Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship 22 

reformers. In fact they are—or would be if they or anyone else took them 

seriously—preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this 

way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the 

basis of a free society these past decades.7 

 

Friedman ends his article with a quote from his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom:8 

 

There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources 

and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the 

rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without 

deception or fraud. 

 

The relentless pursuit of profit maximization that Friedman promotes unfortunately has been the 

dominant paradigm of business education for the last many decades. In the wake of the corporate 

scandals at the turn of the millennium, the late professor Sumantra Ghoshal wrote an insightful 

piece that was published posthumously in 2005, placing the blame for many of the worst excesses 

of management practices on the ideas and theories that emerged from business school academics. 

Ghoshal laments that “by propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools 

have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility.”9 Ghoshal also 

approvingly cites Thomas Kochan’s observation that the root cause of the scandals was the 

overemphasis placed on maximizing shareholder value without any regard for other stakeholders.10 

Sadly, even a decade after Ghoshal’s assessment, ethics scandals continue to rock the corporate 

world. Consider the emissions scandal of the German automaker Volkswagen,11 or the faulty 

airbags case of the Japanese airbag manufacturer Takata,12 or the fake accounts scandal of the U.S. 

banking company Wells Fargo.13 Yet, despite calls to reform business education, the dominant 

model remains focused on profit maximization and shareholder primacy. This is not to say that 

many business schools have not incorporated courses on business ethics and corporate social 

responsibility (CSR) into their curriculum. But as Ghoshal rightly pointed out, such an approach 

is not enough.14 What is needed is a shift in the focus of business education. 

At the annual macromarketing conference in 2016, Dr. Tina Facca-Miess from John Carroll 

University and I delivered a presentation titled “A Social Entrepreneurship-Oriented Business 



23 Santos 

Education” in which we proposed moving the focus of business education from the traditional 

profit-based firm-centric model to an outcome-based society-centric one. Our position is that, as 

long as the metric of success is the profitability of the individual firm, all attempts at incorporating 

ethics and CSR will be futile. Instead, the metric of success should be the positive social outcomes 

in terms of the social problems that the firm is attempting to address. 

This proposition is not as outlandish as it might appear. Consider the growth of benefit (or B) 

corporations over the last many years in the U.S. These are for-profit companies that: “(1) have an 

expanded purpose beyond maximizing share value to explicitly include general and specific public 

benefit; (2) are required to consider/balance the impact of their decision not only on shareholders 

but also on their stakeholders; and (3) are required to make available to the public, except in 

Delaware, an annual benefit report that assesses their overall social and environmental 

performance against a third party standard.”15 Pennsylvania is one of more than 30 states that has 

legislation supporting benefit corporations. Consider also other movements such as conscious 

capitalism, conscientious capitalism, servant leadership, economy of communion companies, 

community interest companies, etc.  

Friedman accused businessmen who promoted the idea of business as having social ends or a 

social conscience as advocating socialism. Perhaps business education has shied away from 

considering the social ends of business for fear of being labeled as socialist. But this can no longer 

be the case. Consider one of the trends that Deloitte identified in its survey of companies across 

the world in 2018: being “social” in the sense of recognizing that the company operates in an 

ecosystem consisting of customers, stakeholders, communities, business partners, and 

employees.16 A remarkable 77% of respondents to the survey rated “citizenship and social impact” 

as critical or important, though nearly 50% also claimed that executives were not ready to deliver. 

The value offering of incorporating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship into the 

regular business school curriculum is that it interjects a common good focus that both these fields 

have and that traditional business education lacks. Consider the definition of social 

entrepreneurship proposed by Professor Paul Light: an effort towards “sustainable, large-scale 

change through pattern-breaking ideas in what or how governments, non-profits, and businesses 

do to address significant social problems.”17 My own definition of a social entrepreneurial 

organization is “one that aims at co-creating social and/or ecological value by providing innovative 

and lasting solutions to social and/or environmental problems through a process of empowerment 



Integrating Non-Profit Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship 24 

and in a financially sustainable manner.”18 Benjamin Huybrechts and Alex Nicholls point out that 

there are three features of social entrepreneurship that are common to most definitions.19 The first 

is the primacy of social and environmental outcomes over profit maximization. The second is an 

innovative mindset that is manifested in new organizational models and processes and in new ways 

of framing societal challenges to arrive at new solutions. The third feature is market orientation. 

According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, approximately 1.56 million non-

profits were registered with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2015, an increase of about 10.4% 

from 2005.20 While non-profit organizations have existed for a number of years, social 

entrepreneurial organizations are a more recent development. Unfortunately, there is not a clear 

IRS designation for social entrepreneurial organizations; hence, counting them is tricky. 

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the number of these organizations is substantially large.  

Given the number of non-profit and social entrepreneurial organizations in the U.S. as well as 

globally, starting degrees in non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship makes sense from a 

business perspective. However, there are stellar programs in many non-Catholic and secular 

universities in both non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship. For instance, the U.S. News 

& World Report rankings in 2019 for schools with the best non-profit management programs did 

not have a single Catholic school in the top twenty.21 The top five schools were Indiana University, 

Bloomington; Syracuse University; Purdue University; University of Southern California; and the 

University of Minnesota. Likewise, some of the schools offering social entrepreneurship degrees 

include Duke University, Babson College, and American University.22  

The increased offerings in non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship courses is also 

driven by a shift in student preferences. In a paper published in the Journal of Jesuit Business 

Education in 2013, David McCallum and Laura Horian point out that business school graduates 

increasingly are concerned not just about getting a job, but also about making a difference in the 

world.23 These students want to be part of transformative change that leverages resources to make 

a difference for a greater number of people, particularly the poor and marginalized. The growth of 

Ashoka-U, an initiative of Ashoka, the world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs, is 

indicative of student interest (www.ashokau.org). Since its launch in 2008, Ashoka-U now 

recognizes about forty-five campuses across the world as changemaker campuses. Marquette 

University was one of the early changemaker campuses, attaining changemaker status in 2010.  



25 Santos 

So, there are two main motivating factors for incorporating non-profit leadership and social 

entrepreneurship education into business schools. First, it increases career opportunities. Second, 

students are not interested in an exclusive focus on the financial bottom line and are concerned 

about environmental and social issues. While a number of business schools are influenced by these 

two factors in opting for non-profit leadership or social entrepreneurship programs, I think that 

Catholic business schools should consider these as opportunities for redefining traditional business 

education rather than just following the pack in starting programs or degrees in non-profit 

leadership and/or social entrepreneurship. Let me elaborate this point. 

In a paper published ten years ago in the Journal of Catholic Higher Education, Stephen Porth, 

John McCall, and Joseph DiAngelo assessed the state of business education at Catholic colleges 

and universities. They used a two-pronged research method. The first was a survey that was sent 

to the heads of the business schools in all the 169 Catholic universities and colleges in the United 

States, which resulted in forty-two responses for a 25% response rate. The second prong was an 

analysis of the websites of the population being studied. The conclusion reached by Porth and 

colleagues was that business education at Catholic colleges and universities was not sufficiently 

distinctive. They proposed that two concepts from CST could enable distinctive student outcomes: 

respect for the dignity of the human person and the purpose of business as oriented towards the 

common good.24 However, as Michael Naughton at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota 

points out, the integration of CST into business education is a complex undertaking. Naughton 

highlights three dimensions of this complexity. The first is the Catholic intellectual tradition itself, 

which has theological, moral, and philosophical elements. The second is “the increasing 

complexity of managing and leading business institutions within a global environment and the 

growing specialization of various disciplines in business education.” And the third is “the 

situational complexity of different Catholic universities around the world with their own unique 

cultures, histories, geographic locations, and their increasingly pluralistic environments.”25 

In a faculty survey done in the fall of 2014 on CST in Catholic business schools in the U.S., 

Andrew Gustafson and Matthew McCarville from Creighton University found that, at most of the 

forty-three schools that responded, only a very small minority of faculty were considered versed 

in CST.26 Surely this should be considered a problem. The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 

which is now part of the Dicastery for Integral Human Development, published not quite a decade 



Integrating Non-Profit Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship 26 

ago a reflection entitled “Vocation of the Business Leader.” Deep in the text, in §86, the document 

states: 

 

business students are informed by powerful theories and highly trained in technical 

skills; but some unfortunately leave university without the ethical and spiritual 

formation that would ensure that their insights and skills are used for the welfare of 

others and the support of the common good. Indeed, some leave with a formation 

that predisposes them to live the divided life rather than giving them the 

fundamentals for an integrated life.27 

 

One way of overcoming this problem might be to have faculty training in Catholic Social Teaching. 

I am, however, skeptical of this approach being very successful. A more successful approach might 

be to begin by refocusing the purpose of our business education towards training our students to 

be successful in non-profit and social entrepreneurial organizations, as well in for-profit 

organizations. Such a refocusing would introduce considerations of the common good, human 

dignity, and solidarity into the curriculum, without having to mandate remedial training in CST. 

Of course, leaders of Catholic business schools would do well to be guided, or at least inspired, by 

CST in re-orienting the curriculum! 

It is significant in this regard that the International Association of Jesuit Universities (IAJU), 

together with the International Association of Jesuit Business Schools (IAJBS) and Colleagues in 

Jesuit Business Education (CJBE), has embarked on an ambitious project of both envisioning an 

alternative paradigm of business and economic development and providing students at Jesuit 

business schools with an alternative paradigm of business education. The IAJU was founded in 

July 2018 and has more than two hundred members. One of its six priority areas is environmental 

and economic justice.28 While the IAJBS and the CJBE have regularly featured topics of 

sustainability and ethics at their annual meetings, these have not made a significant impact on 

business education. It is to be hoped the IAJU joint project will lead to fundamental change. 

I conclude with a quotation from the document “Considerations for an Ethical Discernment 

Regarding Some Aspects of the Present Economic-Financial System,” released by the 

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human 

Development in May 2018. In §17, the document states: 



27 Santos 

 

What is demanded is an initiative, above all, for the renewal of humanity in order 

to reopen the horizons towards that abundance of values which alone permits the 

human person to discover himself or herself, and to construct a society that is a 

hospitable and inclusive dwelling place with room for the weakest, and where 

wealth is used for the benefit of all—places where it is beautiful for human beings 

to live and easy for them to have hope.29 

 

 

Notes 

 

1. Oxfam Briefing Paper, “An Economy for the 99%,” January 2017, https://www-

cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/bp-economy-for–99-percent–160117-en.pdf, 

accessed April 4, 2019. 

2. World Health Organization, “Children: Reducing Mortality,” September 19, 2018, 

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/children-reducing-mortality, accessed 

April 4, 2019. 

3. International Energy Agency, “Energy Access Outlook 2017,” October 19, 2017, https:// 

www.iea.org/access2017/, accessed April 4, 2019. 

4. UNICEF, “Universal Access to Sanitation—UNICEF Data,” July 2017, https:// 

data.unicef.org/topic/water-and-sanitation/sanitation/, accessed April 4, 2019. 

5. International Energy Agency, “Energy Access Database,” https://www.iea.org/ 

energyaccess/database/, accessed April 4, 2019. 

6. United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, “Pennsylvania Homelessness 

Statistics,” https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/pa/, accessed April 4, 2019. 

7. Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” The 

New York Times Magazine September 13, 1970, 33, https://graphics8.nytimes.com/ 

packages/pdf/business/miltonfriedman1970.pdf, accessed on April 4, 2019.  



Integrating Non-Profit Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship 28 

8. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 

133. 

9. Sumantra Ghoshal, “Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management 

Practices,” Academy of Management Learning & Education 4.1 (2005): 75–91, at 76. 

10. Ibid., 81. See Thomas A. Kochan, “Addressing the Crisis in Confidence in Corporations: 

Root Causes, Victims and Strategies for Reform,” Academy of Management Executive 16.3 

(2002): 139–141. 

11. Russell Hotten, “Volkswagen: The Scandal Explained,” BBC December 10, 2015, 

http://www.bbc.com/news/business–34324772, accessed April 4, 2019. 

12. Hiroko Tabuchi and Danielle Ivory, “Takata Discarded Evidence of Airbag Ruptures as 

Early as 2000,” New York Times February 12, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/ 

business/takata-discarded-evidence-of-airbag-ruptures-as-early-as–2000.html?_r=0, 

accessed April 4, 2019. 

13. Matt Levine, “Fake Accounts Still Haunt Wells Fargo,” Bloomberg October 13, 2018, 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018–10–23/fake-accounts-still-haunt-

wells-fargo, accessed April 4, 2019. 

14. Ghoshal 88. 

15. See “What is a benefit corporation?” B Lab, 2019, https://benefitcorp.net/faq, accessed 

April 4, 2019. 

16. Josh Bersin, “The Rise of the Social Enterprise: A New Paradigm for Business,” Forbes 

April 3, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2018/04/03/the-rise-of-the-social-

enterprise-a-new-paradigm-for-business/#6db75f0271f0, accessed April 4, 2019. 

17. Paul C. Light, “Reshaping Social Entrepreneurship,” Stanford Social Innovation Review 

(Fall 2006): 47–51, at 50, http://www.nyu.edu/social-entrepreneurship/news_events_ 

resources/pdf/paul_light.pdf, accessed April 4, 2019. 



29 Santos 

18. Nicholas J.C. Santos, S.J., “Social Entrepreneurship That Truly Benefits the Poor: An 

Integrative Justice Approach,” Journal of Management for Global Sustainability 2 (2013): 

31–62, at 39, https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1136& 

context=market_fac, accessed April 4, 2019. 

19. Benjamin Huybrechts and Alex Nicholls, “Social Entrepreneurship: Definitions, Drivers, 

and Challenges,” in Social Entrepreneurship and Social Business: An Introduction and 

Discussion with Case Studies, eds. C.K. Volkmann, K. Ernst, and K.O. Tokarski 

(Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler, 2012), 31–48, at 33. 

20. Brice McKeever, “The Nonprofit Sector in Brief,” National Center for Charitable Statistics, 

January 3, 2019, https://nccs.urban.org/project/nonprofit-sector-brief, accessed April 4, 

2019. 

21. U.S. News & World Report, “Nonprofit Management Programs,” 2019, 

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-public-affairs-schools/nonprofit-

management-rankings, accessed April 4, 2019. 

22. Giselle Weybrecht, “How Business Schools are Creating Social Entrepreneurs,” AACSB 

Best Business Schools’ Blog, October 11, 2016 https://bestbizschools.aacsb.edu/blog/ 

2016/october/business-schools-creating-social-entrepreneurs, accessed April 4, 2019. 

23. David C. McCallum, S.J., and Laura Horian, “A Leadership Education Model for Jesuit 

Business Schools,” Journal of Jesuit Business Education 4/1 (2013): 37–52. 

24. Stephen J. Porth, John J. McCall, and Joseph A. DiAngelo, “Business Education at Catholic 

Universities: Current Status and Future Directions,” Journal of Catholic Higher Education 

28.1 (2009): 3–22, at 10. 

25. Michael Naughton, “A Complex Mission: Integration of Catholic Social Tradition with 

Business Education,” Journal of Catholic Higher Education 28.1 (2009): 23–44, at 25. 

26. Andrew B. Gustafson and Matthew McCarville, “Catholic Social Thought in Catholic 

Business Schools in the U.S. Today: A Survey and Conclusions,” Journal of Religion and 



Integrating Non-Profit Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship 30 

Business Ethics 4 (2017): 1–31 (article 2), https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/ 

viewcontent.cgi?article=1105&context=jrbe, accessed April 4, 2019. 

27. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, “Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection,” 

4th ed., November 2014, §86, https://www.stthomas.edu/media/catholicstudies/center/ 

ryan/publications/publicationpdfs/vocationofthebusinessleaderpdf/PontificalCouncil_4. 

pdf, accessed April 4, 2019. 

28. International Association of Jesuit Universities, “Environmental and Economic Justice,” 

https://iaju.org/working-groups/environmental-and-economic-justice, accessed April 11, 

2019. 

29. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human 

Development, “‘Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones’: Considerations for an Ethical 

Discernment Regarding Some Aspects of the Present Economic-Financial System,” May 

17, 2018, §17, https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2018/05/ 

17/180517a.html, accessed April 4, 2019. 

 


