Meeting Human Material need and Satisfying Human Wants Through Workplace and Marketplace Cooperation

Abstract

While strongly endorsed and encouraged by personalist economists, workplace community — the deliberate and systematic molding of individual workers into an effective team for the accomplishment of a common task — developing community at the intra-firm level clearly is not unique to personalist economics. At that level, the need to unify individuals into work groups is self-evident even if it is not always apparent as to how this is best accomplished. In this regard, personalist economics instructs and is instructed by the real world in areas such as employment security, labor-management relations, gain sharing, and participative management.

In fact, the purpose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit, but is to be found in its very existence as a community of persons who in various ways are endeavoring to satisfy their basic needs and who form a particular group at the service of the whole of society. Profit is a regulator of the life of a business, but it is not the only one; other human and moral factors must also be considered, which in the long term are at least equally important for the life of a business.

Centesimus Annus, chapter 4.