Foundations for a Humanistic Person-Centered Company is a book written by  Domènec Melé Carné .   This work originally appeared in English in 2024, under the title  The Humanistic Person-Centered Company: Conceptual Foundations . Melé prefers the term  “company”  to ”  business ” because  “company”  better highlights the associative aspect.

Chapter  1 describes the problematic view of human beings, often reduced to a mere factor of production or a “human resource” for profit.  Chapter 2,  after contrasting humanism and economism, presents the humanism adopted in this work, which revolves around the rich notion of the “human person.”  Chapter 3  proposes ethics as the driving force behind personal freedom and personal human growth, which is achieved by doing good to others.  Chapter 4 reviews several dominant ethical theories in business ethics, and Melé presents his own proposal.  Chapter 5 analyzes the role of ethics in economic activity and in decision-making in business management.  Chapter 6 considers the company within society. Melé rejects two extremes: viewing society as a mere aggregation of individuals united only by interests and seeing society as a whole in which individuals practically disappear.

The causes of the company

The final chapter, Chapter 7, perhaps the most important as a proposed thesis for the essay, analyzes the identity and purpose of the company from the perspective of personalist humanism . It begins by critically reviewing various positions on these topics and then returns to the question of why companies exist. To answer this, it draws on Aristotle, who established four fundamental causes for all reality: material, formal, efficient, and final. Melé then develops these causes as they apply to the company.

The material cause  is identified with the people and resources (materials and equipment, technology, information, and funds) that comprise the company.  The formal cause  is linked to cooperative relationships, which are expressed in an organized community of people: suppliers, clients, consumers, the local community where the company operates, etc. The company, he insists, is an intermediary community within society and established as a social institution.  The efficient cause  is the work of the people within the company in its different forms: entrepreneurial work, managerial work, operational work, and the activity of investors.  The final cause consists of the company’s purpose, which, to be legitimate, must be consistent with the common good.

This book, as Andrew V. Abela, dean of the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC), pointed out,  is written “with philosophical rigor, but in accessible language, and in dialogue with various currents of ethical and managerial thought.”