Renowned Busi­ness­man Vis­its Bethel

MISHAWAKA—On Tues­day, Mar. 26, Dr. James Otte­son vis­ited Bethel to give a lec­ture ti­tled “Hon­or­able Busi­ness: A Frame­work for Busi­ness in a Just and Hu­mane So­ci­ety.” Otte­son pub­lished a book ear­lier this year un­der the same name. 

This is not Otteson’s first time vis­it­ing Bethel; he spoke in 2015 about Adam Smith and Karl Marx. 

Dr. Aaron Schavey, as­so­ci­ate pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics, in­vited Dr. Otte­son to speak. 

“A goal of the busi­ness de­part­ment is to not only teach the tech­ni­cal as­pects of op­er­at­ing a busi­ness, but we also want to give stu­dents an ap­pre­ci­a­tion for the im­por­tant role that busi­ness plays in so­ci­ety,” said Schavey.

Schavey ex­plained that it can be a bat­tle to over­come the neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tion some peo­ple as­so­ci­ate with busi­ness. 

“So of­ten, busi­ness gets a very bad name in our cul­ture,” said Schavey. “But busi­ness does a lot of good; it cre­ates value, it makes the lives of other peo­ple bet­ter, it pro­vides jobs... and I would say that a lot of these jobs pro­vide dig­nity for peo­ple.”

Denise Pen­rod, a se­nior in­ter­cul­tural stud­ies ma­jor, was es­pe­cially in­trigued by the topic. 

“The topic was on hon­or­able busi­ness, and I think that’s some­thing... that some­times is­n’t talked about, the moral as­pect of busi­ness, so I was in­ter­ested in that,” said Pen­rod.

Pen­rod said that one il­lus­tra­tion that stood out in her mind was a graph show­ing the in­come of hu­man­ity; Pen­rod ex­plained that the line was shaped like a hockey stick, shoot­ing up­ward in the 1800s with the de­vel­op­ment of in­dus­tri­al­iza­tion.

“He was ar­gu­ing that dur­ing all that flat part in the graph, there was in­come equal­ity, but it was su­per im­pov­er­ished,” said Pen­rod. “So, he ba­si­cally asked the ques­tion, ‘do you want poverty, or do you want in­equal­ity?’... he was ar­gu­ing that poverty can be solved through busi­nesses and cap­i­tal­is­tic in­sti­tu­tions.”

An­nelotte Letens, a se­nior busi­ness ad­min­is­tra­tion ma­jor, missed work to at­tend the lec­ture. 

“I’m tak­ing sem­i­nar in eco­nom­ics for fun, so the topic of eco­nom­ics and busi­ness is just re­ally in­ter­est­ing to me,” said Letens. “I was glad to be there.” 

Letens es­pe­cially ap­pre­ci­ated Otteson’s com­par­i­son of char­ity ver­sus busi­ness. 

“I re­ally liked when he talked about giv­ing back,” said Letens, “and how giv­ing back means that you’ve taken some­thing, whereas busi­ness is­n’t re­ally tak­ing some­thing from some­one, it’s pro­duc­ing a greater good for the greater amount of peo­ple.”

If you’re in­ter­ested in learn­ing more about the topic of hon­or­able busi­ness, you can pur­chase Otteson’s book here.