Servant Leadership, Social Entrepreneurship and the Will to Serve: Spiritual Foundations and Business Applications

This book brings together a number of important essays on the intersection of servant leadership and social entrepreneurship, examining them through a shared focus on ’the will to serve’. This combination bears out the insight that inspiring social and economic leaders are able to transform a conflictual human settlement into a collaborative and caring human community. The book seeks to answer the question of whether we can induce from their ’way of doing things’ a model of civic entrepreneurship and leadership that can inspire people in profit, non-profit and public organizations. It also examines the extent to which the will to serve is compatible with the will to maximize profit or the will to gain economic, political or religious power. Furthermore, it asks how far different spiritual traditions create different models and examples of servant leadership and social entrepreneurship. This book will be of interest to researchers working in the fields of business ethics, business spirituality and corporate social responsibility.

Luk Bouckaert is Professor Emeritus of Ethics at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the founder of the Belgian and European SPES-Forum vzw.

Steven C. van den Heuvel is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven, Belgium, as well as an Extraordinary Researcher in the Faculty of Theology at North-West University, South Africa.