Catholic Social Teaching (CST) developed a view on the purpose and the role of business in society. This view found its fundament in the Papal Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum published in 1891. CST considers a business as a community of persons working together to serve the common good. This view deviates from today’s dominant shareholder-focused or stakeholder-focused view of business. The past few years a number of scholars suggested that CST can offer a moral compass for corporate governance. Scholars in theology as well as in business and management studies have tried to interpret Catholic Social Teaching for corporate governance. But what is the status of the scholarly debate? This paper will present an integrative literature review, covering fourthy-eight scholarly articles and book chapters published during the past ten years, and presents a conceptual overview. What emerges from this overview is that a majority of the published work is conceptual in the sense that it interprets the core principles of Catholic Social Teaching and applies or projects it on business management. Catholic Social Teaching and corporate governance- a literature review and a conceptual overview.docxThere is a limited set of published articles and chapters that connects or tries to integrate Catholic Social Teaching with existing theories such as MacIntyre’s virtues ethics or Economia Aziendale. Still, there is no solid empirical work on how the core CST principles of human dignity, common good, subsidiarity and solidarity would work out in business practice. This paper addresses this omission.
