I’ve recently been engaged in a rich dialogue about the potential — yet largely unfilled — role that corporations can play as agents of positive social change. A corporation, after all, is a legally constituted body, or “corpus”, that has been granted certain forms of agency. How can that agency best be directed toward the ends of social justice and shared prosperity?

Clearly, “trickle-down” economics is not the answer. Trickle-down ideology has led to widespread social injustice, along with massive ecological degradation, as the self-interested accumulation of corporate profits generates ruinous externalities. Indeed, this record of social and ecological ruin has spawned a growing movement of anti-corporate awareness raising and activism that has become increasingly vocal and well-organized in recent years.

While anti-corporate activists struggle with the question of how to restrain corporate excesses and abuses, it is also important to ask how corporations might be reinvented from the inside out by those who run them. Concepts such as corporate social responsibility, corporate global citizenship, and social entrepreneurship have all emerged as a means of encouraging positive change within corporations.

Ultimately, however, any effort to reinvent the corporation from the inside out will need to be recognized as a spiritual endeavor. Transcending the narrow pursuit of material self-interests is a fundamentally spiritual project. It requires the cultivation of spiritual qualities and commitments within corporate actors. Even Adam Smith, one of the founding figures of modern economics, recognized that moral self-regulation — which is a spiritual capacity — is an essential requisite of a just and sustainable economy.

What, then, does it mean to found a corporation upon spiritual principles and infuse it with spiritual purpose? How can corporations systematically cultivate spiritual qualities and commitments within their ranks? What does “leadership training” and “human resource development” mean in this context? What does corporate governance look like in this context? The answers to these questions are not yet clear. But they can be found. And it’s time for the learning to begin.