Edinburgh Napier University

  In recent years, there has been a growing number of subspecialties within the context of business management, which have begun to talk seriously about a notion of religious points of view in a business context. In this paper we unpack a view from Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716) and to a lesser extent Kant (1724- 1804) and Hegel (1770-1831) in relation to this perspective with a view to interpret the complexity and the role of religion in this arena. Leibniz famously argued that the universe as it currently exists, has to be “the best of all possible worlds,” since an omniscient creator would know all possibilities, and, therefore select the best available options for a starting and ending point.
We argue that, although dichotically opposed to the many contemporary empirical attitudes, this perspective still has an inherent and modern-day stance, representative to both business theory and decision making via knowledge transfer mechanisms. Thus, we examine why business start-ups evolve and what effect a religious element has on the central caveat for businesses wishing to achieve success and maintain competitive advantage options, perspectives and scenarios. In this regards, we look at a significant amount of literature, in a bid to understand both the problematic nature surrounding the mechanics used to establish meaningful baselines from the many perspectives. The paper then summarises these theoretical baselines into segmented contexts for discussion.