Goodwill and the Third Place – business or society?

Abstract

The late Professor Keith MacMillan's abiding interest in building successful business relationships as the key to a firm's success is put in its historical, theoretical and practical context. Where the founders of the core social sciences seemed to focus exclusively on Man as an object of knowledge operating within observable systems of exchange, MacMillan explored aspects of human interaction previously ignored by ‘hard’ managerial science. By identifying a non-monetary aim for business activity – gaining goodwill – MacMillan arrived at a solution for the seemingly intractable conflict of interests between business and society. This paper explores the man and his works, with MacMillan's life seen as a practical working-out of his theoretical conclusions. The paper concludes with a literary analogy from the 14th century Tuscan poet Dante Alighieri: the ideological position from which divergent interests can be harmonised is seen as akin to the vantage point possible from Mount Purgatory, as portrayed in Dante's Divine Comedy.