Ethics, economics, and service: Changing cultural perspectives

Financial services, the media, and health care are each considered to be a service industry, but recently have become more dominated by economic concerns. This change is part of a larger perception concerning the nature of “the economic system”, one which can be viewed from successive conceptual shifts among three major moral perspectives by which economic concerns gradually gained an independent stature. A present emerging moral paradigm can restore the economic system to the rich relational context from which it has been falsely and destructively abstracted, showing that neither “the economic system” nor the institutions embedded within it can be separated from humanistic and service concerns.