Religion and Business: a Good Match? RESILIENCE Sponsored Roundtable at #EuARe2025

Religion and Business

Opinions and experiences differ on whether religion has a negative or positive effect on business. Religious values can have a positive effect on business ethics, on attitudes towards work and making money, on dealing with pressures and problems, but religion also asks for costly and time-demanding holy-days and rituals, and can cause moral and personal conflicts that effect business negatively. Are satisfying answers to the title of the roundtable possible? The panelist have experiences with both business and religion and will certainly be able to contribute to finding an answer.

Roundtable Participants

• Vijay Katri, Dean of the Leeds School of Business, Boulder, Colorado
• Fiorella Kostoris, Professor of Public Economics, University Luiss-Guido, Rome
• Hans-Ulrich Küpper, Professor of Business Administration (retired) at LMU Munich School of Management and University of Vienna
• Tandean Rustandy, Founder and CEO of PT Arwana Citramulia Tbk (Indonesia)

Moderator

Herman Selderhuis, President European Academy of Religion.

Discussion

After each of the participants has given an opening statement ( each max. five minutes) on the question: Religion and business: a good match?, the moderator of the forum will start a conversation in which the following questions will be discussed:

1. What are your arguments for or against this statement: religion and business should stay away from each other?
2. In what way can research on religion as well as teaching in business schools contribute to this topic?
3. What effects have the variety of religions and the variety of contexts on a global economy?

About the Roundtable Participants

Vijay Khatri is the Tandean Rustandy Endowed Dean of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As a Professor of Information Systems, he focuses on the information economy, data analytics, and data repository management. Khatri has a notable leadership record in student success, interdisciplinary research, and community engagement, and he is spearheading the 2035 Leeds strategy. Before joining Leeds in July 2023, Khatri was a professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. There, he held various leadership roles, including Executive Associate Dean for Strategy, Innovation, and Technology. He co-directed the Institute for Business Analytics and led the development of the Digital Intelligence Initiative and the Grant Thornton Institute for Data Exploration for Risk Assessment & Management. Khatri has received numerous awards for his research and teaching, including the IU Provost’s Award for Supporting Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity, the IU Trustees Teaching Award, the Innovative Teaching Award, and the MBA Teaching Excellence Award. He holds a PhD from the Eller School of Business at the University of Arizona, a master’s degree in business from the University of Bombay, and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Malaviya National Institute of Technology.

Fiorella Kostoris was Professor of Economic Policy in the Department of Economics of the University of Trieste, later becoming a permanent Professor at the Scuola Superiore di Pubblica Amministrazione in Rome and then Professor of Political Economy in the Economics Department of Rome’s “Sapienza” University and in the University LUISS of Rome. She is President of the interreligious project ENUMA Italia. She has advised a number of Italian and international organisations in the areas of both finance and policy-making. These include: the International Monetary Fund European Department, the Competition Directorate of the EEC, as member of the “Wisemen Group on State Aids Policy”, the Conseil d’Analyse Economique du Prémier Ministre in France (from 1999 to 2004) and the Italian Ministry of University and Research (2003-2006). Ms. Kostoris has served on the Board of the Ethical Fund of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro for Telethon, been advisor to UniCredit Banca Impresa, Chairperson of Sella Gestioni SGR and then consultant to the Banca Sella Group.

Hans-Ulrich Küpper, was a Full Professor of Business Administration and director of the Institute of Production Management and Management Accounting at LMU Munich School of Management (University of Munich). Furthermore he was director of the Bavarian State Institute for Higher Education Research and Planning between 1995 and 2014 as well as the Ludwig-Fröhler-Institute for handicraft. In 2013 he retired. Afterwards he was the academic director of Bavarian EliteAkademie until 2021. Between 2020 and 2023 he was a Full Professor of Accounting at the University of Vienna. He received his doctorate and his habilitation at the University of Tuebingen.  After that he was a full professor at the universities of Essen, Darmstadt and Frankfurt/Main. He got an honourable doctorship by the Technical University of Munich. Professor Küpper teached in management and cost accounting, business ethics, production theory, production planning and scheduling. He wrote several books, especially to production theory (2^nd ed.), production planning (3^rd ed.), cost accounting (11^th ed.), controlling (7^th ed.) and business ethics (2^nd ed.), and published in leading German and international journals to these issues. He is coeditor of several famous German Handbooks and was department editor of Journal of Business Economics (ZfB) until 2024.

Tandean Rustandy, MBA, is an Indonesian entrepreneur, academic and philanthropist known as the founder and chief executive officer of Arwana Ceramics. He was born in the city of Pontianak, West Kalimantan, on December 7, 1965, to a simple family. After a difficult early life, Tandean was able to attend the University of Colorado Boulder in 1987 to complete his bachelor’s degree in finance. Tandean is also an alumnus of the University of Chicago and graduated with a Master of Business Administration in 2007. Along with several of his colleagues, he founded Arwana Ceramics on Feb. 22, 1993, in Jakarta, Indonesia. The company focused on the field of ceramic industry and became a listed company in 2001. In addition to being an entrepreneur, Tandean Rustandy is also active in the world of education and philanthropy.

EuARe 2025