Relational Well-Being and Wealth: Ma ¯ori Businesses and an Ethic of Care Chellie Spiller Ljiljana Erakovic Manuka Henare Edwina Pio ABSTRACT. Care is at the heart of the Ma ¯ori values system, which calls for humans to be kaitiaki, caretakers of the mauri, the life-force, in each other and in nature. The relational Five Well-beings approach, based on four case studies of Ma ¯ori businesses, demonstrates how business can create spiritual, cultural, social, environmental and economic well-being. A Well-beings approach entails praxis, which brings values and practice together with the purpose of consciously creating well-being and, in so doing, creates multi-dimensional wealth. Underlying the Well-beings approach is an ethic of care and an intrinsic stakeholder view of business. KEY WORDS: value based management, ethic of care, Indigenous business, Maori business, sustainability, relational wellbeing and wealth, stakeholder theory Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality. (Abbott, 1884, 107) The quotation is taken from Abbott’s Flatland: A romance of many dimensions, which is a critique of the stultifying conditions of Victorian England. Flatland is a society of creatures who inhabit a two-dimensional surface. These inhabitants, including the central character, a ‘square’, are unable to conceive of worlds beyond their two-dimensional experience. One day, however, a sphere enters Flatland and invites the square to consider the possibility of multiple dimen- sions. Given the limited dimensionality, the square is unable to fully recognise the sphere, let alone com- prehend the sphere’s suggestion. In Flatland the square can only see the sphere as a circle; to the square the sphere has no interior and thickness. Eventually, the sphere casts the square out of Flatland into a three- dimensional world: An unspeakable horror seized me. There was a dark- ness; then a dizzy, sickening sensation of sight that was not like seeing; I saw a Line that was no Line; Space that was not Space: I was myself, and not myself. When I could find voice, I shrieked loud in agony, ‘‘Either this is madness or it is Hell.’’ ‘‘It is neither’’, calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, ‘‘it is Knowl- edge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.’’ (Abbott, 1884, 122) Owing to his experience beyond Flatland the square undergoes a transformation of consciousness. Now the square can see directly what he had pre- viously been unable to comprehend – he can see that his worldview was based on a reality experienced on a two-dimensional surface that was narrow and limited. On his return the square, with new knowledge, could gaze on the wretched plains and inhabitants of Flatland with a different perspective. We invite businesses to consider approaches that go beyond the limited dimensions of the bot- tom-line, and invite researchers to step beyond management Flatlands of limited perspective wherein business is somehow a universal economic truth (Henare, 2003; Petrie, 2006) comprising ‘indepen- dent, rational, self-interested, utility-maximising individuals’ (Peet, 2006, 91). We ask business to dare to experience another way of knowing and to consider holistic and multi-dimensional approaches based on an ethic of care which, as this study shows, can create multi-dimensional well-being through better personal relationships and better relationships with the natural world. In demonstrating how Journal of Business Ethics (2011) 98:153–169 Ó Springer 2010 DOI 10.1007/s10551-010-0540-z