Business Ethics & Environmental Sustainability: Human Race Theatre’s Holmes & Watson, Apt. 2B : University of Dayton, Ohio

After an exceptional experience at the Dayton Theatre Guild’s Campaigns, Inc., the BEES gave a woman another chance to start up a business, this time a fictive detective agency rather than a political consulting agency. The premise — that both Holmes and Watson are women — provided ample opportunities for comedy and mystery. But the more important insights gleaned by the BEES were those provided by comparing the two venues: The Human Race is a professional company, paying equity wages, while the Dayton Theatre Guild is a not-for-profit, populated by amateurs and volunteers.  

The juxtaposition of the two theatrical venues is eerily similar to the juxtaposition of two approaches to eradicating poverty by lending to the poor: microcredit and microfinance. Microcredit (the inductive philosophy underpinning Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank) pursues the eradication of poverty largely by relying (initially) on ‘undemanding finance’ (raising money from donors that do not insist on a rate of return).  Microfinance (the deductive theory informing the activities of Pierre Omidyar (founder of Ebay) and other rich donors attempt to eradicate poverty with banks backed by ‘demanding finance:’  ‘donors’ who requiring a rate of return, if not the return of the principal itself.

While it is true that not-for-profit endeavors are often reliant, in perpetuity, on donor funding, their advantage is that they can focus on their stakeholders — the poor — and offer other support (training, health care, even insurance). In contrast, microfinance programs are often less ambitious, and take fewer genuine risks. They are really trying to correct a market failure — that conventional banks do not want to lend to poor people—but in wanting to be profitable, they often lend to ‘less poor’ poor people, failing to empower the neediest to be entrepreneurial.

In a similar vein, for-profit theatres cannot always afford to take chances; they must choose plays that will fill seats, that do not risk offending reliable supporters/traditional audiences. Theatres that have less pressure to balance budgets can, ironically, experiment with more challenging fare, pursuing topics that might disturb.

While Campaigns, Inc. ended with the culprits — the political consultants — in anguish for their ethical malfeasance, the team of Holmes and Watson turned a profit, complacent that their concern was a going one, with few doubts about means and ends.