Wpływ katolicyzmu na działanie gospodarcze w polskich małych firmach: wybrane wątki badania empirycznego i stan debaty akademickiej

This article offers the preliminary results of the research exploring the role of Catholic convictions in blocking shadow economy activities at a time when markets in post-communist Poland have been affected by anomie. The article also discusses selected aspects of academic scholarship on the interplay between religion and economy. What is striking is that very little is known about the actual influence of modern Catholicism on the market economy. This article intends to fill this gap, but from a narrow empirical perspective. Considering that the social sciences are historically bound, it is not attempted to elaborate universal laws regulating the influence of Catholicism on attitudes of business people; instead, the article is concerned with the local perspective of the possible involvement of a Catholic agency understood as practical ethics in shaping the self-interest of entrepreneurs managing small and medium enterprises in the post-communist society where the basic rules of capitalist economy have been emerging in anomic social circumstances.