To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.22 (528 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0674057406 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 392 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-03-11 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad.While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart’s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (iwj) and its local affilia
Fascinating account E. Scarborough Well-written, informative, and extensively documented, this book is a fascinating account. Moreton weaves together a great deal of history, dealing not only with Wal-Mart's development and growth but also the geo-political, religious, cultural, and economic contexts that supported the business enterprise. The author's scholarship is admirable and her w. "Making The World A Better Place" according to David Shores. This is an exceptionally thought provoking book. Using the growth of Wal-Mart as a frame of reference, the author explores a wide variety of cultural changes that influence the way we see the world.One cultural change is the so called "feminization of men". Instead of being authoritarian family leaders, many husbands have learned how to joyfully partic. fine scholarship sam I live and teach in Arkansas, although most of my life and education have been in other regions of the country. No single book has given me more insight into the region in which I now live. I can attest to the author's statements about the culture and values of this region based on my daily experience here in WalMart country. Her judgments ring true. I
Bethany Moreton is Professor of History at Dartmouth College.
Giving Max Weber's Protestant ethic something of a late-20th-century update, Moreton shows how this confluence wedded Christianity to the free market. In the spirit of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? historian Moreton unearths the roots of the seeming anomaly of corporate populism, in a timely and penetrating analysis that situates the rise of Wal-Mart in a postwar confluence of forces, from federal redistribution of capital favoring the rural South and West to the family values symbolized by Sam Walton's largely white, rural, female workforce (the basis of a new economic and ideological niche), the New Christian Right's powerful probusiness and countercultural movement of the 1970s and '80s and its harnessing of electoral power. All rights reserved.