THE SOUL OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP: From Max Weber to the new business spirituality
[There can be] no capitalist development without an entrepreneurial class; no entrepreneurial class without a moral charter; no moral charter without religious premises.[1]
In the classic film “Wall Street” Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) typifies the entrepreneur for many. “The lesson in business,” he tells Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), is “don't get emotional about stock, it clouds the judgment.” Gekko is constantly in a telephone conversation, using language such as “block anybody else’s merger efforts,” “Christmas is over, business is business,” and “I want every orifice in his body flowing red.” In a famous scene, Gekko redefines greed: “Greed is good, greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures that essence of the evolutionary spirit.” It is interesting that Gekko uses the word “spirit” in a film that exemplifies the secular humanism that has been the dominant cultural environment of business in the Western world for several decades. But there is a change in Western culture that makes the question of a moral charter for entrepreneurship and even the search for a religious/spiritual foundation apt if not urgent.
THE ELUSIVE ENTREPRENEUR
Defining entrepreneurship is not an easy task. Entrepreneurship involves three facets – envisioning, inventing (creativity) and implementing – any one of which, by its absence, renders an activity as less than fully entrepreneurial.[2] Entrepreneur is a French term that in the Middle Ages was used of a clergy person who was in charge of a great architectural work such as a cathedral or a castle. In one person were combined the functions of inventor, planner, architect, manager, employer and supervisor. An earlier form of the word, “entrepreneur,” was used as early as the fourteenth century. According to Bert Hoselitz the term was used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for government contractors. But in the eighteenth century this French term becomes infused with “a precise economic content” in the writings of the eighteenth century businessman, Richard Cantillon.[3] The trio of qualities noted above – envisioning, inventing and implementing – seem indispensably linked with the idea of entrepreneurship: not just envisioning, not just inventing, not just implementing, but all three. Admitting the complexity of defining an entrepreneur, Robert Hebert and Albert Link suggest a similarity with the Heffalump in Winnie-the-Pooh: “All who claim to have caught sight of him report he is enormous, but they disagree on his particularities.”[4]
In this paper I wish to revisit Max Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. As Michael Novak notes, there are at least two good reasons why Weber has earned an immortal place in intellectual history. First, “he identified something new in economic history and glimpsed . . . its moral and religious dimensions. Second, he suggested in advance why Marxism, both as an explanatory theory and a vision of paradise, was doomed to fail: Its resolute materialism excluded the human spirit.”[5] I then wish to explore an extraordinary irruption of spirituality in business in the Western world, loosely called the New Business Spirituality. Is this a confession of the bankruptcy of secular humanism - humankind left alone with humankind without a transcendent reference point? Dr. H. J. Blackham, one time Director of the British Humanist Society said that the most drastic objection to humanism is that it is too bad to be true! While the phrase “paradigm shift” is undoubtedly overused, I think this is what we are experiencing. Finally, I wish to reflect on Weber and the New Business Spirituality on the basis of classic Judaeo-Christian theology of entrepreneurship both to welcome congruencies and to indicate some ways that a lasting and life-giving centre for the entrepreneurial imperative can be found.[6]
Unquestionably entrepreneurial activity requires faith, whether that faith is a “push” from within (drivenness that arises from unmet human needs) or a “pull” from without (a calling from a significant Other). Most of the contemporary theories of entrepreneurship do not consider this aspect. Factors usually identified include personality - traits such as risk-taking, independence, internal locus of control, self-confidence,[7] the environment or “the times”[8] and the possession of skills that can be learned.[9] The most plausible theory is the systemic one, namely that multiple interdependent factors work together to create the entrepreneurial imperative that has led to the flourishing of western capitalism. With the exception of the much debated 1904-1905 essay by Max Weber there is a surprising lack of study and literature on the spiritual/religious sources of entrepreneurship.[10]
WEBER’S “PARTIAL, COMPLEX AND MOMENTOUS” THESIS
The Protestant Work Ethic is blamed (not without reason) for much of the anti-leisure attitudes (the so-called “Calvinist feeling that work alone is good”).[11] The popular version of the Protestant Work Ethic involves the following beliefs: idleness is sinful;[12] industriousness is a religious ideal, waste is a vice; frugality is a virtue; leisure is earned by work and a preparation for work; complacency and failure are outlawed; ambition and success are sure signs of God’s favour; wealth is a special sign of God’s favour.[13]
Some of these beliefs stem directly from the Protestant Reformation. The magisterial reformers (Luther and Calvin) not only “reformed” the way in which people came to know their acceptance with God but also their attitude to the world and work in particular.[14] Lutheranism enjoins the entrepreneur to consider his economic activity as a calling (Beruf), though according to Max Weber the Lutheran’s commitment to his worldly calling/station does not involve a strenuous effort to master, rationalize and innovate.[15] As Weber viewed the matter, something more would be needed to ratchet up the believer’s intensity to a passion for entrepreneurship. Gianfranco Poggi puts it this way,
Only a religious vision that turns worldly reality into a field of experimentation, and the individual into a ‘tensed-up being’, relentlessly working that field in the pursuit of a dynamic design, could plausibly be said to have offered such an inspiration.[16]
According to Weber this is what Calvinism supplied; not the Calvinism taught by the Reformers but the reception of that teaching by what he calls “the lay practitioners of religion.”[17] Weber’s thesis can be summarized in this way: For capitalism to flourish there must be both intensive activity and the imperative to save. The rise of both spirits can be traced to Calvinism. As to the first, with the closing of the monastery door as a way to prove one’s merit before God, the fervent believer was enjoined to prove oneself by intensive work in the world in his or her calling. For the second, Calvinism taught self-denial and self-sacrifice, the very delayed gratification that is essential for accumulating capital. The theological underpinning for this, according to Weber, was supplied by the twin doctrines of Calvinism - the transcendence of God and predestination.[18] These allowed believers to operate in the world as God’s instrument and in the process to gain some assurance of their own status as the elect.[19] The Calvinist Puritans recommended living the life one would live if one was sure of his or her salvation thus inciting “intense worldly activity.” Weber cites Baxter to show that living with discipline, productivity and self-restraint shows you are saved. The first doctrine “cranks up the tension” and the second “opens the believer to the world.”[20] “Thus . . . all the Calvinist faithful’s ethical eggs were placed in the basket of his calling.”[21]
The attainment of [wealth] as a fruit of labour in a calling was a sign of God’s blessing. And even more important: the religious valuation of restless continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest medium of asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of that attitude toward life which we have here called the spirit of capitalism.[22]
Implicit in the Calvinism Weber studied is a particular concept of the stewardship of money, only potentially useful, and of time, involving a methodological attitude to time that monitors the environment and makes adjustments, maximizing the time.[23] Catholicism proposed extensive interpenetration of the sacred and profane, discouraging “the faithful from treating the latter as a religiously neutral field, deprived of ritual significance, and open to his ‘tinkering’ and rearranging.”[24] In contrast, Calvinism led believers to adopt an ethical posture; an inner-worldly asceticism in the context of intensive ‘tinkering’ in the world.[25] When you combine the attainment of wealth (acquisitive activity) as the fruit of labour and a sign of God’s blessing with the limitation of consumption (saving) the inevitable result is the accumulation of capital.[26] This is powerful incentive for envisioning, inventing and implementing. The spirit of this motivation is typified by the words of the evangelical John Wesley, founder of the Methodists, in his famous sermon on the use of money: “Gain all you can [a push for entrepreneurship], save all you can [a push for capitalism], give all you can.”[27] Poggi’s conclusion is apt: Weber’s argument is partial (addressing a distinctive part of a large historical problem), complex (“it comprises a number of discrete points, connected by a correspondingly high number of steps or transitions”) and momentous (emphasis mine).[28]
Weber’s thesis is hard to verify empirically but, as the British economist Brian Griffiths notes, “the Protestant ethic thesis turns out to be a specific example of a far more general thesis: namely that the economic process is related in an important way to cultural and religious values.”[29] Entrepreneurship is inspired, and religious/spiritual sources are a powerful motivation. What is remarkable in The Arc of Ambition is that the authors, James Champy and Nittin Nohria, do not consider where ambition comes from. They note: “The pattern of achievement in virtually every field is about seeing beyond the accepted beliefs and conventions of the day. Achievers ignore the boundaries of the old and have the courage to explore the new. They see something others don’t.”[30] Champy and Nohria do acknowledge, however, that some Asian religions – Buddhism for instance – discourage inventiveness by advising people to accept their life circumstances.[31]
REFORMATIONAL SOURCES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The “Protestant Work Ethic” could be more accurately described as the “post-Protestant work ethic.”[32] Weber rarely quotes Calvin.[33] He relies heavily on his observations that capitalism seems to have flourished better in Protestant countries than Catholic,[34] a matter explained differently by David Landes.[35] Weber also relied heavily on the later Puritans, such as Richard Baxter,[36] Pietists in England and Holland, Methodists,[37] and deists like Benjamin Franklin.[38]
Among the nominally religious and early post-Protestants, people moved away from dependence on the sufficiency of Christ’s work for salvation and, during the industrial revolution, invested work with more religious significance as a means of proving one’s acceptance with God. The vocation of rest (given proper emphasis by Calvin and the early Puritans) was lost.[39] Weber correctly observed that what got worked out in the Reformed Churches and sects was a “reversion to the doctrine of salvation by works” rather than justification by grace through faith: God helps those who help themselves.[40] But Weber was incorrect in concluding that Lutheranism, “on account of its doctrine of grace, lacked a psychological sanction of systematic conduct to compel the methodical rationalisation of life.”[41]
Both Luther and Calvin recalled people to the foundational document of the Christian faith (the Bible) and to the essential gospel experience. Thus they argued that the primary spiritual posture - and therefore the psychological force for life in this world - was neither existential anxiety (fear that one might not be approved by God) nor self-justification. Rather true spirituality is a combination of gratitude to God and love of neighbour. This is what should make people “tick.” It is also a source of entrepreneurship, inspiring people to creative action, to dream dreams and to serve the common good. While these truly spiritual motives do not create “tensed up” people they do provide an empowering motivation for passionate and creative work, a motivation that can be sustained indefinitely as I will attempt to show much later. Luther expressed this beautifully using the analogy of marriage (an analogy Calvin himself used)[42]:
When a husband and wife really love each other, have pleasure in each other, and thoroughly believe in their love, who teaches them how they are to behave one to another, what they are to do or not to do, say or not to say, what they are to think? Confidence alone teaches them all this, and even more than is necessary. For such a man there is no distinction in works. He does the great and the important as gladly as the small and the unimportant, and vice versa. Moreover, he does them all in a glad, peaceful, and confident heart, and is an absolute willing companion to the woman. But where there is any doubt, he searches within himself for the best thing to do; then a distinction of works arises by which he imagines he may win favour. And yet he goes about it with a heavy heart and great disinclination. He is like a prisoner, more than half in despair and often makes a fool of himself. Thus a Christian man who lives in this confidence toward God knows all things, can do all things, ventures everything that needs to be done, and does everything gladly and willingly, not that he may gain merits and good works, but because it is a pleasure for him to please God in doing these things. He simply serves God with no thought of reward, content that his service pleases God. On the other hand, he who is not at one with God, or is in a state of doubt, worries and starts looking for ways and means to do enough and to influence God with his many good works [Weber’s “tensed up” person!].[43]
As I will show later, the Judeo-Christian revelation of the God of grace positively inspires creativity, risk-taking, and inventiveness not because a person is unsure of his or her status before God but precisely because they have this gospel confidence. It is the one-talent person with his conception of a mean, demanding God that fails to invest (Matt 25:24-25).
Since the times of the magisterial reformers (Luther and Calvin) and the post-Protestantism which Weber studied, the Western world has experienced several decades of secular humanism. Speaking to this Keynes observed fairly that “modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.”[44] The spirit has been quenched. Business is business. Greed is good. Self-interest is the primary motivation for entrepreneurship. The unhappy divorce of church/religion and business has left business on its own, and Christians (and other people of faith) living schizophrenic lives: God on Sunday, Mammon on Monday. The corporation is simply a profit-making machine. Two hundred years ago George III’s Chancellor, Baron Thurlow, said: “How can you expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?”[45] There is, however, a cultural paradigm shift under way in part due to postmodernity (however we define it!). Speaking to the philosophical underpinnings of postmodernity, Thomas Oden says, “Postmodernity whether East or West will be searching for a way back to the eternal verities that grounded society before the devastations of late modernity.”[46]
THE NEW BUSINESS SPIRITUALITY
One evidence of this recovery of soul and spirit is the spate of books of which John Renesch’s New Traditions in Business: Spirit and Leadership in the Twenty-First Century is representative.[47] Coordinating twelve leading thinkers about the future of business, Renesch and others propose a new business model:
* The company is a community, not a corporation, a system for being, not merely a system for production and profit.
* The new image of the manager is that of a spiritual elder.
* Employees are members of the body working interdependently for the common good.
* While mission statements, vision, goals, and values will continue to push a company, a “Higher Purpose” (parallel to the “Higher Power” made popular by A.A.) will pull a company forward (emphasis mine).
*The corporation is an equipping (learning) organization that provides an environment for every-member service (ministry) so each person will become more human, more creative, and more integrated with the Higher Purpose.
Renesch and his associates are not alone. In 1997 the British economist Charles Handy wrote eloquently on the need for a recovery of spirit in the business world.[48] An annual corporate leadership and ethics forum at Harvard involving key corporate leaders in North America, including the Canadian psychologist Martin Rutte, is currently exploring the recovery of spiritual values in the marketplace. The Vancouver Sun recently carried an article on Tanis Helliwell, a Canadian New Age therapist and business consultant, who offers a seminar titled “Take Your Soul to Work.” There is indeed a host of authors, conferences, seminars and traveling gurus promoting something that is neither simply traditional religion (though it draws heavily on it) nor simply New Age spirituality (though there are affinities).
The language being used today by many entrepreneurs and CEOs seems like a return to the revival tents of frontier Christianity: caring, love, spiritual, the human spirit, awakening, backsliding, new heresy, inner resources, inner authority, inner wisdom, soul, the search for a deeper sense of life purpose, co-creation, the pursuit of unconditional love, metanoia (repentance), the business leader as a spiritual elder, the need for transcendence, relationship with God, wonderment, evoking spirit, celebration, the corporate cathedral, the Higher Purpose, communion, spiritual values, disciplines, and tradition. The “basic positivistic and reductionistic premises (of scientific materialism) are being replaced by a new set of beliefs that include increased faith in reason guided by deep intuition. In other words, a ‘respiritualization’ of society is taking place that is more experiential and less fundamentalistic than most of the historically familiar forms of structured religion.”[49] The alleged paradigm shift of the century is not a return to religion but to spirituality without religion.[50]
Here the corporation again has a soul and a calling. Vision is replacing profit as the raison d’etre of a corporation. A corporation exists to make a long-term contribution to society, indeed to the globe. As older social cultures (cities, neighbourhoods, churches) have become atomized, business cultures will be the new tribes, the new neighbourhoods. “Corporations are our new communities.”[51] One indication of this change of focus is the following list of reminted mission statements used by large corporations to reflect “not mainly for profit” but “for good”:
Du Pont: “A new partnership with nature.”
Mary Kay Cosmetics: “To give unlimited opportunity to women.”
Merk: “To preserve and improve human life.”
Sony: “To experience the joy of advancing and applying technology for the benefit of the public.”
Wal-Mart: “To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.”
Walt Disney: “To make people happy.”[52]
Crucial to this respiritualization of business is the role of intuition and awakening of will, joy, strength and compassion through the liberating power of relating to a higher purpose that inspires creativity and a calling from deep sources within.[53] Thus we are challenged with soul work, not merely remuneration or the challenge of a career. Most commonly this higher purpose is not thought of as a being or power outside the system because nothing is outside the system! The new business spirituality affirms “inner wisdom, authority, and resources, challenging the scientific materialism that was dominant in the earlier part of the century.”[54] The private corporation, it is claimed, has the potential of providing spiritual eldership for the young and of extending creation across geographical, cultural and political boundaries - the most powerful institution on earth.[55] The church of Weber’s study has been reinvented in the corporate cathedral.
Who would have thought that post-Protestant Calvinism, which fired one generation of entrepreneurs, would be replaced after several decades of spiritual wilderness with a business spirituality without religion? As I will show below many of the concepts of the New Business Spirituality are entirely congruent with historic Christianity and Judaism: co-creativity, spirit, love, service (the same word as “ministry” in Greek), interdependence, community, relationality, global concern, ecological sensitivity, vocation or calling. The New Business Spirituality movement reflects, on one hand, the insatiable hunger of the human being for Someone beyond humankind, for authentic community and for significant service. On the other hand, there are presuppositional questions which, from the point of view of the Judaeo-Christian tradition need to be addressed.[56] In my opinion, the New Business Spirituality is addressing the God-sized vacuum in the souls of people in the workplace, a gap that has unfortunately been left unattended by the religiously occupied church and the secular humanism of Western culture.
We turn now to broadly consider what could be called a biblical theology of entrepreneurship, bearing in mind the seminal influence of Max Weber’s thesis and the emerging New Business Spirituality.
TOWARDS A JUDAEO-CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
1. The Human Vocation
Inventiveness, creativity and initiative derive from human beings created in the image of God
(Gen 1:27) as subcreators or co-creators with God, charged with the care of and development of the whole of creation (Gen 1:28; 2:15). Contrary to what is often alleged, the Judaeo-Christian view of the so-called “creation mandate” is not a license to manipulate and control but a charge to care for and develop creation as trustees rather than owners. God intended that both human creatures and the rest of creation should not simply be left preserved but should flourish.[57]
This means enculturating the world by making tools, making places, making communities, making cities, making family, making communication, making beauty, making music, making meaning, making food, making wealth and making play. Humankind was commissioned to be entrepreneurial in just this: not merely to admire untouched creation but to develop it for the common good and for God’s glory. In this way Adam and Eve were the first priests of creation. In the same way business entrepreneurs are priests of God and priests of creation, accountable to God for their stewardship since they are not owners but charged to be sub-creators through which they bless creation and others. As Novak says, we “bring the Creator’s work to its intended fulfilment by being co-creators in a very grand project.”[58] That we are invited and enlisted into a grand project is underscored in the New Testament where the phrase “fellow-workers” with God is actually used (1 Cor 3:9). We are creating creatures.[59] The New Testament speaks of this as calling/vocation. Further, it announces that all are called, not just religious professionals.
2. Community Building
God created humankind “male and female . . . in [God’s] image”" (Gen 1:27) - built for community, relationality and love. God’s purpose is to build on earth both the faith community and the human community. Thus the Bible faithfully records the cooperative endeavour, often with humankind grievously failing, of building family, people, church, nation and ultimately a global community. The business corporation is part of this divine mission. The meaning of the word “company” is literally “shared bread” (Latin, com plus panis), something practiced by the first Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 2:42-47). It can be argued that the corporation used the model of the early church which was a new pattern of mutual responsibility, accountability, structured authority and voluntary participation that was neither oikos (household) nor polis (state). Max Stackhouse claims the church was the first “trans-ethnic and trans-national corporation.”[60] The Benedictine monastic movement also became a precursor of the corporation since it gave the church a base that was neither oikos nor polis, but was a disciplined co-operative community outside the traditional structures. And it was entrepreneurial.
3. Initiative and Risk-Taking
There are risks - for God as well as humankind - in this great venture of unfolding the potential of creation and building community. All acknowledge that entrepreneurship involves risk, though usually a calculated one.[61] Here the parable of the talents, which Jesus taught, is especially insightful (Matt 25:14-30). The servant with five or two talents, entrusted with money by the master while he was away, invested and made more. Each was an entrepreneur. But the servant with one talent wrapped it up and hid it, only to be condemned by the master upon his return. Why did the first two servants risk failure and loss through investing their talents to make more? Why did the servant with one talent wrap it up in a handkerchief and keep it intact? Why was the judgement of this servant so harsh - experiencing the removal of the talent, being declared worthless and cast into outer darkness? (25:30) This seems all the more harsh because the servant with one talent did not throw the talent away, squander it or despise it. The reason for his lack of entrepreneurship was his conception of God: “I know you are a harsh man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground” (25:24-25). It is noteworthy that this is close to the conception of God attributed by Weber to Calvin! A harsh exacting God that is to be feared inhibits risk-taking whereas a God who is creative, loving, forgiving and good inspires risk-taking. With such a God, failure might even become a kind of success.
4. A Proper Selfishness
The expectation of gain or profit is certainly the most complicated aspect of a theology of entrepreneurship. Both Adam Smith and many contemporary authors argue that while the entrepreneur’s efforts may result unintentionally in the well-being of society, their primary aim is to make a profit. This, however, is not simply the case. Don Flow, a business person in the automotive industry, says that accepting no social responsibility other than making a profit is to ethically fail “to understand the systemic nature of the economy and human community.” He uses the analogy of blood in the human body. We need blood to live but we do not live for our blood. We need profit for a business to survive but businesses do not exist for their own survival but to produce goods and services that sustain and enhance human experience.[62]
Significantly, Champy and Nohria distinguish good from bad ambition: “A good ambition is holistic. It’s not simply adding more chips to a stack of successes. Ambitious people benefit themselves to the degree that in pursuing their dream, they also respect their own lives and loved ones. Ambitious people benefit society to the degree that their achievements enrich others as well as themselves.”[63]
While Scripture condemns self-love (preoccupation with oneself as a form of idolatry), and selfish ambition (as a “work of the flesh” in Galatians 5 - through which a person is defined by accomplishments and behaviour as in predatory competition), there is a place in Scripture for self-affirmation - appreciating one’s value, dignity, talents and capacities. There is also a concern for profitability - seeing that one’s life and one’s investment leads to a worthwhile end (Matt 16:26). Charles Handy calls this a “proper selfishness” [substitute entrepreneurship for “proper selfishness”](Handy 1997, 86ff).
5. The Promise and Will of God
Further, two great biblical doctrines are positively inspiring to self-assertion, passion, zeal and positive ambition. First, there is the promise of God given originally to Abraham, a promise which is God’s settled promise to bless the people of God and through them the earth and all peoples. This is at the heart of the faith of Israel and the faith of Christians (2 Cor 1:20). There are three parts to the promise: the community (the family), the land (earth) and the blessing of the nations (global love). The promise is to be appropriated, lived out and embodied - a profound incentive to this-worldly entrepreneurial activity. Behind the promise is the gracious initiative of God and in the centre is gratitude to God and love for neighbour.
Second, there is the doctrine of the will of God. God’s will, profoundly revealed in God’s interaction with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is not a divine fiat, an inexorable force to which one blindly and cravenly submits; nor is it chance or fate. God’s will is an empowering vision, a dream of greatness (as with the dreams given to Joseph). God does not have a wonderful plan for our lives but a wonderful purpose. So the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob positively inspires envisioning, inventing and implementing.
6. The Vision of the New Heaven and New Earth
As cited earlier, Novak claims Marxism had a vision of paradise that excluded the human spirit. The Judeo-Christian faith has an empowering vision of the future that positively inspires creativity and inventiveness.
The vision of the new heaven and the new earth at the end of the Christian Bible points powerfully to this ideal. It is the end to which God’s and humankind’s joint work is striving - not a “spiritual” heaven, but a new heaven and a new earth, a transfigured creation. Eschatology, the study of “end times,” is central to the Judaeo-Christian world-view since it shows us, as the theologian Moltmann said so well, that we are placed not at sunset but at the dawning of a new day. God originally had in mind the marriage supper of the Lamb, that powerful metaphor of people, place and renewed creation that occupies Revelation 19-22, so he thought up the world, thought up a God-imaging creature and even sent his Son to redeem people and creation to that end. Without such a worthy end humankind has no final meaning for tasks in this world. But the End is a garden city, a community of all peoples experiencing the three-fold Sabbath harmony of God, creation and humankind. The end is a beginning; but the beginning of it all has this end in view.
7. Jesus, Entrepreneur
On to the stage of human history strides Jesus, whom Bruce Barton in 1924 called “The Man Nobody Knows,” a book often scorned but containing some truth. The gospel, Barton argues, pictures Jesus running a small entrepreneurial business, engaging the powers, enjoying a feast, befriending the marginalized, and changing the course of history. As Barton says,
Jesus had no funds and no machinery. His organization was a tiny group of uneducated men, one of whom had already abandoned the cause as hopeless, deserting to the enemy. He had come proclaiming a Kingdom and was to end upon a cross; yet he dared to talk of conquering all creation.[64]
What was the secret of his “entrepreneurial success”? From the gospels, Barton extracts several principles by which he argues that Jesus was the founder of modern business: whoever will be great must render great service; whoever will find himself at the top must be willing to lose himself at the bottom; the big rewards come to those who travel the second, undemanded mile.[65] A contemporary development of the same theme, Jesus CEO, invites yet another book with the title “Jesus Entrepreneur”!
Considering Jesus as a model entrepreneur is warranted not only on the basis of his three-year public ministry but also because his occupation as a tekton (Greek), usually translated “carpenter,” is more likely one who makes a project happen as with designing and building a boat or a house.
CONCLUSION
Undoubtedly the world has changed since the days of the Puritanism which Weber analyzed, though much of the “Calvinist” dread of God still lingers in many churches. We have moved from a culture informed by belief in a supreme being in which people lived out their lives in a calling, answerable in the end to God, to an anti-rational, humanistic and often nihilistic culture. Perhaps secular humanism has run its course. In recent years there has, in the West, been a recovery of spirit or soul. It is a mixed and ambiguous movement. One could cynically suggest that the New Business Spirituality is just one more manipulative device to be used by managers to crank up motivation in flagging workers - of instrumental rather than intrinsic value. The nature of true spirituality is that it is essentially gratuitous. But the New Business Spirituality invites a recovery of the great theological truths which fired the entrepreneurship of Jews, early Christians, Catholics and Protestants and all peoples of faith. What is certain is that, except in the Third World where traditional Christian faith is flourishing, we are witnessing a recovery of entrepreneurship through spirituality without religion and therefore without a transcendent and universal basis of entrepreneurial initiative. Will the religious/spiritual form of the new humanism prove enough without a transcendent Centre? Is something more needed? What ultimately is needed for sustained and healthy entrepreneurial activity is provided by the Judeo-Christian worldview, and by personal relationship with God - creativity, risk-taking, proper-selfishness, and the dream of a new heaven and a new earth. Gianfranco Poggi concludes: “[There can be] no capitalist development without an entrepreneurial class; no entrepreneurial class without a moral charter; no moral charter without religious premises.”[66]
Author’s Note: While this article was written some years ago and concerns mainly Western society and Western entrepreneurship I think is largely relevant even today though I wish I had commented on Asian entrepreneurship. It was originally published in Crux, Vol XXXVI, No 2 (June 2000), 22-33; reprinted in Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Vol 9, Issues 1 (Feb 2001): 2-11; and is found adapted and reduced as chapter nine in R. Paul Stevens, Doing God’s Business: Meaning and Motivation for the Marketplace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 163-184, but without the extensive footnotes.
References:
[1] Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber's Protestant Ethic (London: Macmillan, 1983), 83.
[2] Jeffry A. Timmons, New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship in the 1990's (Homewood, Il: Irwin, 1990), 17; Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 243.
[3] Robert F. Hebert and Albert N. Link, The Entrepreneur: Mainstream Views and Radical Critiques (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982), 12-13.
[4] Ibid., 114.
[5] Michael Novak, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Catholicism (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 9.
[6] In Believers in Business Laura Nash (Harvard Business School) investigated the subject narrowly (how and why evangelical Christians have been motivated to lead very successful corporations) and approached her study empirically/descriptively (through qualitative research, observing and interviewing). I am not examining the capacity of all religious systems to inspire entrepreneurial activity, though there is need for such a study. Poggi points to Max Weber’s studies of other civilizations based on Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and ancient Judaism, studies which show, at least to Weber's satisfaction, that in spite of other conditions being favourable, these societies did not provide an ethical understanding of entrepreneurial activity (Poggi, 50). Weber’s sweeping generalizations on this must be critically examined, though, as I will show, Abrahamic and Christian faith predisposes people in theory to creative and inventive activity and many religious expressions do not. But there are significant studies to show how in each religious system there is incentive to entrepreneurial activity in this world even when that religion contains a call to withdrawal and contemplation (as does Christianity). An excellent survey of reflections on capitalism within Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Chinese philosophy is found in Max Stackhouse, Dennis P. McCann, and Shirley Roels, eds. On Moral Business: Classical and Contemporary Resources for Ethics in Economic Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 335-427. See also Ashis Gupta, Indian Entrepreneurial Culture: Its Many Paradoxes (London: Wishwa Prakashan, 1994); Kuzuo Inamori, A Passion for Success: Practical, Inspirational, and Spiritual Insight from Japan’s Leading Entrepreneur (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995); Yamamoto Shichihei, “A Protestant Ethic in a Non-Christian Context,” in Entrepreneurship: The Japanese Experience (PHP Institute, Kyoto, Japan, 1986) 1:1-9; E.E. Williams, “Entrepreneurship in the People’s Republic of China,” in Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research 1989, ed. Robert H. Brockhaus (Wellesley, Mass: Babson College, 1989), 495-508.
[7] John E. Tropman and Gersh Morningstar, Entrepreneurial Systems for the 1990s: Their Creation, Structure and Management (New York: Quorum Books, 1989),7.
[8] Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Change Masters: Innovation & Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1983).
[9] Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
[10] Charles Handy defines spirituality as a “taste for the sublime,” the lifting of our hearts to “something bigger than ourselves and of the infinite possibilities of life.” He quotes the official definition of the Department of Education in Britain: “The valuing of the non-material aspects of life, and intimations of an enduring reality” (Charles Handy, The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism - A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World [London: Hutchinson, 1997], 108).
[11] Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 42.
[12]Weber, quoting Richard Baxter, notes that “Waste of time is the first and in principle deadliest of sins” (Weber, 157).
[13] Adrian Furnham, The Protestant Work Ethic: The Psychology of Work-Related Beliefs and Behaviours (London: Routledge, 1990), 13; Robert Banks, “Work Ethic, Protestant,” in The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity, ed. Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 1129-1132.
[14] The Reformation was essentially for Luther a matter of soteriology, salvation, and not ecclesiology. It is often noted that Luther, and for that matter Calvin, did not provide the ecclesiology (church structure) to contain the “new wine.”
[15] Poggi, 41, 60-61. Weber points to Luther’s many statements against usury or interest in any form as evidence that Luther had a more traditionalist approach: a person does not by nature wish to earn more and more money (Weber, 60, 82). Weber argues that the Bible, the Old Testament in particular, actually favours this traditionalist view. It is exemplified in the words of Jesus: “Give us this day our daily bread” (83).
[16] Poggi, 61.
[17] Guy Oaks, “The Thing That Would Not Die: Notes on Reflection,” in Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, ed. Harmot Lehmann and Guentor Roth (Washington: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 241.
[18] Weber argues that predestination was the most characteristic doctrine of Calvinism, which was the centre of the great political and cultural struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Netherlands, England and France. But in support of this Weber quotes the Westminster Confession of 1647: “By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death” (Chap III). Milton’s well-known opinion of this “double predestination” (arguably not from Calvin) was “Though I may be sent to Hell for it, such a God will never command my respect” (Weber, 101). A more scriptural expression of the matter was expressed by the novelist Charles Williams who maintained that no one is ever sent to hell; they insist on going. In a note on the subject Weber carefully explains that “we are not studying the personal views of Calvin, but Calvinism, and that in the form to which it had evolved by the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries in the great areas where it had a decisive influence and which were at the same time the home of capitalistic culture” (Weber, note 7, 220). Weber argues that both Luther and Calvin had a double God: the fearsome God of the Old Testament and the loving Father of the New. With Luther, so Weber argues, the New Testament kept the upper hand; with Calvin, the transcendent God of the Old won out (Weber, note 12, 221). While offering an attractive explanation for the cultural events which followed the Reformation, Weber lacks support from the Reformers themselves for this view.
[19] Poggi, 65. Weber notes that in Islam the related doctrine is not predestination but predetermination “and was applied to fate in this world, not in the next. In consequence the most important thing, the proof of the believer in predestination, played no part in Islam” (Weber, note 36, 227).
[20] Weber, 70.
[21] Ibid., 66.
[22] Ibid., 172.
[23] On this point Weber observes, correctly, that the Reformation recovered the holiness of everyday life (in contrast to the contemplative life), though he makes the case as a matter of Church control: “The Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control which was very lax, at the time scarcely perceptible in practice, and hardly more than formal, in favour of a regulation of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced” (Weber, 36).
[24] Poggi, 56.
[25] Ibid. Poggi’s own critique of Weber raises the question of whether the “spirit of capitalism” was the necessary precondition for the development of modern capitalism (Poggi, 48).
[26] Weber, 172.
[27] We are to gain all we can without compromising our life (food and sleep), health (especially in mind) or hurting our neighbour: “We cannot devour the increase of [the neighbour’s] lands, by gaming, by overgrown bills. . . . We cannot, consistent with brotherly love, sell our goods below the market price; we cannot study to ruin our neighbour’s trade in order to advance our own. . . . sell anything that tends to impair health . . . by ministering, suppose, either directly or indirectly, to his unchastity or intemperance. . . . Gain all you can by honest industry. Use all possible diligence in your calling. Lose no time. If you understand yourself, and your relation to God and man, you know you have none to spare. If you understand your particular calling, as you ought, you have no time that hangs upon your hands. Every business will afford employment sufficient for every day and every hour” (John Wesley, “The Use of Money,” in Stackhouse et al., 194-197.)
[28] Poggi, 79. While Poggi argues that the set of conditions Weber described were not sufficient to account for the rise of capitalistic entrepreneurship, Weber described “a necessary part” in these phenomena. The multiple factors essential for a capitalistic economic system to emerge from feudalism are considered in Brian Griffiths, The Creation of Wealth (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984), 94.
[29] Griffiths, 31.
[30] James Champy and Nittin Nohria, The Arc of Ambition: Defining the Leadership Journey (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2000), 26.
[31] Ibid. 28.
[32] Of the many critiques of Weber significant studies include Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938); Kurt Samuelson, Religion and Economic Action (London: Heinemann, 1961); and Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic (London: Macmillan Press, 1983).
[33] In one endnote where Weber does refer directly to Calvin’s writings he remarks, significantly, “Calvin himself most emphatically denies that works were indications of favour before God, although he, like the Lutherans, considered them the fruits of belief (Inst., III,2,37,38). The actual evolution to the proof of faith through works, which is characteristic of asceticism, is parallel to a gradual modification of the doctrines of Calvin. As with Luther, the true church was first marked off primarily by purity of doctrine and sacraments, but later the disciplina came to be placed on an equal footing with the other two” (Weber, note 41, 228).
[34] Weber finds the smaller participation of Catholics in the modern business life of Germany all the more remarkable in that generally minorities are driven to economic activity by their disadvantaged state, a factor he observes among the Poles in Russia, the Huguenots in France under Louis XIV, the Nonconformists and Quakers in England and the Jews for two thousand years (Weber, 39).
[35] David Landes, “Religion and Enterprise: The Case of the French Textile Industry,” in Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Edward C. Carter II, Robert Forster and Joseph Moody (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976). Landes explores the phenomenon of relatively slower development of industry in France, in comparison with England, and claims that this was not due so much to Catholicism but the fact of family firms whose primary concerns were safety, continuity and privacy. It can be argued, however, that even these were an expression of Catholic culture. Samuelson also critiques Weber on this point showing that his statistical assessment of the relation performance of Protestants and Catholic were flawed (141). Indeed Samuelson notes that Catholic Belgium was second after England to begin industrialization (121).
[36] Weber acknowledges his dependence on Baxter’s Christian Directory in an endnote in which he summarizes: “This recommendation of worldly activity as a means of overcoming one’s own feeling of moral inferiority is reminiscent of Pascal’s psychological interpretation of the impulse of acquisition and ascetic activity as a means to deceive oneself about one’s own moral worthlessness. For him the belief in predestination and the conviction of the original sinfulness of everything pertaining to the flesh resulted only in renunciation of the world and the recommendation of contemplation as the sole means of lightening the burden of sin and attaining certainty of salvation” (Weber, note 47, 229).
[37] Weber notes: “The name in itself shows what impressed contemporaries as characteristic of its adherents: the methodical, systematic nature of conduct for the purpose of attaining the certido salutis” (Weber, 139). Wesley’s “methodism” was primarily pragmatic, a way of implementing practical Christianity through the class system rather than a way of achieving certainty of salvation.
[38] Weber, 50, 53, 180. In support of the alleged Protestant “duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital which is assumed as an end in itself” Weber quotes Franklin: “He that loses five shillings, not only loses that sum, but all the advantage that might be made by turning it in dealing, which by the time that a young man becomes old, will amount to a considerable sum of money” (Weber, 50-51). Later Weber argues that in answer to why money should be made, Franklin quotes Proverbs 22:9 “See it thou a man diligent in his business?” [NIV “skilled in his work”] “He shall stand before kings,” a matter Weber maintains was drummed into Franklin by his Calvinist father (Weber, 53). Bob Goudzwaard’s definition of deism is worth noting: “the conception that God has created the world in such a perfect manner that immediately afterwards he could afford to go into early retirement” (Capitalism & Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society, trans. Josina Van Nuis Zylstra [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979], 20).
[39] Banks, 1129. As is well known, Adam Smith accounted for the economic process in a typically deist manner by attributing the harmony created when each person pursues their own ends but unwittingly serves a general good because of an “invisible hand.” As Goudzwaard says, “the invisible hand is the deistic version of the role of God”s providence”(22). Deism provided the philosophical basis for the science of economic activity since it envisioned the economic cosmos as controlled by natural laws than could be subjected to human analysis.
[40] Weber, 115. It is this thought that becomes central in the famous “self-help” books of Samuel Smiles (Tim Travers, Samuel Smiles and the Victorian Work Ethic [New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987]).
[41] Weber, 128.
[42] Inst., II,12,7.
[43] Martin Luther, “Treatise on Good Works,” in Luther’s Works, trans. W.A. Lambert, ed. James Atkinson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 26-27. Calvin reflects this idea as well: “We have not an uncertain God of whom we have created a confused and indistinct apprehension but one of whom we have a true and solid knowledge” (Comm. Ps., 4:2). Salvation for Calvin was knowing God and knowing ourselves. This double knowing is the work of the Spirit, the testimonium internum, and internal persuasion (Inst., III, 2, 14-16).
[44] Keynes, quoted in Handy, 31.
[45] Ibid., 157.
[46]Oden, 45.
[47] Authors taking up this challenge include L. Bolman and T. Deal, Leading with the Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995); Denis Breton and Christopher Largent, The Soul of Economics: Spiritual Evolution Goes to the Marketplace (Wilmington, Delaware: Idea House Publishing Co., 1991), which reinterprets the law, beatitudes and Lord’s prayer as a mythical structure for rethinking economics; Jack Canfield and Jacqueline Miller, Heart at Work: Stories and Strategies for Building Self-Esteem and Reawakening the Soul at Work (New York: McGraw Hill, 1998); Gilbert Fairholm, Capturing the Heart of Leadership: Spirituality and Community in the New American Workplace (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997); Charles Garfield, with Michael Toms et al, The Soul of Business (Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House Inc., 1997); Emilie Griffin, The Reflective Executive: A Spirituality of Business and Enterprise (New York: Crossroad, 1993); Os Guiness, Winning Back the Soul of American Business (Washington, D.C.: Hourglass Publishers, 1990); Ian Percy, Going Deep (Toronto: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1998); John Renesch, ed. New Traditions in Business: Spirit and Leadership in the 21st Century (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1992).
[48] Charles Handy, The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism - A quest for Purpose in the Modern World (London: Hutchinson, 1997)
[49] Renesch, 16.
[50] My thesis student, Jeff Sellers, has helpfully summarized this mixture of New Age and traditional religious spiritualities under three aspects:
* Corporate aspect: higher purpose more than higher profit, ecological sensitivity.
* Personal aspect: self-actualization, autonomy, creativity, spiritual motivation.
* Cosmic aspect: cooperation, harmony, spiritual evolution and global synergy.
[51] Renesch, 66.
[52] Handy, 78.
[53] Noteworthy are the stunning examples of creativity (they call it ambition) in Champy and Nohria, The Arc of Ambition.
[54] Renesch, 15.
[55] Ibid., 141-156.
[56] One issue is anthropology, the implicit view of the human person. Much of the New Business Spirituality deifies the person in speaking of the “the limitless potential of the individual,” and the “Divinity that is at our deepest core” (William Miller in Renesch, 71). “Human transcendence” is an oxymoron - the extension of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil into the twenty-first century. Authors in the field of business spirituality use “transcendence” for the Buddhist experience of transcending all distinctions so that emptiness equals fulfilment (Maynard in Renesch, 42). Second, there is the issue of soteriology or redemption. The New Business Spirituality appeals to the intrinsic goodness of humankind without dealing with human brokenness, disorder (sin). Original sinfulness, it has been suggested, is the only biblical doctrine that can be empirically verified! Theory X and Y wrestle with these double truths about humankind (see Lee Hardy’s The Fabric of This World). While human beings cooperate with God in the process of redemption ultimately humankind cannot save itself. Third, there is the issue of epistemology and ontology. The acceptance of the subjective principle of epistemology - we invent what we know; what we believe is what is - which leads to a multiverse. So there is new life without new birth, repentance without turning to God, hope without a substantial worthy end for the whole human story, god without God, faith without God.
[57] Novak believes that the deepest moral justification for a capitalistic system “lies in its promotion of human creativity” (1993, 235).
[58] Michael Novak, Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 37.
[59] Dorothy Sayers, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 77-79. In contrast, see my critique of the New Business Spirituality in footnote 56.
[60] Max L. Stackhouse, Dennis McCann, and Shirley Roels, eds., On Moral Business: Classical and Contemporary Resources for Ethics in Economic Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 113.
[61] One significant difference John O’Del discovered in his comparison of Polish and American entrepreneurs was that the Polish ones (in their new market economy) were prepared to take greater risks! (John N. O’Del, Polish Entrepreneurs and American Entrepreneurs: A Comparative Study of Role Motivations [New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997]).
[62] Don Flow, “Profit,” in The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity, ed. Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 809-813.
[63] James Champy and Nittin Nohria, The Arc of Ambition: Defining the Leadership Journey (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2000), 236.
[64] Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (New York: Triangle Books, 1924), 89.
[65] Ibid., 177. In contrast, see Edmund F. Byrne, Work, Inc.: A Philosophical Inquiry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 66. Byrne claims Jesus not a good role model for work.
[66] Poggi, 83.
