Corporate Religion
Corporate Religion

Author: Jesper Kunde

Publisher: Financial Times/Prentice Hall

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780273661115

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The aim is to unite everything in a Corporate Religion. A religion that brings together the internal company and the external market in a shared, connected flow of understanding. CORPORATE RELIGION is about building a strong market position in a world where consumers no longer demand simply the product, but reliable companies and brands. The winners of the future will be those corporations who can handle the consequences of this change and implement strategies revealed in this book. It's about a shared vision and the courage to believe in a Corporate Religion. "Management has to unite the organisation around a strong idea, a shared vision, and then manage accordingly. That makes tough demands. In the company of the future there will only be space for believers. Dissenters must look elsewhere." It's about leadership and what is required for winning in the market place of the future. "Employees have the right to a leader who will stand at the front and lead them into the future. A leader who dares to believe, because without belief, it is impossible to have an opinion about the future." It's about internal-external integration, creating a bond between the internal culture and the external positioning, to consolidate the chosen market position. "Companies can be seen like people. The important factors are: how we perceive ourselves, how others perceive us and how we want to be perceived by others. The more integrated the three perspectives, the stronger and more consistent we are." And it's about how to implement the idea in the company. "I provide a number of models, 12 cases and a "timetable" explain how you set the process in motion. You cannot build a strong corporate religion without having strong working tools." In the future, building strong market positions will be about building companies with a strong personality and corporate soul.

Evangelicals Incorporated
Evangelicals Incorporated

Author: Daniel Vaca

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0674243978

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity. American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success? According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues that evangelical Christianity became religiously and politically prominent through business activity. Through areas of commerce such as branding, retailing, marketing, and finance, for-profit media companies have capitalized on the expansive potential of evangelicalism for more than a century. Rather than treat evangelicalism as a type of conservative Protestantism that market forces have commodified and corrupted, Vaca argues that evangelicalism is an expressly commercial religion. Although religious traditions seem to incorporate people who embrace distinct theological ideas and beliefs, Vaca shows, members of contemporary consumer society often participate in religious cultures by engaging commercial products and corporations. By examining the history of companies and corporate conglomerates that have produced and distributed best-selling religious books, bibles, and more, Vaca not only illustrates how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial activity but also reveals how the production of evangelical identity became a component of modern capitalism.

Corporate Spirit
Corporate Spirit

Author: Amanda Porterfield

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0199372659

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this groundbreaking work, Amanda Porterfield explores the long intertwining of religion and commerce in the history of incorporation in the United States. Beginning with the antecedents of that history in western Europe, she focuses on organizations to show how corporate strategies in religion and commerce developed symbiotically, and how religion has influenced the corporate structuring and commercial orientation of American society. Porterfield begins her story in ancient Rome. She traces the development of corporate organization through medieval Europe and Elizabethan England and then to colonial North America, where organizational practices derived from religion infiltrated commerce, and commerce led to political independence. Left more to their own devices than under British law, religious groups in the United States experienced unprecedented autonomy that facilitated new forms of communal governance and new means of broadcasting their messages. As commercial enterprise expanded, religious organizations grew apace, helping many Americans absorb the shocks of economic turbulence, and promoting new conceptions of faith, spirit, and will power that contributed to business. Porterfield highlights the role that American religious institutions played a society increasingly dominated by commercial incorporation and free market ideologies. She also shows how charitable impulses long nurtured by religion continued to stimulate reform and demand for accountability.

Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business
Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business

Author: James Dennis LoRusso

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-02-09

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1350006262

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

By the early twenty-first century, Americans had embraced a holistic vision of work, that one's job should be imbued with meaning and purpose, that business should serve not only stockholders but also the common good, and that, for many, should attend to the “spiritual” health of individuals and society alike. While many voices celebrate efforts to introduce “spirituality in the workplace” as a recent innovation that holds the potential to positively transform business and the American workplace, James Dennis LoRusso argues that workplace spirituality is in fact more closely aligned with neoliberal ideologies that serve the interests of private wealth and undermine the power of working people. LoRusso traces how this new moral language of business emerged as part of the larger shift away from the post-New Deal welfare state towards today's global market-oriented social order. Building on other studies that emphasize the link between American religious conservatism and the rise of global capitalism, LoRusso shows how progressive “spirituality” remains a vital part of this story as well. Drawing on cultural history as well as case studies from New York City and San Francisco of businesses and leading advocates of workplace spirituality, this book argues that religion reveals much about work, corporate culture, and business in contemporary America.

One Nation Under God
One Nation Under God

Author: Kevin M. Kruse

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2015-04-14

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0465040640

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The provocative and authoritative history of the origins of Christian America in the New Deal era We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s. To fight the "slavery" of FDR's New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for "freedom under God" that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The new president revolutionized the role of religion in American politics. He inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, as Congress added the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and made "In God We Trust" the country's first official motto. Church membership soon soared to an all-time high of 69 percent. Americans across the religious and political spectrum agreed that their country was "one nation under God." Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how an unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.

Church State Corporation
Church State Corporation

Author: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-07-15

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 022645469X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Church and state: a simple phrase that reflects one of the most famous and fraught relationships in the history of the United States. But what exactly is “the church,” and how is it understood in US law today? In Church State Corporation, religion and law scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan uncovers the deeply ambiguous and often unacknowledged ways in which Christian theology remains alive and at work in the American legal imagination. Through readings of the opinions of the US Supreme Court and other legal texts, Sullivan shows how “the church” as a religious collective is granted special privilege in US law. In-depth analyses of Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby reveal that the law tends to honor the religious rights of the group—whether in the form of a church, as in Hosanna-Tabor, or in corporate form, as in Hobby Lobby—over the rights of the individual, offering corporate religious entities an autonomy denied to their respective members. In discussing the various communities that construct the “church-shaped space” in American law, Sullivan also delves into disputes over church property, the legal exploitation of the black church in the criminal justice system, and the recent case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Brimming with insight, Church State Corporation provocatively challenges our most basic beliefs about the ties between religion and law in ostensibly secular democracies.

Consuming Religion
Consuming Religion

Author: Kathryn Lofton

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-09-12

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 022648209X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Introduction: being consumed -- Practicing commodity. Binge religion: social life in extremity ; The spirit in the cubicle: a religious history of the American office -- Revising ritual. Ritualism revived: from scientia ritus to consumer rites ; Purifying America: rites of salvation in the soap campaign -- Imagining celebrity. Sacrificing Britney: celebrity and religion in America ; The celebrification of religion in the age of infotainment -- Valuing family. Religion and the authority in American parenting ; Kardashian nation: work in America's klan ; Rethinking corporate freedom -- Corporation as sect. On the origins of corporate culture ; Do not tamper with the clues: notes on Goldman Sachs -- Conclusion: family matters

The Business Turn in American Religious History
The Business Turn in American Religious History

Author: Amanda Porterfield

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0190280190

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Business has received little attention in American religious history, although it has profound implications for understanding the sustained popularity and ongoing transformation of religion in the United States. This volume offers a wide ranging exploration of the business aspects of American religious organizations. The authors analyze the financing, production, marketing, and distribution of religious goods and services and the role of wealth and economic organization in sustaining and even shaping worship, charity, philanthropy, institutional growth, and missionary work. Treating religion and business holistically, their essays show that American religious life has always been informed by business practices. Laying the groundwork for further investigation, the authors show how American business has functioned as a domain for achieving religious goals. Indeed they find that religion has historically been more powerful when interwoven with business. Chapters on Mormon enterprise, Jewish philanthropy, Hindu gurus, Native American casinos, and the wedding of business wealth to conservative Catholic social teaching demonstrate the range of new studies stimulated by the business turn in American religious history. Other chapters show how evangelicals joined neo-liberal economic practice and right-wing politics to religious fundamentalism to consolidate wealth and power, and how they developed marketing campaigns and organizational strategies that transformed the American religious landscape. Included are essays exposing the moral compromises religious organizations have made to succeed as centers of wealth and influence, and the religious beliefs that rationalize and justify these compromises. Still others examine the application of business practices as a means of sustaining religious institutions and expanding their reach, and look at controversies over business practices within religious organizations, and the adjustments such organizations have made in response. Together, the essays collected here offer new ways of conceptualizing the interdependence of religion and business in the United States, establishing multiple paths for further study of their intertwined historical development.

Guaranteed Pure
Guaranteed Pure

Author: Timothy Gloege

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2015-04-27

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1469621029

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

American evangelicalism has long walked hand in hand with modern consumer capitalism. Timothy Gloege shows us why, through an engaging story about God and big business at the Moody Bible Institute. Founded in Chicago by shoe-salesman-turned-revivalist Dwight Lyman Moody in 1889, the institute became a center of fundamentalism under the guidance of the innovative promoter and president of Quaker Oats, Henry Crowell. Gloege explores the framework for understanding humanity shared by these business and evangelical leaders, whose perspectives clearly differed from those underlying modern scientific theories. At the core of their "corporate evangelical" framework was a modern individualism understood primarily in terms of economic relations. Conservative evangelicalism and modern business grew symbiotically, transforming the ways that Americans worshipped, worked, and consumed. Gilded Age evangelicals initially understood themselves primarily as new "Christian workers--employees of God guided by their divine contract, the Bible. But when these ideas were put to revolutionary ends by Populists, corporate evangelicals reimagined themselves as savvy religious consumers and reformulated their beliefs. Their consumer-oriented "orthodoxy" displaced traditional creeds and undermined denominational authority, forever altering the American religious landscape. Guaranteed pure of both liberal theology and Populist excesses, this was a new form of old-time religion not simply compatible with modern consumer capitalism but uniquely dependent on it.

The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty
The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty

Author: Micah Jacob Schwartzman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 0190262532

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What are the rights of religious institutions? Should those rights extend to for-profit corporations? Houses of worship have claimed they should be free from anti-discrimination laws in hiring and firing ministers and other employees. Faith-based institutions, including hospitals and universities, have sought exemptions from requirements to provide contraception. Now, in a surprising development, large for-profit corporations have succeeded in asserting rights to religious free exercise. The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty explores this "corporate" turn in law and religion. Drawing on a broad range perspectives, this book examines the idea of "freedom of the church," the rights of for-profit corporations, and the implications of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby for debates on anti-discrimination law, same-sex marriage, health care, and religious freedom.