Corporate Culture

Conceptual Overview

Culture has been around for a long time in academic orientations to organization and corporate life. It would be correct to say that Max Weber was one of the first to identify it as a significant factor when he associated an explicit conception of culture with the growth of capitalism. The argument of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was that where capitalism first flourished in Western Europe, it did so in states and regions whose culture was predominantly Protestant. There existed what Weber termed an “elective affinity,” using a term popularized by the German dramatist Goethe, between the sober, calculating culture of the rational believer in salvation through the relation between God and his potentially elect and saved flock as the Protestant churches conceived this relation between faith and deity, and a rational accounting in business. An accounting of the soul as the believer sought to exhibit signs of grace in God's calling led to a naturally prudent attitude to life in general and an accounting mentality toward material as well as spiritual matters. Such prudence and a cultural disposition toward the principles of double-entry bookkeeping meant that early Protestant businessmen were well positioned to calculate profits and losses as well as predisposed to make profits through rational decision making. Having made profits, they were less likely to squander them on conspicuous consumption or charity: The former would damn their souls, lessening the probability of salvation, while the latter would encourage idleness and thus the Devil's work among its recipients. Work was what gave life meaning, as the application of industriousness in the glory of God, and so any profits should be reinvested in the further glory of God and the search for salvation, signs of which might be visible through the good work(s) of the believer. Hence, the culture of Protestantism provided an ideal seedbed for what 19th-century economists called “primitive accumulation”—the earliest stages of investment in a capitalist economy. Although the thesis has been hotly contested, there is considerable evidence both to support some aspects of it, such as the sources of 19th-century industrial finance in the English Industrial Revolution, as well as plenty of counter-factual evidence putting the origins of capitalism elsewhere in different religious cultures or times.

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