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The term "natural" is ubiquitous in advertising and branding, but limited research has investigated how consumers respond and relate to naturalness. Some researchers have documented preferences for natural products, specifically food, but there has been scant investigation of the psychological antecedents of such preferences, especially in the critical, multi-trillion-dollar domain of healthcare. Using publicly available country-level data from 41 countries and individual-level experimental and survey data from the lab and online panels, we find converging evidence that consumers do indeed differ in their preferences for relatively natural versus artificial healthcare options. These differences are influenced by the extent to which they subscribe to the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE)—a belief system that influences judgments and behaviors across diverse domains—such that people who subscribe strongly (vs. weakly) to the PWE are more likely to prefer natural healthcare options because they are more averse to external intervention in general. Further, belief in the PWE makes consumers more sensitive to the intrusiveness of an intervention than to its extent. Theoretical and substantive implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I recontextualize Weber's ideal type in the philosophy of natural science and economics in terms of idealization. The goal is to promote the appreciation of this methodology in contemporary social science and improve upon some Weberians' underdeveloped interpretations. Drawing on Weber's methodological writing and study of the Protestant ethic, I argue that the philosophy of idealization and Weber's ideal type share methodological characteristics: both support the selection of a research topic by isolating a particular component of reality and then constructing an imagination based on empirical materials and thought experimentation. By using the imagination as a benchmark, investigators counterfactually and contrastively explain why a particular case was observed as it was, as opposed to other possible outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilevel marketing (MLM) involvement can adversely affect consumer wellbeing. We examine how individual beliefs about work predict participation and financial losses in MLMs. As MLMs are presented to the marketplace as low-barrier opportunities to start one's own business, we suggest that this may speak directly to people who strongly endorse Protestant work ethic (PWE), making them more inclined toward MLM participation, and financial outcomes associated with that participation. Using a place-based (county level) MLM data set from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC; n = 326,487), and a consumer survey (n = 515), we find evidence that PWE is positively associated with participation in MLMs (studies 1 and 2), and that PWE predicts estimated financial losses among those who lost $1000 or more (study 1) but financial gains in a more general sample of MLM participants (study 2). Implications for research, marketing, and consumer advocacy are discussed.

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Max Weber's thesis on the decisive influence of Protestant ethic on the formation and development of modern capitalism has become one of the best-known and widely shared canonical claims in social sciences. Since its publication at the beginning of the 20th century, this thesis, supported by subsequent great works by the German classic, has rarely been the subject of major controversy. The work of correcting Weber's thesis was undertaken in the late 20th century by Michael Novak. Novak's correction is not confrontational, but complementary. The American thinker abandons the research area of minority Protestant communities, which caught Weber's attention, and undertakes an analysis of the broader religious tradition, developing both before and after the Reformation. In particular, the achievements of Pope John Paul II, interpreted by Novak in terms of the renewal of a liberty current of Catholic social thought, provide important corrective data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critiques the centrality of work in capitalist societies and looks at people who have abandoned their location-bound jobs for the lifestyle of a digital nomad. Five months of fieldwork in Thailand during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that digital nomads aspired to have autonomy over their work, including reducing their work time. However, pursuing their ideal meant negotiating the desire to minimise labour hours on the one hand and guilt about not fitting the hegemonic values of hard work on the other. Digital nomads try to overcome the dominant work ethic in their talk about working productively. While these digital nomads generally spoke of 'productivity' in terms of autonomy and efficiency, concerns over 'appearing lazy' shifted the register to mainstream concepts of productivity, such as 'hard work'. Drawing on philosophers of work and the need to take utopias seriously, this article proposes that even if small-scale and individualised, digital nomads' attempts to reorganise their working lives are an important critique of work, especially in post-COVID trends toward more remote working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines how heterosexual consumers react to advertising featuring same-sex couples. Across three studies, we find that heterosexual consumers report higher levels of disgust in response to advertising featuring same-sex couples in comparison to mixed-sex couples, which results in more negative attitudes toward the advertisement and the advertised brand. We also find that moral-identity priming reduces disgust elicited by advertising featuring same-sex couples and improves attitudes toward the advertisement and the brand. However, we find that moral-identity priming is ineffective for consumers with high social dominance orientation. For these consumers, portraying same-sex couples as possessing Protestant work ethic traits decreases disgust and improves attitudes toward the advertisement and the brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, business historians have started to become more interested in the relevance of Max Weber's Protestant Work Ethic thesis. This article builds on this recent work by providing an in-depth case study of the career of the Wesleyan wool entrepreneur Isaac Holden (c. 1807–97) in order to assess and evaluate the usefulness of Weber's work for our understanding of the ways in which religious beliefs can influence commercial decision-making. Ultimately, what it suggests is that, whilst Weber's work offers a valuable starting point for business historians looking to explore the links between religion and business, there is a need for more consideration to be given not only to the theological differences that existed between different branches of Protestantism, but also the informal institutional pressures and constraints that influenced Protestant entrepreneurs in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often assume that costlier means lead to better outcomes, even in the absence of an objective relationship in the specific context. Such cost–benefit heuristics in goal pursuit have been observed across several domains, but their antecedents have not been fully explored. In this research,the authors propose that a person’s tendency to use cost–benefit heuristics depends on the extent to which that person subscribes to the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE), an influential concept originally introduced to explain the rise of capitalism. The PWE is a core value predicated on the work-specific belief that hard work leads to success, but people who subscribe strongly to it tend to overgeneralize and align other work-unrelated cognitions for consistency. Across ten studies (N=1,917) measuring and manipulating PWE, robust findings show that people who are high (vs. low) in PWE are more likely to use cost–benefit heuristics and are more likely to choose costlier means in pursuit of superior outcomes. Suggestions are provided for how marketers may identify consumers high versus low in PWE and tailor their offerings accordingly.

The present paper responds to calls to integrate a more explicitly intersectional framework and agenda to vocational psychology. We elucidate how several matrices of domination (i.e., interlocking systems of oppression) may shape the working lives of Americans. Although vocational psychology has made limited progress in exploring two such matrices—the impact of White supremacy and Patriarchy—and expanding research, theory, and clinical work to increasingly diverse populations, we argue that other oppressive systemic forces have been largely overlooked. In response to this gap, a close analysis of how our economic system (i.e., late-stage capitalism, neoliberalism) and Christian hegemony (i.e., protestant work ethic, the prosperity gospel) have impacted the workforce is provided. Finally, to center intersectional perspectives on change, we argue that vocational psychology must pivot to a more activist stance and provide recommendations for research, training, and clinical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the nineteenth century an unprecedented number of prisons were built across the Western‐influenced world. However, many more developed from repurposed and modified buildings. By applying space syntax analysis to examples from the then British colony of Malta, this article investigates the commonalities of penal space across a series of purpose‐built and refashioned prisons, taking into consideration key architectural phases resulting from remodelling. Rejecting the notion that Maltese developments are merely symptomatic of British colonialism, the spread of Western prisons is cast in terms of wider trends and the global spread of a particular type of penal space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the relationships between the four dimensions of the protestant work ethic (internal locus of control, asceticism, hard work, anti‐leisure) and organizational counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). Based on a sample of Chinese employees, the results from two‐wave lagged data (N = 691) indicated that the asceticism dimension and the anti‐leisure dimension were negatively associated with CWBs. These associations were moderated by party affiliation, indicating that party members had a stronger negative relationship between these constructs than non‐party members did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In diesem Aufsatz würdigt Heinz Kurz den Beitrag Max Webers zu den Sozial- und insbesondere Wirtschaftswissenschaften aus Anlass seines 100. Todestages. Nach einem Überblick über Leben, Werk und Wirken geht er kurz auf Webers methodologische Betrachtungen und seine Rolle im „Werturteilsstreit" im Verein für Socialpolitik ein. Es folgt eine Auseinandersetzung mit Webers Aussagen zur Werttheorie und Grenznutzenlehre. Der Hauptteil der Arbeit gilt Webers Beiträgen zur Religionsökonomik. Nach einer Zusammenfassung des Werks „Die protestantische Ethik und der ‚Geist' des Kapitalismus" und der darin exemplarisch behandelten historischen Macht von Ideen beleuchtet der Autor einige Aussagen Webers vor dem Hintergrund der neueren Theorie und macht auf Grenzen des Arguments aufmerksam. Es folgt ein Überblick über die Aufnahme des Werks damals und heute und die große Bedeutung der „Weber-These" in der modernen Religions- und Kulturökonomik. Nach einer kurzen Erörterung des Verhältnisses von Weber zu Marx wirft Kurz ein Streiflicht auf Webers Beitrag zum Verständnis von Macht und Herrschaft. Webers Werk erweist sich als gewaltige Schatzkammer von Ideen, von denen mehrere noch darauf warten, aufgegriffen zu werden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents Max Weber as an economist and as a social scientist. Weber’s relations to economics, philosophy and sociology are discussed. Max Weber has more in common with economists than it might seem at first sight. His principle of value neutrality has become the foundation of the methodology of social sciences, including economics. The second point shared by Max Weber with standard economics is methodological individualism. The third point which a modern economist can learn from Max Weber is the concept of the ideal type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aimed to analyze the moderating effect that Protestant work ethics (PWE) have on the relationship between human resources practices (HRP) and (a) work engagement (WE) and (b) organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The sample consisted of 299 participants. The results revealed that PWE moderates the relationship between HRP and WE and OCB through five dimensions. The dimensions of PWE-leisure and PWE-centrality of work are moderators between the HRP and the WE. The dimensions of PWE-morality–ethics, PWE-wasted time, PWE-delay of gratification, and PWE-leisure moderate the relationship between HRP and OCB. The analysis offers additional evidence to existing literature in understanding how human resources practices facilitate the development of work engagement and citizenship behaviors. The workers’ values play an essential role here to strengthen that relationship and mitigate its harmful effects.

Can cultural differences affect economic change? Max Weber famously argued that ascetic Protestants' religious commitments—specifically their work ethic—inspired them to develop capitalist economic systems conducive to rapid economic change. Yet today, scholars continue to debate the empirical validity of Weber's claims, which address a vibrant literature in political economy on the relationship between culture and economic change. We revisit the link between religion and economic change in Reformed Europe. To do so, we leverage a quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where certain regions had Reformed Protestant beliefs imposed on them by local authorities during the Swiss Reformation, while other regions remained Catholic. Using 19th-century Swiss census data, we perform a fuzzy spatial regression discontinuity design to test Weber's hypothesis and find that the Swiss Protestants in the Canton of Vaud industrialized faster than their Catholic neighbors in Fribourg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) is a powerful force in Western culture with far reaching effects on our values and judgments. While research on PWE as a cultural value is abundant in diverse disciplines, little research has explored how this cultural value facilitates the use of heuristics when evaluating the morality of others. Using both PWE and illusory correlation as foundations, this paper explores whether people attribute positive moral characteristics to others merely based upon a description as hardworking. Three experiments suggest merely being described as hardworking leads to perceptions of greater honesty, a more careful and detailed approach to one's work, accompanied by a lesser likelihood of engaging in cheating behavior and a greater likelihood of accountability. These results have implications regarding the detection of deviant/fraudulent behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on two main arguments about the secularization of Protestant work ethic (PWE) and the uniqueness of Islamic work ethic (IWE). By adopting a linguistic point of view, this study aims to grasp a common understanding of PWE and IWE in the field of work ethic research. For this purpose, 109 articles using the keywords PWE and IWE in their titles were analyzed using content analysis. The findings support the argument that emphasizes universally shared values of PWE. In addition, the findings reveal that IWE provides a unique perspective on how to improve organizational performance, but at the same time differs in work orientation and commitment across cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the dark side of leadership, treats creative self-efficacy as a mediator, and frames supervisor bullying and employee creativity in the context of social cognition and social comparison. We theorize that with a high social comparison orientation, the combination of high supervisory abuse toward themselves (own abusive supervision) and low supervisory abuse toward other team members (peer abusive supervision) leads to a double whammy effect: When employees are "singled out" for abuse, these victims suffer from not only low creative self-efficacy due to supervisory abuse but also low supervisory creativity ratings. Results based on our two-wave data collected from multiple sources—253 employees and their 77 immediate supervisors—support our theory. The significant three-way interaction effect reveals that when social comparison orientation is high and peer abusive supervision is low (Time 1), own abusive supervision (Time 1) creates the strongest negative impact on creative self-efficacy (Time 2), which is significantly related to supervisory low creativity rating (Time 2). Our discoveries of egregious bullying offer provocative theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to the fields of leadership, abusive supervision, creativity, and business ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is an old cliché that Weber's 'Protestant Ethic' (PE) is historically wrong or deficient. Recent work by German sociologists has reinforced this view, with the aim of further demoting the text within Weber's oeuvre: as if it was a work of bad history and nothing more. This paper takes a contrary view. It argues that the text is neither 'wrong' (to say so is a category error) nor is it confined to the past. Rather, it is much misunderstood, and a principal reason for this is our ignorance of Weber's uniquely sophisticated historicism, an area of his thought that has hardly been examined hitherto. The PE must be read as a product of this historicism, and set within the comparative context of contemporary European historicism, which was then at its apogee. Seen in this light, it is not only a pre-eminent guide to Weber's modern social theory, but one of the most carefully constructed and original historical works in all of European thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes Japanese-style management and organizational system and provides insights concerning reasons for its efficiency in Japan. It is important to understand that Japan is a society where performance and achievement of common group goals is a primary cultural value embedded in 250 years of Tokugawa religion. Japan's historical high need for achievement is group oriented unlike the Western highly individualistic Protestant work ethic. As might be expected in such an achievement oriented society, Japan is reputed to have few equals in its overall education and improvement information systems with over 85% of the population completing high school and approximately two million post-secondary students. The Japanese management and organization system is unique, and it certainly has proven effective to date in its own homogeneous social-economic environment. There is also growing awareness, however, expressed by both Japanese and American scholars that its remarkable success may also be causing dysfunctional changes in Japan's social-economic environmental structure. Nevertheless, after years of being major importers of technology, Japan has emerged as a major exporter of technology, including its management and organization system.

Dubin, Champoux and Porter (1975) found a strong relationship between central life interests of workers and their commitment to the organization. This paper extends their findings by investigating the relationship between work values, defined as the Protestant Ethic of the worker, and commitment to the organization. A distinction is made between moral and calculative commitment, and it is shown that work values are related more to moral than calculative involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work value systems of 1,058 workers were assessed to investigate differences in values between younger workers and older workers. Both education and age were found to strongly influence such values, but little evidence was obtained to support the concept of a pervasive generation gap in work value systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A facet design describing the theoretical and empirical interrelationships among five forms of work commitment (Protestant work ethic, career salience, job involvement/work as a central life interest, organizational commitment, and union commitment) is presented. The analysis reveals that these concepts are partially redundant and insufficiently distinct to warrant continued separation. Suggestions for advancing the study of work commitment are rendered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the proposition that increasing job scope is appropriate only for certain types of individuals, investigators have attempted to identify individual characteristics that moderate the relationship between job characteristics and employee responses. Three streams of research are examined. Each case found moderating effects to be modest in magnitude. A lack of consistency occurred in spite of the large number of studies and well developed theoretical models. Future research efforts in this area would not be productive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence is presented that college students of the late 1960s, as contrasted with those of the early 1960s, had low levels of competitive motivation, and negative attitudes toward authority figures, assuming managerial roles in large bureaucracies, accepting administrative responsibility, and assuming masculine roles. No consistent differences were found in attitude toward assuming a differentiated role or power motivation. The data support an hypothesis that students' attitudes changed, rather than the hypothesis that the addition late in the decade of a small group of students with extreme attitudes accounted for the results. These findings have implications for the study of student activism and for a theory of value-transmission across generations. It appears that the Protestant ethic is declining in influence, but that it is not being replaced by a social ethic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the "Organization Scientist," as postulated by William H. Whyte, dominate industrial research and development? This article explores available evidence, and from the mixed picture proposes a new hypothesis. A scientist or engineer's orientation varies with his organization position and function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how local Protestant belief, as one type of social norms, affects corporate cash policies. We find that firms located in areas with more Protestants hold less cash reserves. The influence of local Protestant belief on cash holdings is more profound for firms with weak corporate governance and firms with one geographic segment. In addition, we find that the difference in cash deployment is reflected in the difference in firms' investment and payout policies. Overall, our study shows that local Protestant belief is an important factor in determining corporate cash policies and helps to mitigate the potential free cash flow problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weber’s claim that Calvinism eliminated magic from the world, inserted into The Protestant Ethic in 1920 and arising out of research reported in The Sociology of Religion, entails a sociological but also a theological proposition identified in this article. Weber’s conceptualization of magic permits his examination of the economic ethics of the world religions. Non-European cases, including China, are examined by Weber to confirm his Protestant Ethic argument regarding modern capitalism. He holds that Confucian rationality, associated with bureaucratic order, is compromised by its tolerance of magic. Weber contrasts this with the Calvinist rejection of magic. Weber’s claims regarding Calvinist demagicalization are made without regard to the Reformation Calvinist obsession with satanic witchcraft, in which the efficacy of magic is accepted as real. The distance between Calvinism and Confucianism, essential to Weber’s argument, is thus narrowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber demonstrates his mastery in many different fields. However, Weber acknowledged that he was no expert in theology and he admitted that he had relied on a number of theological sources for his treatment of Calvin. Unfortunately, an examination of his sources reveals that Weber was highly selective. He not only chose what he wanted to use; he also dismissed those theologians whose ideas did not seem to fit his interpretation. Weber did not provide us with an account of Calvin's Doctrine of Predestination as it was, but he gave us one as he wanted it to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]