What Happened to the Protestant Ethic?
To grasp managers’ experiences and the more general implications they contain, one must see them against the background of the great historical transformations, both social and cultural, that produced managers as an occupational group. Since the concern here is with the moral significance of work in business, it is important to begin with an understanding of the original Protestant Ethic, the world view of the rising bourgeois class that spearheaded the emergence of capitalism. The Protestant Ethic was a set of beliefs that counseled “secular asceticism”—the methodical, rational subjection of human impulse and desire to God’s will through “restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling.”2 This ethic of ceaseless work and ceaseless renunciation of the fruits of one’s toil provided both the economic and the moral foundations for modern capitalism. On one hand, secular asceticism was a ready-made prescription for building economic capital; on the other, it became for the upwar
