Has Capitalism Lost its Puritan Spirit? What do Recent WVS Data Say about Religiosity and Work Values?

Abstract

IntroductionIt is well established that the industrial and post™ industrial transformations have profoundly altered how humans think, work, and live. The emergence of knowledge-based post™ industrial societies has accelerated the cultural change not only in rich and developed countries but also throughout the world (Bell, 1973, Turkle, 1995, Toffler, 1989) . Sociologists such as Daniel Bell (1976), John Carroll (1977), Christopher Lasch (1979), Zygmunt Bauman (1987, 1999) and Richard Sennett (1998) etc., claimed that capitalism has lost its puritan spirit during the post™ industrial era.This paper is about the cultural shift from the puritan to a secular spirit of late capitalism, which has been defined under different names by social theorists. The issue of or the epoch of new age has become one the central topics of social theory. In the transformation process from an agricultural/traditional society to an industrial society, the ethos of society has changed. Modern/industrial capitalism has created a or the has created the new society.The Puritan work belongs to modern times in human history coinciding with the industrial revolution. ^Vork had never been a virtue or a way of salvation before the industrial age. According to the Oxford Online Etymology Dictionary, labor, the synonym of work, means trouble, difficulty, hardship, toil, fatigue, exertion and pain at the same time. For example, the ancient Greeks and Romans considered work to be a curse and fit only for slaves (Kaplan, 1979; Ciulla, 2000). The ancient philosophers had a consensus about the abhorrence of work. Plato and Aristotle believed that work (for commercial gain) humiliated the people who performed it (Lafargue, 1907).However, with the coming of an industrial society, schools, industrial organizations and religious associations started to preach the virtue of hard work and the well-organized use of time (Polanyi, 1957; Kaplan, 1979; Bozkurt et al., 2010). The Ford Company founded the Sociological Department to examine the private life of workers. Researchers from this section visited workers' homes and encouraged workers to aspire to the Ford values of industriousness, thrift, sobriety, saving, and hygiene. Ford tried to reduce absenteeism and the turnover of workers. Moreover, the Sociological Department endeavored to enforce puritan morality (McGraw, 2007; Lasch, 1979; Clegg, 2009).According to Weber (1971, 1956) occidental industrial capitalism, which is the rational organization of free labor, is unique and has not existed elsewhere. The ethos of this capitalism was ethic codes that emphasized the importance of the values of work, anti-leisure, saving, abstinence, moral orientation, frugality, sobriety, industriousness, achievement, moderation, sexual restraint, tranquility, temperance, silence, order, resolution, sincerity, justice, cleanliness, chastity, humility, and forbidding (Bell, 1976; Furnham, 1990). For Weber, the Puritan ethic, which was a rationalization of life and economic action, justified all the restraints and sanctions for individual life and advanced the development of capitalism. Early industrial capitalism also desperately required the puritan mood and values. One major outcome of restraints on consumption was the accumulation of capital, which in turn led to the expansion of production and further development (Bell, 1996).In another important study, Carroll (1977) demonstrated how Puritan theology helped liberate individuals from the ties of the traditional values of pre-industrial societies. This was crucial for it emphasized man's general responsibility and the passionate early Puritans played an important role in the shaping of industrial society. These values expanded religion beyond the borders of the church and made it of this world. Vocation in Protestant theology was considered a sublimation of guilt and man was also considered a sinner at birth. …