Southern Christian Work Camps and a Cold War Campaign for Racial and Economic Justice

This chapter looks at mid-twentieth-century southern Christians who saw interracial work camps in the South as a model for working alternatives to capitalism. Under Nelle Morton’s leadership, the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen organized the first integrated UNRRA cattle boat relief trip to postwar Europe and sent student work groups to support economic cooperatives across the South. These camps revealed both the potential and the limits of white-led activism in the service of racial and economic justice.

The Homemaker as Worker

Swinth’s essay explores 1970s American feminists’ efforts to revalue household labor as work with economic and social value. It begins by tracing domestic workers’ campaign to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act and secure a minimum wage for household employees. The chapter then turns to liberal and radical feminists’ struggles to recognize housework as labor worthy of wages and fringe-benefits, including most importantly, social security. By altering the valuation of household labor and making social reproduction visible as work, feminists of the era drew on a gender justice framework to put forward successful working alternatives to conventional economics. Swinth bolsters contemporary campaigns to value women’s emotional labor and caregiving by connecting them to the vision pioneered by second wave feminists more than fifty years ago.

Generative Businesses Fostering Vitality

This chapter explores the idea of generative businesses that focus on goals of vitality at multiple levels, with operations based on principles of renewal, restoration, and resilience. Key is shifting the core understanding of the role(s) of businesses in society and how we—and they—view the world. To do that, we need to fundamentally change the memes—the core cultural artifacts—that surround the idea of business. This chapter uses a shamanic rationale—the idea of according dignity to all people, other living beings, and Earth itself in all its manifestations—to argue for a radically different business system that works in harmony and balance with the planet—a form of planetary stewardship on the part of businesses. Generative businesses serve the communities in which they operate, creating vitality in the form of connections and community, stable and decent employment opportunities, and a holistic approach to doing business.

Curing the “Disease” in Corporatized Higher Education

This chapter treats the corporatization of higher education in the United States. In particular, the chapter contends that corporatized higher education has imported individualistic practices and models from the business world, modern economics, and more broadly neoliberal capitalism into higher education. A vision of the human person as selfish, hypercompetitive, solipsistic, and unwilling to sacrifice for the common good (homo economicus) undergirds these models and practices. The chapter discusses the so-called Dickeson model and Responsibility Centered Management (RCM) to illustrate the kinds of practices that flow from this anthropology. It also advances the argument that harmful “symptoms” of the corporatization of higher education such as the casualization of the academic workforce (known as “adjunctification”) have been accepted, at least partially, as a result this flawed understanding of human person. The second half of the essay turns to the Catholic social tradition to prescribe some possible “cures” to the “disease” in corporatized higher education.

An Integral Ecology as the Ground for Good Business

Integral ecology is an increasingly important term in Catholic social teaching. This paper brings this term in relation to business drawing upon the integral relationship between human and natural ecology. Pope Francis and his two predecessors believe that the current ecological conversation can increase our sensitivity to our impact on the natural environment as well as help us to rediscover the moral and spiritual consciousness of human nature and development that has been weakened and disordered in the wider culture. An integral ecology can enlarge our notion of the good, especially the good in business. Without the cultural and environmental insights from an integral ecology that has the capacity to provide deep moral and spiritual roots, business will always be prone to see itself within its own autonomous and utilitarian sphere failing to connect to the natural and human realities in which it is embedded.

Meaningful Work in a Time of Crisis

The co-author of The Responsible Company: Patagonia’s First 40 years describes how work at the clothing company he helped start became increasingly meaningful and satisfying over the decades as, beginning with a switch from conventional to organic cotton, Patagonia tackled increasingly difficult social and environmental problems in its operation and supply chain. Stanley draws on two papal encyclicals, Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum(1891) and Francis’s Laudato Si (2015), and Catholic social justice principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, to illustrate the need and the possibility, in a time of social and environmental crisis, for business to mobilize its productive capacity to help regenerate human communities and the natural world; this would be meaningful work of the highest order.

Introduction

This introduction offers a history of the collaborative effort that produced the volume, explains the rationale for the volume, explores the key problems the volume takes up, and offers brief summaries of each essay.

The Care Economy as Alternative Economy

This essay explores the care economy, defined as activity oriented toward sustaining life and promoting basic well-being, whether that activity is paid or unpaid. The essay finds parallels between Pope Benedict XI’s concerns about neoclassical economics as expressed in Caritas in Veritate and feminist scholarship addressing the care economy. Both Benedict and feminist economists challenge sharp binaries between the market and the state and affirm a spectrum of motives driving economic activity. Both Benedict and feminist economists critique an individualistic, voluntaristic anthropology of self-interest, and both understand true economic development to promote the holistic well-being of all persons. However, Benedict does not draw on scholarship about development and the care economy. Progress toward the vision of development outlined in CV requires consideration of this economy and acceptance of a more complex and pluralist account of the social organization of caregiving than Benedict envisions.

Inaugurating a “Bold Cultural Revolution” through Prayer and Work

This chapter explores traditions within U.S. Catholicism that exemplify working alternatives proposed by Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’. The first part of the chapter presents resources that emerge within Dorothy Day’s and Peter Maurin’s Catholic Worker newspaper, with special attention to the perspectives of John Hugo and Paul Hanly Furfey on Catholic farming communes in the 1940s and Thomas Merton’s view on the emerging U.S. ecological movement in the 1960s. The second part of the chapter examines the ways in which contemporary communities of religious women and their lay collaborators pursue ecological justice in the early twenty-first century. Taken together, a long-standing tradition of Catholic working alternatives emerges that emphasizes the combination of prayer and work thus presenting a significant alternative to a cultural and political-economic system that denigrates human dignity and imperils natural ecology by rupturing the divine-human relationship.

Working Alternatives

A clear definition of capitalism should be a building block for any conversation about working alternatives. In this chapter I am exploring the different definitions of capitalism that have been forwarded and highlight the difficulty in establishing such clarity. I then propose understanding capitalism as a metaphor and highlight the contentious dimensions that have provoked the search for working alternatives: the protection of dignity or intrinsic value as well as the promotion of the well-being or the common good. I then suggest that the way we organize on individual, group, organizational, and societal level can protect intrinsic value and promote the common good, a concept I label humanistic management.