In this groundbreaking work, Amanda Porterfield explores the long intertwining of religion and commerce in the history of incorporation in the United States. Beginning with the antecedents of that history in western Europe, she focuses on organizations to show how corporate strategies in religion and commerce developed symbiotically, and how religion has influenced the corporate structuring and commercial orientation of American society. Porterfield begins her story in ancient Rome. She traces the development of corporate organization through medieval Europe and Elizabethan England and then to colonial North America, where organizational practices derived from religion infiltrated commerce, and commerce led to political independence. Left more to their own devices than under British law, religious groups in the United States experienced unprecedented autonomy that facilitated new forms of communal governance and new means of broadcasting their messages. As commercial enterprise expanded, religious organizations grew apace, helping many Americans absorb the shocks of economic turbulence, and promoting new conceptions of faith, spirit, and will power that contributed to business. Porterfield highlights the role that American religious institutions played a society increasingly dominated by commercial incorporation and free market ideologies. She also shows how charitable impulses long nurtured by religion continued to stimulate reform and demand for accountability.

This book examines the new values, visions, and spirit that are arising in the American corporation. It is not concerned merely with the techniques of the new management, it is concerned with its soul. Eight primary values are identified with this new management in part one. Part two presents a model for creating strategic and tactical changes to build the new corporate culture.

In our postmodern, experience-oriented culture, people are longing for greater authenticity, integrity, and depth in their pastors and leaders. Board directors, church members, and staff alike are all eagerly seeking leaders who effectively integrate their spirituality and leadership. Pastors and executives, however, often struggle with knowing how to integrate their spiritual values and practices into their leadership and management roles. Designed for pastors, executives, administrators, managers, coordinators, and all who see themselves as leaders and who want to fulfill their God-given purpose, The Spirit-Led Leader addresses the critical fusion of spiritual life and leadership for those who not only want to see results, but who also desire to care just as deeply about who they are and how they lead as they do about what they produce and accomplish. Geoffrion creates a new vision for spiritual leadership as partly an art, partly a result of careful planning, and always a working of the grace of God

By the early twenty-first century, Americans had embraced a holistic vision of work, that one's job should be imbued with meaning and purpose, that business should serve not only stockholders but also the common good, and that, for many, should attend to the “spiritual” health of individuals and society alike. While many voices celebrate efforts to introduce “spirituality in the workplace” as a recent innovation that holds the potential to positively transform business and the American workplace, James Dennis LoRusso argues that workplace spirituality is in fact more closely aligned with neoliberal ideologies that serve the interests of private wealth and undermine the power of working people. LoRusso traces how this new moral language of business emerged as part of the larger shift away from the post-New Deal welfare state towards today's global market-oriented social order. Building on other studies that emphasize the link between American religious conservatism and the rise of global capitalism, LoRusso shows how progressive “spirituality” remains a vital part of this story as well. Drawing on cultural history as well as case studies from New York City and San Francisco of businesses and leading advocates of workplace spirituality, this book argues that religion reveals much about work, corporate culture, and business in contemporary America.

In recent years, Chinese policymakers and corporate leaders have focused enormous attention on the concept of corporate culture. Despite its widespread influence among Chinese corporate leaders and policymakers, the corporate culture phenomenon has not been studied in detail by non-Chinese scholars. This book will reveal the political, social and economic factors behind the enormous current interest in corporate culture in China and provide a wide range of case studies that focus on how large corporations like Haier, Huaweiand Mengniu have attempted to transform their cultures, and how they represent themselves as complying with the Chinese government’s interpretation of "positive" corporate culture. Hawes demonstrates how the foreign concept of corporate culture has been re-defined in China to fit the Chinese political, social and cultural context. He examines how this re-definition of corporate culture reflects a uniquely Chinese conception of the purposes and social functions of the capitalist business corporation and how the Chinese Communist Party’s active promotion of "socialist" corporate culture evidences a shift in the Party’s identity towards a business-friendly champion of corporate and economic development. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Business and Management and Chinese studies.

Covers three areas of important teaching on spiritual warfare: Principalities and Powers, Binding and Loosing, and Defensive Spiritual Warfare. This book provides pointers to knowing our enemy and recognizing when we are under spiritual attack. It also explains some of the things we may be up against and how we can deal with them.

This beautifully designed, full-color textbook introduces the Roman background of the New Testament by immersing students in the life and culture of the thriving first-century towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which act as showpieces of the world into which the early Christian movement was spreading. Bruce Longenecker, a leading scholar of the ancient world of the New Testament, discusses first-century artifacts in relation to the life stories of people from the Roman world. The book includes discussion questions, maps, and 175 color photographs. Additional resources are available through Textbook eSources.