In this national bestseller, the co-founder of Amway blends his own amazing story with an inspiring, proven plan for establishing businesses that are both highly profitable and compassionate. "A terrific book".--Larry King.

Addressing a gap in the examination of market-centric and individual-focused aspects of care, this volume brings together interdisciplinary insights from across the social sciences to enrich the debate in the field of business and management around the treatment of care, compassion and capitalism.

It may seem like a recent trend, but businesses have been practising compassionate capitalism for nearly a thousand years. Based on the newly discovered historical documents on Cambridge’s sophisticated urban property market during the Commercial Revolution in the thirteenth century, this book explores how successful entrepreneurs employed the wealth they had accumulated to the benefit of the community. Cutting across disciplines, from economic and business history to entrepreneurship, philanthropy and medieval studies, this outstanding volume presents an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of the early phases of capitalism. A companion book, The Cambridge Hundred Rolls Sources Volume, replacing the previous incomplete and inaccurate transcription by the Record Commission of 1818, is also available from Bristol University Press.

The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy examines how the requirements, stimuli, affects and environments of work condition our empathy. In some cases, work calls for no empathy – characters who don’t blink or flinch in the face of danger nor crack under pressure. In other cases, capitalism requires empathy in spades –charming, friendly, sensitive and listening managers, customer service agents and careers. When workers are required to either ignore their empathy to-do a job, or dial it up to increase productivity, they are entering a psychopathic modality. The affective blitz of work, flickering screens, emotive content, vibrating alerts and sounding alarms erode our sensitivities whilst we are modulated with attention stimulants, social lubricants and so called anti-anxiety drugs. This is amidst a virulent and exacerbating climate of competition and frenzied quantification. Capitalism pressures us to feign empathy and leverage social relationships on one hand, whilst being cold and pragmatic on the other. We are passionate and enthusiastic whilst keeping a professional distance. Sympathy, care, compassion and altruism are important; The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy argues that itis a mistake to presuppose that empathy can achieve these. Rather than being subject to the late capitalist organization of our empathy, psychopathy could be a means of escape.

International #1 Best Seller Business is the most pervasive and influential force on the planet today. Its activities transcend national and international borders. Its activities are not unduly constrained by financial, political, cultural, ethnic, or religious concerns. The net of this is that business, as a prevalent and important force, has a moral responsibility to guide, enhance, value, and nourish the existence of all that it encounters. In the world today, the absolute opposite of this occurs. Business today seldom assesses the efficacy of its activities through the lens of anything but profit. The true purpose of business is to uplift the experience of existing. It is not to make owners wealthy. It is not to produce ever-cheaper goods and services. It is not to keep an avaricious and toxic economic model afloat. And it is certainly not (with no apology to Milton Friedman) to make a profit. From our perspective, business is nothing less than a spiritual discipline, it requires the same integrity, commitment, intentionality, courage, discipline, and compassion as any other spiritual discipline. Spiritual disciplines honor life, in all its forms, as having innate and intrinsic value simply because it exists. It's the honoring of this value-the ennobling of this value-that is called forth when we approach business as a spiritual undertaking. It is the compassionate thing to do.

Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in The Moral Neoliberal morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensible tool for capitalist transformation. Set within the shifting landscape of neoliberal welfare reform in the Lombardy region of Italy, Andrea Muehlebach tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state’s withdrawal of social service programs. Using anthropological tools, she shows how socialist volunteers are interpreting their unwaged labor as an expression of social solidarity, with Catholic volunteers thinking of theirs as an expression of charity and love. Such interpretations pave the way for a mass mobilization of an ethical citizenry that is put to work by the state. Visiting several sites across the region, from Milanese high schools to the offices of state social workers to the homes of the needy, Muehlebach mounts a powerful argument that the neoliberal state nurtures selflessness in order to cement some of its most controversial reforms. At the same time, she also shows how the insertion of such an anticapitalist narrative into the heart of neoliberalization can have unintended consequences.

One of the most important manuscripts surviving from thirteenth-century England, the corpus of documents known as the Hundred Rolls for Cambridge have been incomplete until the recent discovery of an additional roll. This invaluable volume replaces the previous inaccurate transcription by the record commission of 1818 and provides new translations and additional appendices. Shedding new light on important facets of business activity in thirteenth-century Cambridge, this volume makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the early phases of capitalism. This unique text will be of interest to anyone working in the fields of economic and business history, entrepreneurship, philanthropy and medieval studies. A research monograph based on recently discovered historical documents, Compassionate Capitalism: Business and Community in Medieval England, by Casson et al, is also now available from Bristol University Press.