The Protestant Work Ethic and Attitudes Towards Work

The Protestant work ethic and attitudes towards unemployment

The literature on personal correlates of Protestant work ethic beliefs and the relationship between these beliefs and various aspects of paid work is briefly reviewed. A study is described which examines the relationship between Protestant work ethic beliefs and attitudes to unemployment. Subjects rated the importance of various explanations for unemployment in Britain, as well as their agreeme...

The Protestant Ethic and Work: Micro Evidence from Contemporary Germany

Few studies in the social sciences have spurred more controversy than Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. At the core of Weber’s theory lies a connection between Protestantism and attitudes toward work. Using micro-data from contemporary Germany, this paper investigates the impact of Protestantism on economic outcomes and whether any such connection still exists. To b...

Implications of the Protestant work ethic for cooperative and mixed-motive teams

The investigation of teams and teamwork in cooperative (e.g., group brainstorming and team decisionmaking) and mixed-motive (e.g., negotiation) contexts has been carried out through a variety of lenses anddisciplines.One lens that has not beenused to rigorously theorize about andempirically investigate teams is that of ideologies. In this review, we juxtapose the study of a particular status-re...

The Protestant Ethic versus the "New Ethic"

The Protestant Work Ethic: A Lay Theory with Dual Intergroup Implications

The authors propose that, in the US, the Protestant work ethic (PWE) relates both to social tolerance and intolerance. PWE is proposed to have a surface meaning that relates to social tolerance, and also an associated meaning that relates to intolerance, which is acquired in part through social and cultural experience (e.g. PWE being used as a justifier of inequality). In correlational and expe...