Abstract
The first task Donald Sage, an energetic young Calvinist minister, set himself when he arrived at his first parish in 1822 was to inspect the morals of every family. He divided his parish into districts defined by distance and the number of families he could visit in a day. He selected a church elder as his lieutenant and scribe. His tour of inspection lasted 14 months. After a short confidential conference with the head of the family, each household member was examined in private about their knowledge of the Shorter Catechism. Finally, each parishioner, including all servants, was given ‘a few admonitions’ in front of the assembled household. Even the head of the house was not spared, although Sage was careful not to damage his authority to discipline and improve his charges:
I took up, at the same time, a census of the whole population, one column being devoted to the names of individuals, divided into families and numbered as such; another, setting forth their designation and places of residence; and a third, containing what might strictly be called the moral and religious statistics of the parish or remarks illustrative of the state, character and knowledge of each individual. (Sage, 1827)
Sage did not only collect this information to better understand the requirements of his ministry. Rather, these statistics were used to audit his performance as a minister. Records, accounts and statistics of all kinds were developed through the Protestant church’s drive to understand itself and to render individuals transparent and accountable to themselves and to each other. Accountability—to the self, to the church and to God—was the cornerstone of Calvinist theology, religious practice and institutional administration. Nor was this will to know through numbers restricted to the church. The near-15,000 pages of the Statistical Account of Scotland produced between 1791 and 1799 were generated by the Church of Scotland’s 881 ministers, each working to a comprehensive, standardised census return (Plackett, 1986).
Organisation studies is in the throes of something of a historical turn. Perhaps. Gains have been made as historiographical essays have recently appeared in major international journals. Sceptics remain on both sides, however. Scepticism is both apt and wholly misplaced. Apt in that the search for theories and methodologies from organisation studies to apply ‘historically’ is unlikely to appeal to economic and business historians who are notoriously suspicious even of innovations in social and cultural history. Misplaced in that organisation studies has much to gain from theoretical and methodological dialogues with the innovative historiographies of cultural, gender and post-colonial historians. Misplaced also in that the current historical turn—or, perhaps, swerve—marks something of a return to the historical concerns of key figures in the canon of organisation studies, such as Max Weber and Michel Foucault. Indeed, both Weber and Foucault are crucial to Alistair Mutch’s purpose in Religion and National Identity. Weber is an obvious inspiration: Mutch shares Weber’s fascination with how internal operating procedures gradually became more comprehensive and standardised, not just in terms of church governance but how these practices were adopted by other institutions. Foucault’s influence, perhaps, is less obvious: although only cited in passing in the text, his concerns with governmentality are alluded to in the book’s sub-title, Governing Scottish Presbyterianism in the Eighteenth Century. The rich social history of the Presbyterian church has pivoted on the causes, experience and consequences of secessions, especially the Great Disruption of 1843. Mutch argues that this understandable focus on such very public, very political moments has distracted us from the everyday practices of the church as a local and national institution. Only by looking at the taken-for-granted practices of church administration can we understand how obscure accounting manuals slowly gained an importance far beyond the church. The 18th century proto-capitalism was predicated on church organisation and the most prosaic of administrative routines. Even more audaciously, Mutch argues that this organisational template that encouraged local initiative within a national accounting framework was vital to the emergence of American managerial capitalism in the late 19th century.
The core of the book examines the emergence and gradual codification of a governance system in the 17th century. The otherwise obscure figure of Walter Steuart of Pardovan, a close student of Dutch religious organisation, wrote and revised what he hoped would become the definitive text on church governance. For Pardovan, all levels of the church and all aspects of its business had to be held to systematic 360° scrutiny. Parishioners held their minister to account; elders’ use of funds was subject to scrutiny; and the individual parish was visited regularly. At the peak, the church’s parliament had policy-making powers, but these were so hemmed in from below that it was severely constrained. Executive power remained deeply mistrusted and subject to stringent control. Indeed, unlike systems of contemporary corporate governance, inside the church, accountability fell just as heavily on the powerful as on the relatively powerless. All of this, Mutch traces through forensic detail at the local and national levels. One of the charms of this book is that one can hear the author puzzling over paradoxes, happily identifying gaps in texts and local records the better to wonder at their meaning. Mutch holds his reading of church records to account just as vigorously as any zealous Calvinist held himself and his church to inspection. The development of accounting practices and standardised record-keeping is not deduced from text books but established through painstaking historical labour. If this sounds off-putting as a dour meander through the administration of Calvinism then it is relieved through the recovery of figures such as Pardovan and James Montgomery, a Glasgow cotton manager who emigrated to South Carolina, singled out by Alfred Chandler as the author of the first management text. Montgomery’s 1832 management text drew as much on his experience in his church as upon his industrial experience.
The objective of Scottish Presbyterianism was to create a godly society through self-improvement in the service of the common good. Calvin has long been regarded as the prophet of disenchantment, of the triumph of organised religion over magic and reason over superstition. This view remains deeply embedded in the common sense of the social sciences even as it is being questioned by research that stresses the denominational and confessional pluralism of Protestantism, on one hand, and of the parallel institutional developments of science untouched by theology, on the other. Calvinism was a severe doctrine, and Calvinists were strangers to frivolity. Book-keeping was fundamental to how local presbyteries functioned. Indeed, in Mutch’s reading, foundational texts were about organisational routines, not just theology. There were compelling theological reasons for developing and sustaining organisational order, however. Disorder was disruptive to the spiritual life of the individual, to their congregation and to the church as a whole. Administrative efficiency and transparency were practical objectives for a dispersed, loosely coupled church, deeply distrustful of centralisation and hierarchy, organisational forms that recalled Roman Catholicism. Indeed, while it is a common place to regard the Protestant church organisation as central to the emergence of the Scottish democratic intellect, it could also be interpreted as symptomatic of a doctrine that was deeply suspicious of any centralised power or unchecked authority. Over time, inspections gradually lost their early rigour to be replaced by rote question and answer. This limit is inherent in systems of inspection: durability comes at the cost of predictability. This does not necessarily mean that inspection deteriorated into a pointless ritual. Rather, Mutch points to the profound ambiguity in the fate of such systems. The gradual slippage in inspection did not necessarily mean the complete failure of a surveillance system. Or, perhaps, the reverse: it could be that behaviours became so thoroughly routinised and embedded that inspection moved from enforcing practices to reporting their presence.
Max Weber was part of a circle of radical Protestant theologians and philosophers who advocated a pluralist hermeneutics rather that a literalist conservative exegesis. This provided a foundation for a liberal Protestantism in which God’s will could be understood through reason. Protestantism did not reject worldly life but asked its congregants how best they could live pious lives through their engagement with it. This was precisely the paradox that Weber was partly responsible for formulating: how to prise open a space for dialogue between a Calvinism based on revelation and predestination, on one hand, and a liberal Protestantism in which the individual could seek redemption through the application of rationality to their own life, on the other. Scotland was a paradox for Weber. After all, his was a search for the origins of the spirit of capitalism. Scotland was a Calvinist theocracy throughout the 18th century, but capitalist industrialisation did not begin for at least another century. A constant theme across Weber’s work was the relationship between individual identity, the social and the economic. Weber offered a social or cultural economy that complemented, or extended, political economy. Nor was this his concern only whendiscussing Protestantism or the world religions. In his great lectures on science and politics as a vocation, the sense of vocation as a religious duty was transformed into how individuals thought and acted in secular domains. While Weber despaired of the narrow vocation of the career bureaucrat, better that those completely bereft of faith and so exposed to anomic individualism. Weber examined the meanings of Protestant theology and inferred their impacts on the psychologies and cultures of individuals. Weber remained deeply ambivalent about the standing of his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: was this an essay in methodology, philosophy or sociology? The ambiguities of this most complex text were, if anything, increased by its long, tangled publication history. Peter Ghosh’s (2014) magisterial study of the Protestant Ethic has clarified its pivotal place in Weber’s intellectual journey but—thankfully—left many of its productive ambiguities intact. The Protestant Ethic is certainly not an empirical text. Weber was a very selective reader of Protestant theology and the sum total of his fieldwork amounted to a few conversations with devout business leaders during a holiday to America in 1906–1907 (Scaff, 2011). ‘Ascetic protestantism’ was, then, not a sect but an ideal type. Here Mutch supplements—or goes beyond—Weber’s concentration on beliefs with the routines of church administration: how theology was translated into everyday practices at the grassroots of specific parishes.
Foucault offered only the most scattered comments on the Reformation and these were confined to his lectures. However, these passing comments suggest that he was aware of the crucial differences between the theologies and practices of Protestantism and those of Roman Catholicism. Reformed Protestantism was, he notes, a laboratory for new governance practices. Frustratingly, however, Foucault never elaborated on these remarks. Foucault’s model of the captive, watched individual was the penitent Catholic. Perhaps his stress on discipline would have looked very different if he had begun from the Protestant emphasis on rationality, efficiency and accountability. If Foucault had pursued his interest in Protestant theology and practice in his consideration of ethics and technologies of the self then this would have raised quite different questions for him. The Protestant’s silent, inward-looking examination of the self, of writing a diary, contrasted with the Catholic penitent murmuring confession to the priest. Both Calvin and Luther detested the intrusive solipsistic confession of Catholicism, a process that enhanced priestly authority while distracting the laity from reflecting upon their faith and how this was expressed in the world. Equally, where the Protestant held himself responsible for his self-examination, the Catholic had to disclose their infractions to another and their meaning was to be interpreted by the priest who was also responsible for judging the penitential tariff. Of course, the subjects raised by individual penitents are unknown. But it is implausible that penitential summas and confessional guidebooks aimed at parish priests were wholly divorced from actual practices. In Protestantism, a suspicion of the self was written into the requirement that the individual should constantly hold their own soul to account through keeping confessional diaries. Writing a spiritual diary was a daily exercise designed to promote a radical inwardness that was the Protestant’s unsettling alternative to the penance and absolution offered by Catholicism. The Protestant confessional diary was to become a permanent record, an archive of the self. In Protestantism, the relationship between the sacred and secular life was to be obliterated, a practical impossibility that forced the individual to seek some spiritual reassurance, however fleeting, from his success and the acclaim of his peers for his godliness. None of this, of course, provided more than passing comfort for those who believed in predestination. For Weber, the Protestant’s capacity for rational self-governance became the gift of worker discipline for nascent capitalism. It is not too much of a strain to anticipate that Foucault would also have read the Protestant belief in individual responsibility and autonomy as necessary to the formation of liberalism. To study the inner workings of Protestantism is not, then, only an exercise in historical sociology but an invitation to pose new questions for organisational theory.
In both Weber and Foucault, religious institutions and practices were vital to the emergence of capitalist modernity. Mutch supplements Weber’s focus on belief with the routines of church administration: how theology was translated into everyday practices at the grassroots of specific parishes. The achievement of Religion and National Identity is that it does not attempt to readoff individual identity or collective action from religious doctrine: the everyday workings of obscure Calvinists have much more to tell us than renowned theologians. This focus on the entanglements of practice, routine and belief provides an invaluable pointer towards how the historical imagination and organisation theory can enrich each other.