Colloquium
Thursday, February 26, 2009
4:00 pm
6275 Bunche Hall
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"Wal-Mart Loves Me": Women, Service, and Faith at the World's Largest CorporationPresented by Bethany Moreton, University of Georgia
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In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, women employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton argues that outside elite policy circles, market fundamentalism was powered by the labor culture of the feminized, evangelical service sector.
About the Speaker
Bethany Moreton comes to Univeristy of Georgia from a year as a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of several articles on globalization, conservative Christianity, and the feminization of work in the service economy. Her dissertation won Yale's university-wide Theron Rockwell Field Prize; the Southern Historical Association's C. Vann Woodward Prize; the Business History Conference's Herman E. Krooss Prize; and the Labor and Employment Relations Association's Kochan-Sleigh award; it was also selected the best dissertation in the humanities or fine arts by the Yale graduate school for a two-year period. A book based on that work, tentatively entitled Everyday Values: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Her areas of interest include the history of capitalism, the twentieth-century cultural and religious history of the United States, and transnational history.
Read Professor Moreton's working paper related to the talk:"The Soul of Neoliberalism."
This event is co-sponsored with the Department of History and the Anderson School of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior Area
