Review of Moreton's "To Serve God & Wal-Mart"

I was first made aware of Bethany's work when I saw her being interviewed on Book TV. It was fascinating, seeing an east coast labor and gender historian talk about "my" world in ways that were nuanced, balanced, and insightful. I told her so, ordered her book, and then found out that she had interviewed and done some work with JBU's own Rick Ostrander and Joe Walenciak. Now it became clearer why Bethany did indeed understand our Wal-Mart and Ozark Christian College worlds at a fairly intimate level. She had spent some serious time getting to know us.

The book itself is not always up my alley. Bethany is still a gender and labor historian, and those are fields that don't thrill me very much. But in the second half of the book, Bethany offers some profound reflections that I haven't heard anyone else encapsulate quite so well.

1) The service industry in the south goes directly from farm service to retail service without ever really participating in the heirarchical industrial period where "service" is defined more as "servitude." That unique historical transition requires a completely different way of creating and harnessing service work.

2) Wal-Mart figures out how to do that work somewhat by accident as the employees of the eventual behemoth teach the leadership about what they need. Sam Walton and others are willing students, but they didn't really plan in advance how to "exploit" the abilities of their workforce. They just figured out how to get in front of the parade once it was already going.

3) That parade was driven by working mothers who wanted flexibility and respect in a community-friendly environment. Wal-Mart gave it to them, not the other way around. Exchanging labor for money in typical "industrial society" formats was much lower on the totem pole for all involved.

4) With "Service" largely unmoored from its industrial base, Christian interpretations of service became much more prominent with these working mothers being lauded and elevated as the pinnacle of what the company was about, even if they weren't being paid the most.

5) These Christian connections spiraled out to various organizations, such as SIFE, WISP, Christian colleges, various churches, etc. Wal-Mart was not a Christian company, but the "Wal-Mart Way" and Christian understandings of service and free enterprise dovetailed nicely to form a new service-oriented mentality.

6) This happy story has its usual embellishments and hypocracies involved (Sam didn't really start out poor, Wal-Mart got lots of money and support from the government, Christianity doesn't sit as easily with capitalism as these parties often seemed to indicate, etc.), but in general, the various players were sincere in their ideas and arguments, which is why this synergy has been so effective for so long.

At least that's my understanding of what Bethany had to say. We're looking at inviting her to JBU sometime this year, so perhaps I'll find out then whether my interpretations of her conclusions are on target.