ABSTRACT

Marketing was nurtured within the cradle of modern capitalist enterprise, an economic system based on the deliberate and systematic adjustment of economic resources for the attainment of monetary profit. It required an attitude of mind that ran counter to the traditional view that regarded the unrestrained and unlimited desire for monetary gain as anti-social and immoral. Explaining why such a change in values should have come about has provided sufficient scope for equally unrestrained and unlimited debate and controversy. One answer that provoked early disputation was that put forward by Weber, generally regarded as one of the founding fathers of sociology, between 1904 and 1906 in Germany and translated by Talcott Parsons in 1930 as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . He proposed that the spirit of capitalism-the pursuit of profit in a rational and systematic fashion from the utilisation of peaceful opportunities for exchange that are underpinned by a sense of duty, hard work and asceticism-was unique to the West and the rational outcome of a particular form of Protestantism that began with Calvin and his Presbyterian followers in the late-seventeenth century.