Posted inBusiness

Max Weber on capitalism and religion

What must surely count as one of the shrewdest, albeit debatable, accounts of the distinctive traits of capitalism was penned by the justly famous German sociologist Max Weber in his controversial book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1930 (London: Routledge Classics, 2001). The reasons for its controversial status are summarised as […]

Posted inGeneral

Confronting poverty

This festive season I spent a few weeks in a reasonably affluent town in the Western Cape. This in itself is unremarkable. However on returning to the Eastern Cape, and Grahamstown specifically, the contrast between that wealth and the grinding poverty of this town became all the more stark and all the more desperate. One […]