Nicholas Burton Richard Turnbull Editors

CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance Series Editors: Samuel O. Idowu · René Schmidpeter Nicholas Burton Richard Turnbull Editors Quakers, Business and Corporate Responsibility Lessons and Cases for Responsible Management CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance Series editors Samuel O. Idowu, London Metropolitan University, London, United Kingdom René Schmidpeter, Cologne Business School, Cologne, Germany More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11565 Nicholas Burton • Richard Turnbull Editors Quakers, Business and Corporate Responsibility Lessons and Cases for Responsible Management Editors Nicholas Burton Richard Turnbull Newcastle Business School Centre of Markets, Enterprise & Ethics Northumbria University Oxford, UK Newcastle, UK ISSN 2196-7075 ISSN 2196-7083 (electronic) CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance ISBN 978-3-030-04033-8 ISBN 978-3-030-04034-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04034-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966594 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents The Quakers: Pioneers of Responsible Management ................ 1 Nicholas Burton and Richard Turnbull Part I The Spirit of Quaker Responsible Business Transforming Contemporary Businesses: The Impact of Quaker Principles and Insights on Business in a Volatile World ............. 9 Georgeanne Lamont Towards a Set of Quaker Business Values ....................... 25 John Kimberley Cadbury’s Ethics and the Spirit of Corporate Social Responsibility .... 41 Andrew Fincham Part II An Uneasy Relationship with the State Quaker Employer Conference of 1918 .......................... 61 Karen Tibbals Honey I Shrunk the State .................................... 79 Mike King Quakers, Free Trade and Social Responsibility ................... 95 Richard Turnbull The Quakers and the Joint Stock Company: Uneasy Bedfellows ...... 111 Donncha Kavanagh and Martin Brigham v vi Contents Part III Complicated Quakers Thomas Jefferson’s Complicated Friends ........................ 131 Sue Kozel John Bellers (1654–1725): ‘A Veritable Phenomenon in the History of Political Economy’ ....................................... 153 Paul N. Anderson Index ................................................... 183 The Quakers: Pioneers of Responsible Management Nicholas Burton and Richard Turnbull This volume brings together a collection of essays by Quaker and other scholars and practitioners from the fields of Management, Organisation and Theology. While the historical Quaker contribution to business and industry has been explored in a few important books (see Raistrick 1950; Walvin 1998; Windsor 1980; King 2014), this volume significantly widens the scope of enquiry to examine the broader perspective of a Quaker contribution to responsible business and corporate responsibility, with topics that encompass both a historical and contemporary perspective. The inspiration for this volume was the following question—what explains the Quaker ethic in business and commerce in the UK throughout the eighteenth to early- twentieth centuries? What are the insights for responsible business practice that may interest contemporary scholars and practitioners? These questions have so far only been partly answered, despite increasing attention from management and organisation scholars. For example, in a publication for theCentreforEnterprise, Markets & Ethics, Turnbull (2014) describes how Quaker culture and identity, more so than religiosity, lies at the heart of the success of Quaker businesses. In contrast, Wagner-Tsukamoto (2008) describes Quaker ethics as only partly successful, and in some respects it represented a failure as it took precedence over institutional ethics and economics. Burton and Hope (2018) describe the importance of the Quaker network and its governance as an important determinant, highlighting how the Quaker approach to business has similar- ities to contemporary movements such as B-corporations and the UN Sustainable Development goals. Kavanagh et al. (2017) have argued that the demise of the Quaker business coincided with the start of ‘management’ as an academic discipline. This was N. Burton (*) Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Turnbull Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1 N. Burton, R. Turnbull (eds.), Quakers, Business and Corporate Responsibility, CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04034-5_1 2 N. Burton and R. Turnbull precisely at the point when many of the Quaker businesses were incorporating, which they see as a decisive political-economic change that ushered in an era of market-based capitalism based on limited liability and the shareholder economy. This idea is elabo- rated further in this volume. Beyond these scholarly contributions, the understanding of how Quaker businesses can contribute to, and inform, our contemporary understanding of responsible business has been largely ignored, despite its potential to shape current debates. Embedded within this volume are chapters that help illuminate the contribution of Quakers to responsible business practice, with many themes of interest to scholars and practitioners. The contributions are written from a sympathetic, but not uncritical view. The editors believe that the Quaker tradition has much to offer to contemporary scholarly debate but that the chapters are not designed to flatter but to assess the evidence. Together, they offer significant academic support to the Quaker contribution for further debate. The topics include: • Examination of the Quaker contribution to responsible business • Quaker faith and practice as transformation in contemporary management settings • Examining the often uneasy relationship between Quaker ethics and the State • Re-examining the contribution of important historical Quaker thinking to current debates • Critically evaluating the paradoxes and pitfalls at the heart of sustainable responsible business practice This volume is organised into three parts: (1) The spirit of Quaker responsible business, (2) An uneasy relationship with the State, and (3) Complicated Quakers. Part 1 begins with an essay by Georgeanne Lamont. Drawing upon her extensive fieldwork with business, Lamont describes an account of Quaker practice which, she argues, can—and does—transform contemporary business. Lamont distils the journals and wider ministry of important Quaker ‘theologians’—George Fox, William Penn, Frances Howgill, Isaac Pennington, among others—into twelve transformational spiri- tual practices that impact organisational development and performance. Critics of the Quaker approach to business are rare, however Mike Rowlinson published a number of often-cited papers in important management journals in the 1990s (e.g., 1988, 1995) that critiqued widely-held assumptions about Cadbury and its respective corporate culture and division of labour policies. According to Rowlinson, Cadbury’s corporate culture is ‘invented’. The second chapter—by John Kimberley—seeks to address this criticism and situates Cadbury’s management practice in its historical context. Lastly, in the first part, we turn to a second contribution on Cadbury’s. Authored by Andrew Fincham, the chapter examines the extent to which George Cadbury should be considered the originator of what is now termed Corporate Social Responsibility. Fincham argues that while corporate responsibility often speaks of the need to balance stakeholder needs, the Cadbury brand of corporate responsibility went even further—Cadbury did not seek to ‘balance stakeholder needs’, but aimed to deliver returns to stakeholders, in pursuit of which maximising economic performance was always secondary. The Quakers: Pioneers of Responsible Management 3 Part II of this volume begins to examine how the State impacted upon this Quaker vision of responsible business. The first contribution in this part of the volume is authored by Karen Tibbels and examines the themes of the inaugural Quakers Employers Conference in 1918, held at the home of George Cadbury

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