OXFORD, Miss. – Love it or hate it, Wal-Mart is one of the largest corporations in the world.
How the company grew from a small, Arkansas-based five-and-dime
store into the international behemoth it is today is the subject of a
presentation Wednesday (Oct. 14) at the University of Mississippi.
The free, public program, featuring University of Georgia
historian Bethany Moreton, is set for noon in Barnard Observatory
lecture hall. Moreton’s presentation, “Wal-Mart, Evangelicals and
Extreme Capitalism,” is part of the Southern Studies Brown Bag Lunch
& Lecture series in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
An Oxford native, Moreton is author of the book “To Serve God
and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise” (Harvard
University Press, 2009), in which she argues that the financial success
and growth of Wal-Mart is the product of Christian networking.
“Many Americans who worked or shopped at Wal-Mart understood it to be a
Christian company, its success a sign of God’s blessing,” Moreton said.
“A new Christian emphasis on service offered both a pattern for
organizing the service workplace and an ethos for valuing that work.
The free-enterprise faithful represented by Wal-Mart drew much of their
strength from faith itself.”
Moreton is an assistant professor of history and women’s studies
at the University of Georgia. Before joining the Georgia faculty, she
spent a year as a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. She is the author of several articles on
globalization, conservative Christianity and the feminization of work
in the service economy. She holds a doctorate from Yale University,
where her dissertation won the universitywide 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.
She holds the 2009 Emerging Scholar’s Prize from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.
The Southern Studies Brown Bag Lunch & Lecture programs take
place at noon each Wednesday during the fall and spring semesters. For
more information, including upcoming events in the series, visit http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/