Weber's Protestant Ethic Revisited: An African Case

Abstract

McClelland (1961) has argued that the values implicit in Weber's (1930) so-called Protestant ethic lead individuals to a concern with achievement. In order to investigate whether introduction of a Protestant ideology into a non-Western society was associated with an orientation toward achievement, East African Quaker Abaluyia were compared with non-Quaker Abaluyia on a battery of tests. The findings indicated that Quakers emphasized education, held realistic beliefs about the behaviors bound up with success in their sociocultural system, exhibited health patterns similar to those of educated individuals in developing countries, and had been exposed in childhood to socialization practices that downplayed physical punishment. These results, although consistent with the Weber-McClelland formulation, were relatively sparse in relation to the total number of comparisons undertaken.