Jeremy highlights three aspects of Methodism that were used to influence power relationships within a firm: paternalism, profit sharing and its equivalents, and managerial revolution.
Paternalism: only a very few industrialists could be held up as model employers in the early 19th century, perhaps 40 or 50 among 4,800 factory owners. These were the paternalists, motivated either by an aristocratic ethos or some sort of religious code.
Profit-sharing: Some Christian and other employers tried profit-sharing and similar bonus schemes such as giving employees non-marketable shares. The first to try profit sharing is said to be Henry Currer Briggs, a colliery owner and Unitarian who converted his business into a public company in 1865. It was John Spedan Lewis who developed the model most fully, turning his business into a trust and his employees into partners sharing the profits. But he “disavowed both high and low motives for his determination to seek a more just distribution of resources and rewards between capital and labour” (p.23): he merely wanted to try a different business model. The first time it was tried with an explicit Christian ethos was not until the Quaker resin manufacturer Ernest Bader, which launched its experiment in 1951 (as described below in the section on social enterprise).
Managerial revolution: the arrival of the joint-stock company shifted power away from a single entrepreneur and into the “hands of professional managers” (p.23). Limited companies began with the Companies Acts of 1856 and 1862. Ownership was dispersed among different stakeholders, leaving professional managers to run the businesses. Could managers continue to channel their paternalistic instincts into a business, or were they merely beholden to the owners to do what was required, even if they didn’t agree with it? Two examples are given: James William Gilbart was manager of the London & Westminster Bank. He asked in 1865 whether companies were like individuals in that could perform moral and religious duties. He suggested that they were moral agents and should act accordingly. On the other hand George Rae, chairman and MD of North & South Wales Bank, wrote that “When a Bank Manager therefore becomes either a prominent political partisan, or a pronounced religious zealot, his Directors have the right to admonish him, that such outbreaks of zeal are incompatible with his duties to the Bank” (p.25, quoting from George Rae (1890) The Country Banker: His Clients, Cares, and Work. From an Experience of Forty Years London).
One Methodist who used his resources for good works is John Mackintosh, the toffee manufacturer, who distributed his wealth in the New Connexion chapel in Halifax. And there are examples of self-professed pious Christians found to be hypocrites and failures: Jabez Spencer Balfour whose decision-making led to the collapse of the biggest building society of the day; Lord Overtoun who proclaimed great piety but neglected basic health and safety procedures to the extent that workers in his chemical works were badly injured; and William Whitely an evangelical whose sexual misadventures ended up with his murder at the hands of an illegitimate son, who in turn received great public sympathy and pleas for clemency. (p. 28)