The Calling and Humility Scale: Extending the Weberian Approach to the Research of the Elective Affinity between Religion and the Economy

Abstract

Weber’s famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has been widely applied in sociological re-search. Weber formulated the question of the relationship between religion and the economy in the sense that certain types of Protestant denominations fostered the development of capitalism. One of the main factors which Weber paid attention to was the “Protestant ethic” concept of calling/vocation. The authors of this research have integrated these findings and extended the original Weberian approach in which ethics plays the central role in the analysis of the elec-tive affinity between religion and the economy. It can be shown that humility is the second component of the ethical variable used by Weber in his sociology of religion. This approach makes the concept of economic ethics relevant for studying all major Christian denominations, that is, not only Catholic and Protestant, but also Orthodox. The aim of the current article is to develop an empirical research method based on this theoretical approach. We propose a scale meas-uring the ethics of calling and humility which can be assessed in quantitative surveys. The scale was pre-tested in Oc-tober-November 2017 in four countries (233 respondents in Russia, Switzerland, Georgia, and Romania). After correc-tions based on the pre-test results, the scale was applied in a survey of parishioners of four Christian denominations in Russia (1262 respondents), those of the Orthodox, Catholic, “traditional” Protestant (Lutheran, Baptist, etc.), and the “new” Protestant (Pentecostal) denominations, in 2017-2018.