In To Serve God and Wal-Mart Bethany Moreton anchors the success of the world's largest corporation to a particular place, time, and people: the first generation of evangelical Christians to leave family farms in the Ozarks after World War II. Her analysis centers on a few key paradoxes that are also instructive for understanding larger shifts in corporate practice, labor relations, and conservative movements. How did a behemoth chain store emerge from a region that was the epicenter of anti-corporate agitation, during a time in which public trust of corporations was extremely low? Why do its employees profess profound loyalty and identify the company as family-friendly, even as it requires them to work unstable part-time schedules for low pay? Moreton argues that Wal-Mart executives accomplished these “innovative sleights of hand” (p. 50) by assimilating and capitalizing on the beliefs and practices that its employees brought to the workplace from their families, churches, and farming backgrounds. By associating Wal-Mart Country with a distinctly rural ethos of folksy friendliness, trust, and hard work, managers crafted a distinct form of corporate populism that simultaneously cast thrifty shopping as religious and familial service.

Translating farm values into the nascent service economy had distinct implications for workplace politics. Drawing on interviews and archived company documents, Moreton shows that Wal-Mart employees considered themselves to belong to a workplace family and used notions of kinship and mutual support rather than class to give meaning to their work. Her most provocative argument is that the hierarchical division between an almost exclusively masculine managerial team and a heavily feminized workforce replicated evangelical Christian marriages in which wives submit to their husbands in exchange for stated appreciation of their labor. To navigate this compromise, women drew on the notion of sacred service, which would eventually percolate up to managerial ideology as a tool to extract maximum value from employees while erasing claims to power differentials. Servant leadership, Moreton argues, synthesized “free enterprise as Christian service” (126). The final chapters chronicle the company's efforts to nurture entrepreneurs and naturalize free markets by sponsoring pro-business student organizations and scholarships at religious colleges in the Ozarks. Her prescient analysis of Wal-Mart's reach into higher education offers a critical perspective on the company's recent partnership with the for-profit American Public University, which will award employees college credits for doing their everyday jobs.

Readers may be surprised that Moreton does not directly tackle some prominent contemporary criticisms of Wal-Mart. The company's infamous attacks against unions, another powerful form of workplace family, are addressed only fleetingly. Instead, the specter of Wal-Mart Present looms behind the employees' nostalgic descriptions of the past, including the deliberate use of the past tense in frequent statements that the early company “was like a family” (51). Her characterization of the “overwhelming consensus on family roles” (57) would also benefit from a more ethnographic sense of how people actually put ideology into everyday practice, closer consideration of the gender discrimination class action lawsuit now progressing through the courts, and more attention to the diversity of evangelical gender relations and ideologies, including evangelical feminism's doctrines of mutual submission studied by sociologists. Overall, however, Moreton's very engaging book is an essential read for research about corporations, labor, gender, kinship, and conservative movements.