Working Alternatives explores economic life from a humanistic and multidisciplinary perspective, with a particular eye on religions' implications in practices of work, management, supply, production, remuneration, and exchange. Its contributors draw upon historical, ethical, business, and theological conversations considering the sources of economic sustainability and justice. A layered and daunting sense of crisis and challenge offers the most basic backdrop for the book. Contemporary events have augmented popular and scholarly interest in humanistic questions related to economic practice. The financial crisis of 2008 offered stark reminders of the ways local economies are interwoven with global conditions. A few years later, Brexit and Trumpism found populist energy in a message of fear related to the threat of economic displacement in a globalized economy. Popular interest in the kinds of conditions that make work productive, growing media attention to the grinding cycle of poverty, and the widening sense that consumption must become sustainable and just, all contribute to an atmosphere thirsty for humanistic economic analysis. This volume offers a novel approach cutting across all these areas of interest. The essays in this book-from scholars of business, religious ethics, and history-offer readers practical understanding and analytical leverage over these pressing issues. Modern Catholic social teaching-a one-hundred-twenty-five-year-old effort to apply Christian thinking about the implications of faith for social, political, and economic circumstances-provides a key springboard. Engaging this and other religious traditions, the works gathered here assert a hypothesis: economic theories, systems, and practices rely on basic, often unexamined, presumptions about human personhood, relations, and flourishing. Foundational conceptions of what people need, how they thrive, and what they owe to others help determine the contours of economic life in a given time and place. Those conceptions, in turn, are embedded in and shaped by the specific material and cultural contexts in which people undertake economic activity. Efforts to analyze and critique economic arrangements and practices, or to envision viable alternatives, thus must contend with both the particularities of those contexts, and the assumptions entrenched in them.
