Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits

* Kraybill, Donald B. and Steven M. Nolt. 1995. _Amish Enterprise; From Plows to Profits_. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pp. xiv + 300. Notes, photographs, references. ISBN: 0-8018-5063-0 (pbk). Kraybill and Nolt present a history and analysis of Amish businesses in the 1980s and early 1990s. These authors tell how hundreds of Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, engaged in an unprecedented economic adaptation after hundreds of years during which their devotion to family farming as the economic center of life did not change. The new adaptation was a remarkable fluorescence of entrepreneurial activity in which Lancaster Amish created enterprises catering to Amish and non-Amish market needs. These enterprises operate within the strictures of Amish thinking about how people should exist in the world, and this is the central question the authors explore. The contents are broad and include a profile of Amish businesses in chapter three, technology in chapter eight, and marketing and networking in chapter nine. Other chapters cover labor issues, business morality, Amish businesses and the law, and relations with the state. What is surprising about Amish enterprise is that it exists. To explain this, both in its vigor and in the ways business owners refrain from fully adopting present-day business plans and procedures, the authors use a culture-centered model. They describe how the Amish interpret their beliefs in negotiating the new behaviors and statuses businesses require (pp. 16-19). From one perspective, the process described in this book is a prime example of conscious, selective acculturation.Negotiation and tension between adopted business behaviors and _Gelassenheit_, a core value informing normative behavior, is highlighted throughout. Gelassenheit asks Amish to be patient and yielding, to submit to the community and to avoid individuation and excess. Gelassenheit asks Amish to be plain and not fancy (pp. 13-16). Business success threatens Gelassenheit. Success creates wealth differentials greater than ones in the farm-based economy. Success affects gender roles because women entrepreneurs own and operate their own enterprises. Success can mean that children receive less attention as business demands increase. Success increases the visibility and importance of business people in district churches, and has fundamental implications for the status of less wealthy but culturally more highly valued farmers.Kraybill and Nolt do not strive for theoretical finesse but let a few well chosen concepts carry much of their argument about cultural negotiation and economic adaptation. Core values presented early surface throughout as they discuss the problems, solutions and limits of the business adaptation. Like another book that Kraybill edited, _Amish Enterprise_ "...shows no awareness of postmodern theory." (Reschly, 1997). But considering what readers the authors are apparently trying to reach, the anthropo