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The purpose of this study is to add to the understanding of humility‐based economic development and entrepreneurship among the Amish – a religious group – in the USA, whose culture values asceticism, frugality, thrift and work, as well as humility.

The paper presents an ethnographic research study.

Amish adults teach their young that work is pleasurable. In order to maintain their values, the Amish try to avoid close contact with people who do not hold the same traditions. Furthermore, due to religious discrimination in the past, the Amish often exhibit a mistrust of outsiders. The primary motive of self‐employment among the Amish is neither profit nor prestige, but rather the maintenance of cultural values, separately from mainstream society such as to emphasise humility over pride. Self‐employment is perceived as much a social activity as an economic activity, and very importantly, it is compatible with religious beliefs.

Given the choice, the Amish prefer not to work for enterprises in mainstream society. These people prefer to be self‐employed or to work amongst themselves, as it is their belief that a community of believers is the context for life.

This research paper reports on an ethnographic research study that reveals the reasons why Amish people in Lancaster County choose self‐employment as a means of livelihood, the changing nature of their enterprises, and the causal variables explaining why there is a shift from farm‐based self‐employment on family farms, to non‐land‐based entrepreneurship.

Attempts to explain the survival and success of the American Amish community by examining its history, tenets, structures and life style. Concludes by stressing the importance of the community’s unambiguous value system, its clear borders/boundaries, its emphasis on integration and continuity, its commitment to the “work ethic”, its techniques of separation, and its meaningful and efficacious rites and rituals.

The authors examined the traditional leadership practiced by the Old Order Amish located in the Holmes and Wayne counties of America. Despite popular stereotypes, this community is remarkably innovative and resilient. Amish leadership aligns with the central tenets of humanistic leadership and provides a rich illustration of how such a leadership paradigm can foster a vibrant, inclusive and sustainable community. Unlike current leadership models that focus on instrumental values like wealth, profit and growth, Amish leadership is concerned with faith, community and living a simple life with purpose and dignity.

The primary data required for this paper were collected by the lead author during a six-month ethnographic study on several Amish communities located in Ohio. The authors also consulted a large set of archival data, including think tank reports, census data, biographies, magazine features and academic publications, which helped in placing the primary data in perspective and reminding of the particularities of the contexts from which the primary data were collected. For the data analysis, the authors used a thematic analysis approach to allow the salient themes of Amish humanistic leadership emerge from the data.

A total offour themes emerged from this study: (1) leadership as local identity and practice; (2) leaders without benefits, chosen by the lot; (3) leaders present matters, followers discuss and decide; (4) community welfare as the yardstick for evaluation. These themes highlighted some of the key aspects of humanistic leadership eclipsed in the mainstream theories of management and leadership. They showed how the Amish respond to the encroachment of technology, which holds critical clues for how humanistic leaders can place the needs of their people before the demands of their shareholders. By examining Amish leadership in detail, this study demonstrated the potential of humanistic leadership for creating a strong and sustainable community while also contributing to the empirical foundation of humanistic management.

Given the closed nature of the Amish, only few academic studies exist, which examined their leadership style. Furthermore, the traditional and conservative nature of the Amish community has prevented critics from investigating their leadership as a model for revitalizing other communities.

To demonstrate the linkage between Porter's cluster theory and supply chain management, and provide evidence of their potential joint positive impact on competitiveness and firm performance.

The paper examines the linkage between cluster theory and supply chain management using data from a case study of the Amish furniture industry in Homes County, Ohio, USA.

Using the Amish furniture industry and a representative furniture firm as examples, the paper shows the positive impact of operating within an integrated supply chain in a geographically concentrated cluster.

Use of a single case study approach limits the generalizability of the findings; the paper recommends further study of linkages in other industries and locations.

The study suggests that firms build competitive advantage by initially focusing primarily on local resources when selecting supply chain partners, rather than looking only for low cost advantage through distant sourcing.

This paper adds to the literature on business linkages by proposing an expanded definition of clusters as geographical concentrations of competing supply networks.

This research project aims to investigate Amish small businesses in North America to determine their success rate and the factors that explain their vitality. Amish entrepreneurs have developed some 10,000 small businesses despite taboos on motor vehicles, electricity, computers, the internet, and education. A theoretical model consisting of five types of socio‐cultural capital (human, cultural, social, religious, and symbolic) was conceptualized to explain and interpret the success of Amish enterprises. The model includes capital deficits that identify the hurdles that successful enterprises must overcome.

The research employed qualitative ethnographic methods that included participant observation, face‐to‐face interviews with business owners in eight states, and document analysis.

The paper finds that Amish businesses have a success rate above 90 percent, which is much higher than that of other American small businesses. Five types of socio‐cultural capital (human, cultural, social, religious, and symbolic) account for the high success rate of Amish enterprises.

The qualitative methods do not permit quantitative analysis or tracking the performance of businesses over an extended period of time.

Understanding the importance of socio‐cultural capital assets and deficits for business success is critical for entrepreneurs, consultants, and scholars.

The five concepts of socio‐cultural capital assets and deficits are a significant expansion of traditional social capital theory. These concepts offer a rich resource for understanding small business failure and success and merit inclusion in future research. Religious and symbolic capitals are especially pertinent for understanding enterprise building in religious and ethnic communities.

This chapter shows that it is important to avoid descending to either an extreme of naturalizing disasters or sociologizing them. Safety depends on the appropriateness of social constructions for nature's constructions, whether inadvertent or based on sophisticated risk assessment. Worse-case scenarios need to be taken into account even if improbable, because assessments of their probability and timing have serious limitations. This chapter demonstrates that modern technology and organization can increase vulnerability to natural disasters. Antimodern communities avoided disaster in this case by stepping off the treadmill of production and practicing technological triage. The challenge for modern communities is to make an ecologically reflexive triage.

Legal and philosophical scholarship on religious education typically focuses on religious schools that challenge core liberal values. Religious schools that offer their students quality secular education, and whose religious character is mild, do not raise these concerns and have therefore evaded scrutiny thus far. This chapter argues that the latter kind of religious schools, which I call “creaming religious schools,” may have a negative effect on educational equality and should therefore be subject to restrictive legal regulation. The negative effect on equality is caused by the fact that when successful, these schools appeal not only to members of the religious community but also to non-member high-achieving students who leave the public schools (a process called creaming) thus weakening them. The chapter argues that the harm caused to public schools cannot be redeemed by alluding to the right to religious education because the religious justification for creaming religious schools is relatively weak. The chapter then examines several potential legal measures for contending with creaming religious schools: the antidiscrimination doctrine, which the chapter rejects, showing that it actually aggravates creaming, locating schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods, restricting tuition, reflective enrollment policy, and finally, the total prohibition of establishing creaming religious schools.