Manufacturing Mennonites examines the efforts of Mennonite intellectuals and business leaders to redefine the group's ethno-religious identity in response to changing economic and social conditions after 1945. As the industrial workplace was one of the most significant venues in which competing identity claims were contested during this period, Janis Thiessen explores how Mennonite workers responded to such redefinitions and how they affected class relations.

Through unprecedented access to extensive private company records, Thiessen provides an innovative comparison of three businesses founded, owned, and originally staffed by Mennonites: the printing firm Friesens Corporation, the window manufacturer Loewen, and the furniture manufacturer Palliser. Complemented with interviews with workers, managers, and business owners, Manufacturing Mennonites pioneers two important new trajectories for scholarship - how religion can affect business history, and how class relations have influenced religious history.

Janis Thiessen is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg.

Janis Lee Thiessen's profile page

‘This monograph is a welcome contribution to the social history of religion in Canada… It contributes to our understanding of the complex ways in which religious faith can impact workers’ class consciousness and activism.’

Labour/le Travail vol 75:2015

‘This is a pioneering work in a new area of study for Mennonites… It has an urban, industrial focus and draws for theoretical and comparative purposes on the scholarly literature of business and labor history applied in new and interesting ways.’

Mennonite Quarterly Review, January 2014

‘Manufacturing Mennonites could prove to be a model for other scholars examining the relationship between religion and corporate culture.’

Oral History Review, April 2014

‘This is an important and suggestive study that should put to rest tendencies either to ignore religion, or to assume that it has an autonomous power outside of the nexus of capitalist social relations.’

Oral History Forum, vol 33:2013

‘Compelling study… Manufacturing Mennonites could prove to be a model for other scholars examining the relationships between religion and corporate culture.’

Oral History Review, vol 41:01:2014

‘A finely nuanced study of the ways in which Mennonites experience social class relations.’

Journal of Mennonite Studies, vol 32:2014