Inner-worldly asceticism was characterized by Max Weber in Economy and Society as the concentration of human behavior upon activities leading to salvation within the context of the everyday world.
[1] He saw it as a prime influence in the emergence of modernity and the technological world,[2] a point developed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
However Stefan Zaleski showed that inner-worldly mysticism that is magic was interested in active transformation of reality.
[7] Inner-worldly asceticism, including above all Protestantism, taught the fulfillment of obligations in the world as the sole method of proving religious merit.
[12] Postmodernism in its repudiation of metanarratives[13] has rejected Weber's theory as one Eurocentric aspect of such grand tales;[14] though Fredric Jameson sees it as illuminating at least one facet of the bourgeois cultural revolution[15]—the psycho-sociological transformation that accompanied the move from traditional agrarian society to the modern urban world-system.