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Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion
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The spiritual organization: critical reflections on the instrumentality of
workplace spirituality
Peter Casea; Jonathan Goslingb
Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK b Centre for Leadership
Studies, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
a
Online publication date: 20 November 2010
To cite this Article Case, Peter and Gosling, Jonathan(2010) 'The spiritual organization: critical reflections on the
instrumentality of workplace spirituality', Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, 7: 4, 257 — 282
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Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion
Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2010, 257–282
The spiritual organization: critical reflections on the instrumentality
of workplace spirituality
Peter Case*a and Jonathan Goslingb
a
Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK; bCentre for
Leadership Studies, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
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Journal
10.1080/14766086.2010.524727
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peter.case@uwe.ac.uk
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Spirituality
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This article offers a theoretical contribution to the current debate on workplace
spirituality by: (a) providing a selective critical review of scholarship, research
and corporate practices which treat workplace spirituality in performative
terms, that is, as a resource or means to be manipulated instrumentally and
appropriated for economic ends; (b) extending Etzioni’s analysis of complex
organizations and proposing a new category, the “spiritual organization”, and;
(c) positing three alternative positions with respect to workplace spirituality
that follow from the preceding critique. The spiritual organization can be taken
to represent the development of a trajectory of social technologies that have
sought, incrementally, to control the bodies, minds, emotions and souls of
employees. Alternatively, it might be employed to conceptualize the way in
which employees use the workplace as a site for pursuing their own
spiritualities (a reverse instrumentalism). Finally, we consider the possible
incommensurability of “work organization” and “spirituality” discourses.
Keywords: workplace spirituality; peformativity; anti-positivism; Etzioni;
spiritual organization
Introduction: interest in workplace spirituality
To suggest that there has been a growing interest in workplace spirituality in
recent years would be to court understatement. In his bibliometric analysis of
texts over two decades, for example, Oswick (2009) points to the relative proliferation in recent years of spirituality discourse within management studies and
the social sciences more generally. The relatively early stirrings of attention
given to the subject in the 1990s (for instance, Senge 1990; Management
Education and Development 1992) has given way to a veritable flood of analysis,
diagnosis and prescription on the part of organizational scholars, practitioners
and popular management writers. 1 Several academic journals, such as Journal of
Adult Development (2001, 2002), Journal of Management Inquiry (2005),
Journal of Organizational Change Management (1999, 2003) and The Leadership Quarterly (2005), have dedicated special issues to the theme of spirituality.
The launch of The Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion in 2004,
*Corresponding author. Email: peter.case@uwe.ac.uk
ISSN 1476-6086 print/ISSN 1942-258X online
© 2010 Association of Management, Spirituality & Religion
DOI: 10.1080/14766086.2010.524727
http://www.informaworld.com
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P. Case and J. Gosling
specifically tailored to publishing scholarly work in what is rapidly emerging as
a specialist subfield of organization and management studies, is also indicative
of the growth in interest in workplace spirituality. Similarly, the number of
conferences and websites dedicated to workplace spirituality is proliferating.
1999 saw the creation of an Academy of Management special interest group entitled, “Management, Spirituality and Religion” which has grown considerably and
now enjoys a membership in excess of 600. 2 “Spirituality” has even entered the
heretofore relatively atheistic (or at least agnostic) confines of the Europeanbased Critical Management Studies (CMS) community in the guise of streams
within the biannual international conference. Moreover, Lips-Wiersma et al.
(2009, p. 289) are able to identify a distinct subtheme of “critical workplace
spirituality” emerging in the academic literature.
Academic interest in the subject is following the corporate trend for workshops, seminars, culture change and corporate transformation programmes that,
in many instances, are increasingly aimed at harnessing not only the mind and
body of employees but also their spiritual essence or soul. Major companies,
such as Apple, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, McDonalds, Nike, Shell Oil and the
World Bank, are embracing this recent drive to secure competitive advantage
through what might be understood from a critical standpoint as the appropriation
of employee spirituality for primarily economic ends (see Mitroff and Denton
1999a, 1999b; Casey 2002; Lips-Wiersma et al., 2009).
What are scholars and practitioners who are skeptical about the potential
commodification of human spirituality – its being used for profit-making ends as
opposed to its being valued for its own sake within the workplace – to make of
the current state of affairs? Moreover, what might we infer from these developments for the future of workplace relations and practices?
As two scholars with a personal and professional interest in “spirituality”
(acknowledging, from the outset, the semantic ambiguities of this term), we seek
in this article to outline some critical thoughts on the commodificaton and appropriation of matters spiritual within predominantly capitalist forms of organization. This is not to say that we are in any way disparaging of expressions of
workplace spirituality or scholarly interest in the phenomenon. Our critique is
specifically aimed at academic research and corporate practices that seek to
extract economic ends from spiritual means since such instrumentality is, to our
sensibilities, demeaning of the human spirit. We contest strongly any social technologies that treat the human as mere resource (bodily, emotional, mental or
spiritual) to be deployed within a nexus of economic profit-making activity.
Despite what might be inferred from the burgeoning writing on spirituality,
explorations of the relationship between the organization of work, religion and
spiritual life is hardly new to social science. Indeed, analysis of this relationship
is foundational to the social theorizing of Weber, Marx, Durkheim and Freud in
considering the emergence of Methodist, Calvinist and Quaker corporations
during the Industrial Revolution. It is also present, either explicitly or implicitly,
in theories of post-modern social organization, such as propounded by Bauman,
Beck, Foucault and Giddens. However, much of what passes as original
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contributions to the debate on spirituality – with some notable exceptions –
appears to be written in blind ignorance of this legacy, preferring, instead, to
treat spirituality in ahistorical and apolitical terms as yet another neutral resource
to be harnessed and husbanded by the erstwhile custodians of organizational
performance. In short, much of the contemporary literature on spirituality is
narrowly utilitarian and instrumental in its intent, often concerned directly to
commodify spirituality. Bell and Taylor (2003), Casey (2002), Carrette and King
(2005) and Roberts (2001) have all raised concerns about this tendency and
attempted to account for the instrumental rediscovery of organizational spirituality through the invocation of relevant social theory. We shall draw selectively on
insights offered by these scholars in our critique of claims made within certain
strands of workplace spirituality literature.
To this end, we present a brief review of the workplace spirituality literature,
paying particular attention to theoretical and empirical contributions that adopt
an instrumental and utilitarian attitude toward the subject. We raise concerns
about the predication, definition and representation of “spirituality” in such
projects, drawing on extracts from contributions to support and illustrate our
critique. Certain manifestations of workplace spirituality and spiritual leadership
theory (SLT) can be understood as continuing a well-established trajectory
within utilitarian approaches to organizational behaviour. It represents the latest
turn of a wheel that positions organizational subjects within discourses of power
and governmentality (Burchell et al. 1991; Foucault 1991 [1978]), promoting a
rhetoric which connects a highly attenuated version of “spirituality” with organizational performativity (Lyotard 1984). Our intention in generating this critique
is not wholesale to discredit interest in workplace spirituality and leadership, but
to suggest that much more nuanced theorisation of the field is needed along with
interpretative approaches that reflect the subtlety of the terrain. To repeat an
apocryphal methodological cliché: if one is armed only with a hammer, then
every problem looks like a nail. This is the current state of affairs found in certain
sections of the field, we suggest, and there is a desperate need for critical reflexivity if a great deal of ethical damage in the name of workplace spirituality is to
be avoided.
Workplace spirituality research: a new paradigm?
It is not our purpose here to provide an exhaustive review of the literature on workplace spirituality, even were this possible. Several authors (Benefiel 2003, 2005a,
2005b; Lund Dean et al. 2003; Giacalone and Jukiewicz 2004a; Reave 2005) have
undertaken the challenging task of trying to map the domain and we refer readers
to these sources for comprehensive reference lists. Literature on workplace spirituality might be placed along a spectrum running from prescriptive texts that
promote the transformative power of spirituality for a practitioner readership (for
example, Barrett 1998; Jones 1996; Klein and Izzo 1999; Lodahl and Powell 1999;
Owen 2000; Wood 2006) through more academically robust books (Conger 1994;
Fairholm 1997; Mitroff and Denton 1999a, 1999b; Howard and Welbourn 2004)
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and scholarly study of the subject in peer-reviewed journals (see, inter alia, contributions to the special issues of Journal of Organizational Change Management,
1999, 2003; Journal of Management Inquiry, 2005; The Leadership Quarterly,
2005). Of particular interest for the purpose of this article are contributions –
hailing predominately from US academics – that seek to theorize and explore
workplace spirituality empirically from a hypothetico-deductive standpoint.
Generic examples of the empirical study of workplace spirituality would include,
inter alia, Ashmos and Duchon (2000), Giacalone and Jurkiewicz (2004a), Giacalone et al. (2005), Milliman et al. (2003). Within the subgenre of spirituality and
leadership, empirical studies would include: Duchon and Plowman (2005),
Fairholm (1997, 1998, 2001), Fry (2003, 2005), Fry et al. (2005). Proponents of
this approach (see, for example, Fry 2003; Fry et al. 2005; Giacalone and Jurkiewicz 2004b) understand their work to be contributing to an objectivist “organization science” that holds out the possibility, in principle, of “complete
explanation” through the incremental accumulation of well-theorized empirical
knowledge. Invoking licence from writers such as Kuhn (1970) and Burrell and
Morgan (1979), advocates of this approach see themselves as pioneers of a new
functionalist paradigm, which, although embryonic in form, promises to become
a fully fledged “normal science” in due course. As we shall see shortly, this new
paradigm3 also entails seeking ways of measuring spirituality in the workplace
(or, at least, discovering proxies for such measurement) and incorporating it as
an independent variable within hypothetico-deductive models of management,
organization and leadership. Several studies, furthermore, seek to explore the relationship between corporate spirituality and organizational performance (Krahnke
et al. 2003; Giacalone and Jurkiewicz 2004a) or spiritual leadership and organizational performance (Duchon and Plowman 2005; Fry et al. 2005).
With respect to the espoused new paradigm and its “science of workplace spirituality” (Giacalone and Jurkievicz 2004b), there is a general lack of acknowledgement of the continuing epistemological dispute in organization and
management studies concerning paradigm incommensurability. This is not the
place to rehearse these arguments fully, but it is important to be aware of the
historical legacy and context in which current contributions are being made. In
brief, what has been described as a “paradigm war” 4 has been waged within
management and organization studies since the initial publication of Burrell and
Morgan’s typology (Burrell and Morgan 1979). It should also be pointed out that
this debate, far from abating, lingers on and has yet to reach a conclusion which
satisfies all parties (Westwood and Clegg 2003). The debate between McKinley
(2003) and Case (2003), for instance, is perhaps typical of the lines of division
drawn between versions of positivist organization research and interpretative
approaches which are founded on a fundamentally different set of epistemological
assumptions. In short, to assume – as do the new spirituality paradigm researchers
mentioned above – that there is, or could be, a consensus view about how to
proceed with organization and management research is at the very least partial,
if not downright naïve. Consider in this regard, for example, the high profile
debate between Pfeffer (1993, 1995) and Van Maanen (1995a, 1995b) which,
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whatever one’s intellectual allegiances, clearly leaves this epistemological question open. Benefiel (2005a) attempts some epistemological rapprochement with
respect to alternative versions of workplace spirituality research that characterize
the field, arguing that it is possible to create a centre ground in which both positivist and interpretative research traditions can cohabit in peace. This, however,
is to gloss over fundamental ontological, epistemological and ethical differences
within a plurality of different approaches that populate the two broad camps.
Leaving aside ontological and epistemological concerns momentarily, we
suggest – contrary to Benefiel – that the ethical implications of adopting a positivist stance toward the study of organization, in general, and workplace spirituality, in particular, make it inappropriate to propose a neutral centre ground.
Academics working in this field need to be aware of the pros and cons of alternative research attitudes and we feel obliged to raise some concerns about the
positivism of the new workplace spirituality paradigm. Attempts to measure
employees’ spirituality, or corporate spirituality, involves the positioning and
subjectification of persons within reductive, instrumental matrices. Individual
and collective responses – indeed, individual and collective “spirit” – are rendered
as statistics suitable for techno-calculative manipulation. Such representations,
moreover, serve to reinforce and perpetuate an unquestioned discourse of capitalist power and control. While the science of workplace spirituality may be
couched within a rhetoric of value neutrality and apolitical “contribution to
knowledge”, it serves, rather, as an instantiation of bio-political invasion and
inscription (Foucault 1990 [1976]).
Moreover, when linked to the enhancement of corporate productivity and
performance, the new paradigm research functions to reinforce and satisfy the
appetites of extant capitalist discourse. Researchers in this paradigm need to
appease their sponsors and the business community they serve. Even when pursuing the noble purpose of supplanting narrow materialist and selfish values with
“postmaterialist” (Giacalone and Jukiewicz 2004b, pp. 15–16) or “transpersonal”
(Giacalone 2004) ones, the discourse hails from a predominantly “businesscentred” worldview (Giacalone and Thompson 2006). Attempts to establish a
more human-centred worldview are thus compromised to the extent that their
protagonists find themselves – in the context of the USA academy, at least –
having, by necessity, to speak the language of business if they hope to have any
influence in the status quo. If some degree of compromise is a feature of more
enlightened advocates of the new paradigm literature, more blatantly performative research that links spirituality with the bottom line makes no attempt to
disguise its motives. Such work is overtly ideological since it appropriates and
emulsifies what might be understood as the genuine grassroots spiritual
aspirations of new counter-cultural social movements (Casey 2002). In other
words, we could theorize the openly performative elements of the new paradigm
as representing yet another accommodation, typical of capitalism’s historical
development, which preserves and furthers hegemony (Gramsci 1971). As such,
the new paradigm research in question, we contend, is far from ethically neutral
or harmless to the interests of employees who are either directly or indirectly
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(through the consumption and adoption of its research outcomes) implicated in
its discourse and practices.
Problems of definition
The field of workplace spirituality, perhaps unsurprisingly given the inherent
ambiguity of the term “spirituality”, 5 is plagued by problems of definition
(Benefiel 2003; Dent et al. 2005; Reave 2005; Tourish and Tourish 2010). What
phenomenon is being referred to by this concept? Our intention here is not to try
to resolve this problem for, we would argue, the power of what Burke (1970)
refers to as “God terms” within conceptual schema is precisely their lack of
bounded-ness and the scope they offer for a plurality of meanings and interpretations. In pursuit of our argument, however, it will be necessary at least to indicate the range of meanings that have been identified in the workplace spirituality
literature and to pay particular attention to definitions deployed within the “new
paradigm”, this being the focus of our critique.
In their review of the literature, Dent et al. (2005) identify a range of contemporary meanings relating to individual spirituality such as self-actualization,
purpose and meaning in life, health and wellness, workplace spirituality and
leadership spirituality. This diversity, by and large, is echoed in the workplace
spirituality literature. In addition, there is also present an overarching idea of
spirituality as connoting some sense of transcendence or inter-connectedness.
Hence according to Kriger and Seng (2005), “‘spirituality’ … refer[s] to the
quest for self-transcendence and the attendant feeling of interconnectedness with
all things in the universe” (p. 722) and, similarly, for Conger (1994), it is, “to see
our deeper connections to one another and to the world beyond ourselves”
(p. 15). Clearly, many of these broad meanings intersect or converge with those
found in the five main world religions – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism,
Islam and Judaism – although there are important and quite fundamental distinctions to be drawn between the meaning of “spirituality” within each of these religious contexts. Adding to the complexity of definition is the rise of what Wexler
(1996) refers to as “unchurched spiritualities”, by which he means the plethora
of practices and beliefs associated with the so-called “New Age”. These include:
unorthodox forms of Eastern and Western mysticism, paganism, magic, astrology, divination, together with complementary medical practices, such as, homeopathy, acupuncture, reflexology and other mind/body therapies. In short, at the
limit, there may be as many conceptions of “spirituality” as there are individuals
that consider themselves, to a greater of lesser extent, to have a “spiritual” dimension to their lives (Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Heelas 2008). Such plurality
offers a significant problem to those students of workplace spirituality who are
determined to specify, codify and measure its presence and influence within
organizations (Hicks 2003). To perform such an operation and render it as a
potentially manageable variable would require at least some consensus over not
only the definition of “spirituality” but also agreement about appropriate
measures of the phenomenon.
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Proponents of the new paradigm find themselves having to attenuate the variety of spiritual discourse considerably in order to make it amenable to measurement and control within the methodological frameworks that they employ.
Hence, Giacalone and Jurkiewicz (2004b) define workplace spirituality as “a
framework of organizational values evidenced in the culture that promotes
employees’ experience of transcendence through the work process, facilitating
their sense of being connected in a way that provides feelings of compassion and
joy” (p. 13, original emphases). In this definition, “values” become detached
from individuals and, instead, manifest in reified form as part of the organizational “culture”. Moreover, care is taken in this generic formulation to elide the
possible relationship between religious affiliation, or belief and spirituality so as
not to exclude any particular individual. But can a “framework of organizational
values” ever satisfy or represent the inevitable heterogeneity of spiritual commitment or expression found within a complex collective? We suspect not.
Similarly, for Ashmos and Duchon (2000), spirituality at work consists in: “the
recognition that employees have an inner life that nourishes and is nourished by
meaningful work that takes place in the context of community” (p. 137, original
emphases). Questions arise concerning “who” or “what” is doing the “recognition” that would satisfy this definition and make it empirically meaningful. Do
Ashmos and Duchon have in mind anarcho-syndicalist groupings or communes
which aspire to abandon formal hierarchical and power relations and thus permit
a genuinely mutual recognition of “inner life”? Probably not, for this definition
has to be workable within a mainstream capitalist business context in order to
serve its authors’ purposes. What is meant by “inner life” and how might it be
“nourished” in symbiotic relation to “work”? Any one of the concepts employed
in this and the previous definition of workplace spirituality is open to multiple
readings and interpretations, which, on epistemological grounds, make their
mobilization as would-be definitive and “operationalizable” statements on the
subject a fantastical endeavour. Our point is that workplace spirituality is, by
nature, going to be an ephemeral phenomenon approachable from multiple
perspectives and hence resistant to neat containment and normalization of the
sort sought by many proponents of the new paradigm.
Added to the inherent difficulty of defining workplace spirituality, there is a
widespread normative assumption, reflected in the definitional aspirations and
present in the broader project of the new paradigm, concerning the mutual desirability of accommodating or meeting employees’ “spiritual needs” while at work.
Hence, Duchon and Plowman (2005) assert that, “[A]n important dimension of
spirituality at work is the notion that employees have spiritual needs (i.e., an inner
life), just as they have physical, emotional, and cognitive needs, and these needs
don’t get left at home when they come to work” (p. 811) and, for Mirvis (1997),
“Work itself is being re-discovered as a source of spiritual growth and connection
to others” (p. 193). There are doubtless a series of socio-political and economic
conditions – some of which we consider below – that one could introduce to theorise why spirituality is asserting itself as a concern for work organization both in
terms of employees seeking spiritual expression and managers feeling the need
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to accommodate or harness these energies. The workplace spirituality new paradigm is notably lacking in its ability or willingness to locate its contributions in
relation to broader social theory, tending to limit analysis to a concern for the
pressures of global competition (Duchon and Plowman 2005; Fry et al. 2005) and
the emergence of post-materialist values (Giacalone and Jurkiewicz 2004b). Both
the problems facing corporations with respect to workplace spirituality and solutions to them are circumscribed by extant thinking in relation to organization
science. What remains unquestioned, therefore, is the assumption that it is right
and proper for organizations to seek to harness employee spirituality. This marks,
we contend, a serious lack of reflexivity in the literature. At the very least, one
might expect academic debate about the erosion of boundaries between the two
domains – personal spirituality, on the one hand, and work commitment or
contract, on the other – which have typically been segregated in modern organizations (Tourish and Tourish 2010). Such boundary erosion brings us, conveniently, to a consideration of the new paradigm’s interest in the relationship
between spiritual life and performance in work organizations.
Workplace spirituality, performativity and measurement
Improved performance and productivity
Much of the new paradigm literature assumes it appropriate to examine and, by
implication, exploit a potential positive correlation between spirituality and
workplace performance. The case is made starkly by Krahnke et al. (2003) when
they assert that:
To have confidence that our suppositions are more than personal assumptions
requires the dispassionate objectivism afforded by the scientific method …
[O]rganizations need conclusive evidence connecting workplace spirituality with
bottom line performance; anything less would bring into question their fiduciary
responsibility to stockholders and their moral responsibility to stakeholders. For
workplace spirituality to be a viable construct in improving organizations and the
people in them, it requires a degree of confidence we can only attain through scientific measurement. (pp. 397–398, our emphases)
Here we see not only claims regarding the “scientific” imperative to generate
“viable” knowledge of workplace spirituality through accurate “measurement” of
the phenomenon, but also a moral imperative to link that knowledge to corporate
financial performance. This proposition is also interesting insofar as it seeks explicitly to erode the traditional fact–value distinction that has typified positivist social
scientific research throughout its post-Enlightenment development (MacIntyre
1985). To that extent it accords closely to the post-modern model of knowledge,
characterized by the emergence of “performativity”, identified by Lyotard (1984).
According to Lyotard, the episteme of modern science which found legitimacy
in grand narratives of progress and emancipation – totalizing stories that gave
meaning to local narratives and practices – is being systematically eroded within
post-industrial societies by the advancement of information-driven technologies.
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These technologies, which, paradoxically, are a necessary product of the modern
scientific need to “observe” beyond the limitations of bare human sensibility, introduce knowledge criteria that undermine the denotative true/false criteria of scientific inquiry. The search for Truth is replaced by a search for the Efficient under
what Lyotard (1984, p. 111) terms the “principle of optimal performance”. An
economic episteme based on the utilitarian language game of more output for less
input displaces the scientific episteme. Lyotard theorizes this new basis of knowledge – the optimization of input to output – as performativity (1984, p. 112). One
consequence of post-industrial technology’s privileging of the ends of action over
its means is that knowledge ceases to be a valid end in itself. Knowledge is assessed
economically not by its truth-value, but by its exchange-value. Knowledge is
produced to be sold. It becomes subsumed within a flow of capital exchange as
part of the consolidation of consumerism within post-industrial societies.
Certain manifestations of new paradigm research into workplace spirituality
are explicitly performative in their intent and remit. This agenda also extends
beyond generic studies of spirituality in organizations to more specific concerns
with the theorisation and study of leadership. Fry (2003, 2005, 2008) and Fry
et al. (2005), for example, have developed a theory of spiritual leadership which
seeks to model causally a set of individual and organizational variables which,
when in proper relationship, are argued to lead to a number of positive individual
and organizational outcomes. Spiritual leadership taps into “the fundamental
needs for the SWB [spiritual well-being] of both leader and follower, through
calling and membership, to create vision and value congruence across the individual, empowered team, and organization levels, and, ultimately, to foster
higher levels of organizational commitment and productivity” (Fry 2008, p. 108,
our emphases). By creating an overall corporate vision, spiritual leaders provide
themselves and followers a context within which employees can find a meaningful vocation or “calling” and feel that they are making a genuine difference
through their work. This, in turn, enables the fostering of social and organizational cultures, “based on the values of altruistic love” (p. 109) in which leaders
and followers derive an authentic sense of membership, feel understood and can
thus express, “care, concern, and appreciation for both self and others” (p. 109).
Fry and colleagues, moreover, claim to have established empirically that practitioners of spiritual leadership will experience greater psychological and physical
well-being (Fry 2003).
Spiritual leadership theory (SLT) also advocates embracing new business
models which give emphasis to leadership ethics, sustainability and social
responsibility, “without sacrificing profitability, revenue growth, and other indicators of financial performance” (Fry 2008, p. 110). In other words, SLT is
intended to assist managers in maximizing the triple bottom line of “People,
Planet, Profit” (see also Elkington 1998). In his revised version of SLT, Fry
(2008) offers a modified causal model in which, “inner life, or spiritual practice”
(p. 111) is seen to positively influence, “(1) hope/faith in a transcendent vision
of service to key stakeholders and (2) the values of altruistic love” (p. 112). Fry
summarizes the interaction between the variables as follows:
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P. Case and J. Gosling
Leaders who practice spiritual leadership by drawing on inner life practice and
communicate and model hope/faith, a transcendent vision, and organizational
values based in altruistic love will encourage the manifestation of positive performance outcomes for both the individual and the organization. (2008, p. 120)
The relationship between spiritual leadership and improved productivity is
also evident in Fry’s earlier work. For example, Fry (2003) observes:
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A major change is taking place in the personal and professional lives of leaders as
many of them more deeply integrate their spirituality and their work. Most would
agree that this integration is leading to very positive changes in their relationships
and their effectiveness. There is also evidence that workplace spirituality programs
not only lead to beneficial personal outcomes such as increased joy, peace, serenity,
job satisfaction and commitment but that they also deliver improved productivity
and reduce absenteeism and turnover. (p. 703, our emphases)
Furthermore:
The purpose of spiritual leadership is to create vision and value congruence
across the strategic, empowered team, and individual levels and, ultimately, to
foster higher levels of organizational commitment and productivity. (Fry 2003,
p. 693, our emphases)6
This performative interest in harnessing workplace spirituality and leadership
is echoed by Duchon and Plowman (2005) who,
… view workplace spirituality as a particular kind of psychological climate in
which people view themselves as having an inner life that is nourished by meaningful work and takes place in the context of a community. Work units that can be characterized by a high degree of workplace spirituality are ones where workers are
aligned with the climate. When this happens we contend the work unit will experience greater performance outcomes. (p. 816, original emphases)
In their study of a healthcare network of organizations in the Southern US,
Duchon and Plowman attempt to introduce a utilitarian model of spiritual leadership, populated by a series of “variables”, which enables a statistical relationship to be established between “work unit performance” and “spirituality”. They
conclude that, “Ultimately, the model suggests that these variables lead to
enhanced work unit performance ... Our interest is in proposing an essential
spirituality–performance link without which further model development would
be irrelevant” (Duchon and Plowman 2005, p. 825).
Measurement
MacDonald et al. (1999) provide a detailed review of instruments designed to
measure spirituality and associated constructs. These include, for example, the
so called “Expressions of Spirituality Inventory” (which purports to measure,
inter alia, cognitive, phenomenological, existential, paranormal and religious
dimensions of spirituality) and “Psychomatrix Spirituality Inventory” (aimed at
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capturing, inter alia, respondents’ awareness of a higher power, their religious
histories and current spiritual/religious practices). The kind of theoretical modelling pursued by proponents of the new workplace spirituality paradigm relies on
methodologically similar measurement technologies. Fry et al. (2005), for
instance, employ an SLT questionnaire that includes a 1–5 (from strongly
disagree to strongly agree) Likert response set to measure such constructs as,
“Vision”, “Altruistic Love”, “Meaning/Calling”, “Organizational Commitment”
and “Productivity”. Their empirical study sought to, “utilize a newly formed
Longbow helicopter attack squadron at Ft. Hood, Texas to test and validate the
hypothesized causal model hypothesizing positive relationships between the
qualities of spiritual leadership, organizational productivity, and organizational
commitment” (p. 836). Similarly, Ashmos and Duchon (2000) developed a 34question instrument with a 7-point Likert-type scale based on psychometric data
from 689 respondents. This “Meaning and Purpose at Work” questionnaire was
designed to capture respondents’ “perceptions of their own inner life”, the
“meaningfulness of their work”, and their personal sense of “community at
work”. The instrument also attempted to address respondents’ transpersonal
sense of spiritual collectiveness at a “work unit-level” by generating data on
“Work Unit Community” and “Work Unit Meaning”. The Meaning and Purpose
at Work questionnaire was also deployed in a subsequent study of healthcare
organizations by Duchon and Plowman (2005), mentioned in the previous
subsection on “performance”. More recently, Martin and Hafer (2009) sought to
test empirically the relationship between emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and performance using a modified version of the Ashmos and Duchon
instrument and other measures.
Our concern is that a performative attitude toward the social scientific investigation of workplace spirituality necessitates through measurement a highly
attenuated and narrow conception of “spirituality”; one that potentially denigrates and impoverishes the meaning that it has for organizational members.
What is needed, we contend, is greater transparency and reflexivity with respect
to the unconscious assumptions that are imported when a workplace “science”
approach to spirituality is adopted (see, for example, McKee et al. 2008). Such
an approach would eschew the performative in favour of a more open-ended
enquiry into the complex set of socio-political and economic conditions that
surround and inform the plurality of spiritual expression within organizations.
The spiritual organization: exploiting or valuing the employee’s soul?
From the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution onward there has been a steady
stream of theoretical and prescriptive practitioner literature on how to exact the
most from employees by promoting identification with the corporation and
thereby harnessing and directing their “inner lives”. In the middle of the last
century this was perhaps best epitomized in the work of the Human Relations and
Quality of Working Life movements. More or less from the outset, corporatist
attempts to tie work to spirit and soul have been subject to criticism. In his
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seminal critique of organizational commitment, for example, Whyte (1965
[1956]) voiced concern over the corporatist trajectory of employment relations in
US organizations, pointing to the way in which the nature of the employment
contract was shifting. Conventional wage labour was, for the “organization
man”, to be supplanted by a work ethic that demanded a commitment of heart
and soul. As Whyte put it, “No one wants to see the old authoritarian return, but
at least it could be said of him that what he wanted primarily of you was your
sweat. The new man wants your soul” (Whyte 1965, p. 365, our emphases).
Similarly, the rise of motivation theory, from Maslow (1970 [1954]) through to
McClelland (1971) and Alderfer (1972), stressed the importance to corporations
of harnessing employee needs for “belonging”. In the case of Maslow, of course,
popular management interpretations of his work also highlight the potential
“spiritual” dimension of life that an employee might pursue through “selfactualization”. There is, then, nothing new in the managerialist attempt to idealize and manufacture employees (Kunda 1992; Townley 1994; Jacques 1995) in
such a way that they become pliable and amenable to totalizing organizational
control (Goffman 1968). In that sense, the work of certain proponents of the positivist workplace spirituality movement (as evidenced in the preceding section)
represents the latest in a very long line of ideologically infused fantasies about
how more productivity can be exacted from employees by aligning their motivations, beliefs and values with those of the corporation.
It may be that, in certain instances, advocates of the “science” of workplace
spirituality are pursuing lines of scholarship and research in the name of humanizing the workplace. In these cases (e.g. Giacalone 2004; Giacalone and
Jurkiewicz 2004b; Fry 2005; Giacalone and Thompson 2006) the argument runs
that the promotion of workplace spirituality will lead to “good” or is of humanitarian value in its own right. The fact that it may lead to greater productivity and
improvements to the bottom line are, viewed from a capitalist perspective, an
incidental benefit. In other words, these authors might argue that their research
and scholarship is not predicated on an interest directly in how workplace spirituality can improve financial performance. The relationship is indirect, and so
references to the performative effects of spirituality are made for rhetorical
purposes. Talk about performance and profit gives permission to talk also about
spirituality; it affords a permissive space in which to suggest an association
between spiritual and material profit. Arguably, this is necessary where performance and profit have become the only criteria of legitimacy, and perhaps even
in the academy, without these two “p-words” there would be no interest in
discussing spirituality in the workplace, nor for studying it in organizational and
managerial milieu.
However worthy the intentions and sentiments of these authors, such arguments are, nonetheless, premised on the possibility of some form of enhancement
of “spirituality” – individual or collective – within the context of neo-liberal
corporate life. As such, they are bounded by the power relations that obtain
within capitalist socio-economic relations. It is managers or leaders who are still
pulling the strings, seeking to mobilize consent and compliance from employees
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or followers so as to satisfy the interest of investors. If “spirituality” is explicitly
on the business agenda, it is difficult to imagine how it can resist being subsumed
within or subordinated to dynamics that, for structural reasons, strive for the
alignment of personal beliefs and values with those of business corporations.
Nonetheless, we take seriously the suggestion that the emergence of organizational control characterised as “spiritual” is something that might become visible
if we approach organizations as instruments of human spirituality, and develop
this further below, after an important caveat.
There are clear unitarist echoes in certain strands of the workplace spirituality
literature of the Cultural Excellence, Total Quality Management and Business
Process Re-engineering programmes of the 1980s and 1990s which, at their
worst, carry sinister Orwellian overtones of seeking to manipulate and control the
hearts and minds of employees through ideological means (Willmott 1993). In
other words, as Lips-Wiersma et al. (2010) have pointed out, there is a darker
side to the workplace spirituality movement that, far from liberating the spirit at
work, entails acts of “seduction”, “evangelization”, “manipulation”, and “subjugation” in pursuit of totalizing control. Tourish and Pinnington (2002) highlight
a similar set of issues for Transformational Leadership (TL) theories and practices which, they claim, promote a fanatical attitude toward change that seeks to
stifle and ultimately prohibit any expression of dissent or resistance. They
suggest that patterns of leadership and power fostered by TL bear disturbing
comparison to those found in religious cults, prompting Tourish and Pinnington
to introduce the notion of “corporate cultism” to complement that of “corporate
culturism” (Willmott 1993). Dystopian analyses of corporate change initiatives
also extend to the new agendas of workplace spirituality. For example, Case
(2005) offers a quasi-science fiction parable against the potential excesses and
dangers inherent in the commodification of workplace spiritual education and
practice (see also Forray and Stork 2002). In this cautionary tale, New Age spirituality becomes part of the business education mainstream in a hi-tech mediated
corporatist world of employee subjugation and ideological control.
Acknowledging the historical legacy of social technologies directed toward
employee commitment and control, we would like to introduce a theoretical
framework that we find helpful in understanding recent – and possibly future? –
organizational developments. Our suggestion is that we might think in terms of
a broad trajectory running from organizational technologies that seek primarily
to control the body of the workforce, through those that try to elicit moral and
ideological commitment and on to those that would have work organizations
appropriate the spirits and souls of employees. One way of theorizing this trajectory would be to extend Etzioni’s categorization of complex organizations
(Etzioni 1971 [1961]). Etzioni suggests that complex organizations can be
classified according to the “forms of relationship”, “member involvement” and
“types of power” that predominate in them. Thus, coercive organizations with a
predominately “alienated” membership ensure compliance through the use of
actual or threatened violence. Such organizations would include, for example,
concentration camps, most prisons and custodial mental hospitals (Etzioni 1971
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[1961], p. 66). Utilitarian organizations elicit “calculative” member involvement
and use resource sanctions to encourage compliance (effectively purchasing
employee commitment). At the time of writing, Etzioni included most blue-collar
and white-collar industries in this category, along with trades unions and peacetime military organizations (Etzioni 1971 [1961], p. 66). Finally, normative organizations are characterized by the “moral” commitment of their members and
seek to influence them through the manipulation of values, attitudes and beliefs.
Religious organizations, political organizations, healthcare organizations, educational institutions and many professional organizations fall into this category
(Etzioni 1971 [1961], pp. 66–67).
While we grant that Etzioni’s conceptualization of power appears somewhat
dated in the light of subsequent theorization (see, inter alia, Lukes 1974;
Foucault 1980), his basic typology of organization remains remarkably innovative and thought-provoking. The analysis also contains a level of subtlety that is
difficult to convey in the cursory summary of the typology offered here. For
instance, Etzioni fully recognizes that his categories – coercive, utilitarian,
normative – can co-exist in any single complex organization and he writes extensively on the nature of “dual-structure” examples. Our purpose in introducing the
basic scheme is to suggest two ways in which it might be augmented. In the first
place, it would seem that the archetypal modern organization typified by Etzioni
as “utilitarian” is increasingly having to respond to social forces that entail the
encroachment of the “normative” into its domain. As we have already pointed
out, this process was certainly underway in the 1950s, but gained considerable
momentum with the appearance of corporate culturist innovations in the 1980s
and 1990s (the Cultural Excellence movement, TQM, BPR, and so forth).
Etzioni’s framework would thus benefit from a retrospective evaluation of the
effects of changes over the past four-and-a-half decades on the classification
boundaries. Second, there may be a case for either extending the “normative”
category or introducing a new category to accommodate workplace spirituality
programmes that seek explicitly to manage employees’ souls.
Whereas Whyte (1965) and Kunda (1992) speak of the corporate aspiration of
capturing the “souls” of the workforce, their meaning seems more metaphorical
than literal. What they refer to is the manner in which certain organizations strive
for enhanced control of the cognitive and emotional commitment of workforces.
The literal reference to the management of spirituality in contemporary positivist literature casts such metaphorical usage in a different light. Might we be
justified, therefore, in suggesting that the explicit and organized management of
employees’ souls extends beyond the domain of “normative” control, which seeks
to shape the morality and aesthetic preferences of employees? The “new paradigm” studies imply a more ambitious intention to lay claim to the employee’s
subjectivity; to position employee identity as the most salient selfhood. The workplace would no longer be merely the site for the discovery and expression of
socially sanctioned values and norms; rather, it becomes both the material and
metaphysical conditions for selfhood, the over-soul or collective soul of which
individual souls are holographic offprints. In this new organizational cosmology,
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employees are destined to find their home and fulfilment through willing conformity to the whole. This, we contend anticipates the emergence of a new postEtzionian category: the spiritual organization, whose member involvement would
entail hope for revelation or enlightenment, and where power is exercised pastorally through conscience, willing obedience, self-surveillance of innermost
thoughts and disciplining of the spirit (Foucault 1982; Bell and Taylor 2003;
Mitchell 2009).
Clearly, there are extant organizations, such as monasteries, cults and other
spiritual communities, which would fall into this fourth general category.
However, to substantiate a claim that these “spiritual organizations” and their
moral communities are more than an intensification of normative control requires
a significant re-faming of organizational and individual agency. Etzioni argues
that workers must be persuaded into their relationship with organizations by
force, utilitarian exchange or a belief in the moral rectitude of the work (or any
combination of these). While the worker who is coerced into employment may
retain a personal antipathy to the organization and its aims, the morally committed organizational member does not afford such independence. The normative
organization –whether or not it overlaps with the coercive or utilitarian – has
successfully bought the conscience of its members, becoming central in their
account of who they are. The positivist literature that we have reviewed thus far
might be dismissed as aiding and abetting such normative control.
However, before we dismiss these discourses of workplace spirituality as
mere accoutrements to the intensification of labour, we should allow the possibility that scholars are attempting to address substantial and vital aspects of
organizational life (member spirituality), but are simply handicapped by the inadequacies of positivist social science methods. In the following section we attempt
an alternative approach, hypothetically differentiating the spiritual from normative organization in a tentative modification of Etzioni’s model (Table 1).
At issue is whether we can anticipate a pattern of expectations associated with
what we are designating the “spiritual organization” beginning to permeate
Table 1. Extending Etzioni’s typology of complex organizations.
Form of
relationship
Member
involvement
COERCIVE
ALIENATIVE
UTILITARIAN
CALCULATIVE
NORMATIVE
MORAL
SPIRITUAL
REVELATORY
Type of power
Use of actual or threatened violence or
discipline to ensure compliance
Use of resource sanctions to encourage
compliance – the “purchase” of commitment
Influence through the manipulation of values,
attitudes and beliefs – the management of
meaning, desire and identity
Willing obedience to rules and practices.
Collaborative management of resources and
opportunities in order to enhance spiritual
insight
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erstwhile secular organizations and institutions in the same fashion that the
“normative” has been encroaching inexorably upon the “utilitarian”, in Etzioni’s
terms. As with Etzioni’s original consideration of dual structures, we would also
have to acknowledge that under certain circumstances, and in differing contexts,
workers could potentially be respected as spirit-enlivened beings within utilitarian and normative modes of organizing. The potential obtains in most complex
organizations for their systems and structures to be relatively liberating and lifeaffirming or, by contrast, oppressive and stultifying to the human spirit. In effect,
this fourth category implies the instrumental use of organizational norms (and
rhetoric) in the service of personal or collective spiritualities – a possibility we
return to in the concluding section of this article.
Our critique thus far of the would-be instrumental exploitation of workplace
spirituality and our conjecture concerning the spiritual organization as a new
ideal type raise a number of crucial social theoretical questions that deserve
attention. It is to these questions that we now turn.
Enchantment meets disenchantment in workplace spirituality
Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and
hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now …. (Weber 1970
[1948], p. 158)
In an attempt to resolve the ambivalent relationship between self and organization
in the West, it appears managers are turning to the instrumental use of technologies
that appropriate spirituality in order to establish what they are encouraged to
perceive as total obedience among a workforce. (Bell and Taylor 2003, p. 342)
Several contributors to the debate have raised concerns about the attempted
parcelling out of the human soul that seems to characterize the positivist
workplace spirituality project. To begin with, as Fornaciari and Lund Dean
(2001, p. 335) observe, it seems rather ambitious if not absurd to try to “factor
analyze God”. The endeavour to reduce spirituality to a set of hypotheses,
measures and statistical relationships risks trivializing the subject and, indeed,
offending the sensibilities of those whose beliefs and values are being scrutinized. Several critics have also pointed to the apparent incongruity of directly
associating a materialist concern for improving corporate productivity and profitability with personal or collective spirituality (Casey 2002; Bell and Taylor
2003; Lund Dean et al. 2003; Benefiel 2005a). That certain academics and practitioners have manifestly been eager to link spirituality with productive output
within a performative matrix is of intrinsic social scientific interest and warrants
closer inspection. There seems to be a fundamental paradox at the heart of positivist attempts to contain and manage spirituality in the interests of improved
performance; one that has distinct ideological overtones.
Viewed from a Weberian standpoint we are witnessing in the new paradigm
research documented above what is, in effect, a collision of opposing social
forces. The performative interest in harnessing spirituality through instrumental
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technologies necessitates the thrusting together of a series of incommensurate
poles: disenchantment and enchantment, demystification and mystification, technical and substantive rationality. Weber (1970 [1948]) characterizes rationalization as a process that has as its ultimate end the disenchantment of the world (a
concept he borrowed from Schiller), that is, the complete elimination of all
wonder and mystery and its replacement by instrumental knowledge. Disenchantment is the outcome of rationalisation and “intellectualisation which we
have been undergoing for thousands of years …” (Weber 1970 [1948], p. 138).
In pursuit of instrumental knowledge, moreover, modern organizations court the
perfection of “technical correctness”, or Zweckrationalität (formal rationality), in
Weber’s terms, at the expense of thoughtful and normative reflection on subjective means and intentions (what Weber referred to as Wertrationalität, that is,
substantive rationality). The manner in which ends replace means under modern
conditions, of course, is what led Weber to speculate on the inherently irrational
foundation and trajectory of formal rationality and the self-defeating dilemmas
produced by bureaucratic technologies of social control.
While positivist studies of workplace spirituality embody, par excellence, the
drive toward disenchantment, the irony is that their object of enquiry is, arguably,
a striving toward a re-enchantment and revitalized sense of meaning on the part
of employees who have become disaffected by the soulless rationalities and
materialism of the modern world (Casey 2002). The resulting paradox is characterized admirably by Bell and Taylor (2003) in their critical analysis of workplace spirituality discourse:
This positivistic logic reflects dominant methodologies within management
research that attempt to constitute workplace spirituality as an object of study. Ironically, however, interest in workplace spirituality is driven by the limitations of
positivistic thought and by the need to develop alternative visions that challenge the
“dehumanized representations”… Paradoxically, the subsequent representation of
workplace spirituality as something to be managed, measured and modelled contributes towards the subsequent demystification of spirituality and the self. (p. 336)
Whereas conventional religious sensibilities were occluded from industrial
organizations in which the instrumental rationality of production was privileged,
disaffection with the excesses of that prevailing order has given rise to a proliferation of attempts to re-enchant workplace practices. As Casey (2002) observes
of contemporary Western organizations, “a monological instrumental rationality
and economic ideology of one-sided modernity now meets a counter-force it
unintendedly [sic] helped generate. Informational capitalism, simultaneity of
exchange and boundary collapse expose organizational rationalities — which
were always fragile — to forces and demands in the wider cultural sphere”
(p. 165). In other words, organizations (and, no less, students of organization) in
the post-industrial world are necessarily having to accommodate or respond to
social forces, including a revitalization and reinvention of plural spiritualities, that
are beyond their immediate control. Hence we witness the willingness of major
corporations to take seriously the spiritual aspirations of employees – whether of
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P. Case and J. Gosling
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a traditional religious or “unchurched” New Age complexion – and reconfigure
work practices to address and even promote these interests in the name of
improved performance and control.
Conclusion: is there a place for spirituality in work organizations?
While being critical of the current fashion for the instrumental appropriation of
spiritual energy within organizations, we nonetheless desire to address the question of what place a considered and nuanced understanding of spirituality might
have within contemporary organizations. In other words, can such notions as
spiritual practice, spiritual discipline and wisdom – intrinsic features of our “spiritual organization” ideal type – be meaningfully integrated within predominantly
secular work regimes (Case and Gosling 2007)? Is there an “art of living” available to the contemporary employee (Nehamas 1998)? Is there a philosophical
way of life to be led (Hadot 1995)?
To commence, we note the instrumentality inherent in our own effort to
research, write and present this article. We have delineated and appropriated both
a body of literature and personal thoughts and experiences, manipulating them to
our purposes – and these purposes themselves are conditioned by the ideological
and normalizing forces (discursive and disciplinary) of contemporary academic
life. On the whole, we consider ourselves to be free agents in undertaking and
executing this work, while adopting a functional instrumentalism in pursuit of the
performative values of our employers (universities). Curiously, however, we find
ourselves alert to the Weberian paradox noted above: our attempt to mount a
rational critique of positivist studies of workplace spirituality is motivated in part
by a frustration with the rationalizing and normalizing forces of the academic
discipline we deploy. While in pursuit of the emancipation of workers from the
normalising rationality of the corporation, no less than that of the positivist scientist, we are ourselves bound by this rationality. So it appears that while we set out
to write an article on “the theorization of spirituality in organisation studies”, we
have been exploring forms of instrumentality. Furthermore, we have positioned
this as anything but “neutral”; rather, we have mounted a critique of the ways in
which organizations might manipulate the spiritual feelings of their employees,
and a parallel critique of scientific collusion in this process. However, ours is not,
we argue, the same degree of performative instrumentalism as implied in the
positivist studies cited above. In those studies the “spirituality” of employees has
been constructed as a thing liable to be measured and manipulated as a factor in
the productive process. As readers of those studies we have not been impelled by
them to think as we have, or to work on this material at all. Rather, we have been
afforded the opportunity to work with the material (Gibson 1966, 1977, 1979;
Greeno 1994; Thanem 2008). We conclude by elaborating three possible ways of
re-conceptualizing the relationship between spirituality and the workplace that
follow from our critique and theoretical reasoning.
1. The “spirituality” of employees is subject to the organized manipulation of
beliefs and disciplinary practices, such that behaviours systematically enhance
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corporate goal-seeking and attainment. Some adherents to spiritual or religious
beliefs may find a happy coherence in, for example, their dedication to “service”
and the “customer service” aims of the organization, or the reliance of the state
on voluntary labour to provide welfare for the mass unemployed. Religious belief
may well be, as Marx and Engels (1967 [1844]) so eloquently put it, “the opiate
of the people” both for its analgesic qualities as well as the ideological alignment
provided by its doctrines and practices. This is a position we share with the positivist authors we criticize: an assumption that spirituality is some form of
constructed consciousness; all that separates us is that we are skeptical of their
manipulations.
However, this is to ignore some other possibilities: that, to pursue the metaphor
of the opium-eater, psychedelic experiences may be wonderful. A characteristic
of post-modern societies is that the totalizing ideological effects of capitalist
production are contested from many directions. No longer is contestation exclusively the province of direct assault by the proletariat. Instead, parallel discourses
(de)construct capitalism in a multitude of ways. Which consideration requires that
we acknowledge another direction of instrumentality.
2. People – employees – use work, organizational life, and employment itself
as instruments in their spiritual lives. In other words, there is an argument that
the material world, with all its tribulations as well as its wonders, serves a purpose
in the spiritual life of the soul (or however one may approach the matter of one’s
own identity). This is not to say that all doctrines, and all spiritualities, are alike
in this regard. Some forms of established religion would consider harmonious
and prosperous citizenship as a sign or a fruit of their spiritual righteousness
(Weber 1992 [1958]), while others find expressions of their spirituality in a determined, even violent resistance to consumerism and corporate hegemony
(McIntosh 2001). Our point here is not an endorsement of a transcendent ontology; rather, we wish to point out that various academic discourses – ours as well
as those we criticize – have eschewed the fundamental distinguishing feature of
spiritual perspectives on work and leadership; that their reality and authority
derive from transcendental sources. To put this more prosaically, the instrumentalism that we criticize in this article treats spirituality as a cipher in the material
relations of production. It therefore fails to take its own avowed subject-matter
seriously, to speak of spirituality from the ground of the spirit, as it were. If they
were to do so, in familiar instrumentalist and positivist terms, they might consider
the extent to which work organizations help or hinder the progress of spirituality.
3. Finally, it may be more appropriate to consider “work organizations” and
“spirituality” as entirely different in type, with incommensurate ends, neither
bearing any essential relation to the other. This is a stance taken by Tourish and
Tourish (2010) in their strident post-structural critique of the spirituality at work
literature. In their view, “the workplace is not a useful medium for people to find
the deepest meaning in their lives”, and, furthermore, “[l]eaders of business organizations are not spiritual engineers or secular priests, charged with responsibility
for the human soul, and business organizations are not a suitable forum for
exploring such issues” (p. 219). From our viewpoint, there may be incidental
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P. Case and J. Gosling
connections between spirituality and the workplace: spirituality might be
strengthened by association and friendship, and perhaps the disciplines of spiritual
exercises are functional in improving performance at work; but the discipline of
these exercises, and of philosophy itself, might be considered to be good in themselves (Hadot 1995). This would constitute a somewhat more radical critique of
instrumentalism in this context rendering it, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant.
We have sought in this article to make a theoretical contribution to the current
debate on workplace spirituality by: (a) taking issue with scholarship and corporate practices which treat workplace spirituality in purely performative terms,
that is, as a resource or means to be manipulated instrumentally for organizational ends; (b) tentatively suggesting that Etzioni’s analysis of complex organizations might be developed to include a new category which we have designated
the spiritual organization; (c) positing three alternative positions with respect to
workplace spirituality that follow from our critique and theoretical reflections.
The spiritual organization, as ideal type, is ultimately an ambiguous category.
From one perspective it can be interpreted as representing a sinister attempt on
the part of capitalist organizations to harness, manipulate and control the soul of
employees. As such, the spiritual organization forms part of an historical trajectory of social technologies which has incrementally sought to colonize and
control, firstly, the bodies, secondly, the minds and emotions (through ideological manipulation) and, lastly, the spirits or souls of employees (position 1 of our
conclusion). From another perspective, the spiritual organization can be taken as
a potentially liberating notion which acknowledges the resurgence and plurality
of grassroots spiritualities that currently find expression in the workplace (position 2). Taken in this sense, it celebrates and values spiritual capacities and would
seek to assist employees in finding meaning in their lives through work. In effect
this amounts to a reversal of the organizational instrumentalism of position 1 in
preference of an instrumentalism on the part of the employee. However, we also
want to hold out a third possibility, namely, the incommensurability of work and
spirituality. Here we see value in spirituality and related disciplines for their own
sake and not as means to be utilized, either by academics using the discourse strategically for what they see to be a “greater good”, corporations or individuals
within a work organization context. From this third position, whatever interaction there might be between the subjectivities of individual or collective spiritual
pursuits and the workplace would be incidental. The workplace has no special
relevance to spirituality; it is simply another site, amongst the multitude of transient phenomena within which subjective spiritual journeys may or may not be
pursued. We suspect that position 3 will not be a popular conclusion for most
readers of this journal for it would, of course, imply the end of workplace spirituality as a discrete subject of study.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism XXV, “Signs of the Future”, Faculty of Economics, University of
Ljubljana, 1–4 July 2007; Ljubljana, Slovenia. While taking sole responsibility for the
Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion
277
finished article, the authors would like to thank Fred Bird (University of Waterloo, CA),
Gerardo A. Okhuysen (University of Utah, USA), and Scott Taylor (University of Exeter,
UK) for their helpful comments on a draft version of the manuscript. We would also like
to thank the co-editor in chief of JMSR, Bob Giacalone, who, in association with two
other editors, Jody Fry and Marjolein Lips-Weirsma, offered help and support in developing this article for publication.
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Notes
1. By way of illustration, popular publications include: Barrett (1998) Liberating the
Corporate Soul, Conger (1994) The Spirit at Work, Howard and Welbourn (2004)
The Spirit at Work Phenomenon, Jones (1996) Jesus CEO, Klein and Izzo (1999)
Awakening Corporate Soul, Lodahl and Powell (1999) Embodied Holiness: A Corporate Theology of Spiritual Growth, Mitroff and Denton (1999a) A Spiritual Audit of
Corporate America, Owen (2000) The Power of the Spirit: How Organisations
Transform, and Wood (2006) Business the Bible Way. There are also sites dedicated
to selling spiritual tools of personal and corporate success. For example, Vincent
Roazzi’s website offers a book and series of CD audio products entitled, “Spirituality
of Success: How to Get Rich with Integrity”, available from http://www.spirituality
ofsuccess.com/Home.aspx?tabId=50 (accessed 14 June 2007).
2. The actual membership of this interest group at the time of writing is 640; a statistic
which compares favourably, for example, with the 774 members of the “Critical
Management Studies” AOM interest group and is more than one-tenth the size of the
long-established generic “Organizational Behaviour” grouping of 5816 members.
Data obtained from http://www.aomonline.org/aom.asp?id=18# (accessed 27 January
2010).
3. We shall treat this scholarly community’s claims to be contributing to a “new paradigm” on face value purely on the grounds that it has emic anthropological meaning.
In other words, insofar as proponents of this discourse are engaged in a set of practices that they themselves understand to be paradigmatic, then it is appropriate for
interested observers, such as ourselves, to accept that nomenclature (regardless of
social scientific objections that might be raised regarding this claim).
4. See Case (2004) for further details of (and references to) “paradigm wars” with
organization studies.
5. “Spirituality” according to the Oxford English Dictionary first appears in the English
language around the middle of the fifteenth century and refers originally to, “The
body of spiritual or ecclesiastical persons” (OED online). Among the meanings that
it accrued during the intervening centuries is, “[A]ttachment to or regard for things of
the spirit as opposed to material or worldly interests” (OED online). The word “spiritual” has a slightly older legacy, dating from the fourteenth century and, in addition
to reflecting a structural differentiation between the numinous and material, means
“Of or pertaining to … the spirit or higher moral qualities, esp. as regarded in a religious aspect” (OED online). Early meanings of the term also related to “breathing”
and “respiration”, semantic associations which resonate with the concept of “inspiration” in Medieval Scholasticism. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
“spirituality” became associated with more worldly qualities, such as, refinement of
the senses and intellect (source: http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl, accessed 27
January 2010).
6. In the interests of balance, we should note that elsewhere Fry (2005) advances a
normative argument which privileges the pursuit of “well-being” over principles of
acquisition and consumerism that, he contends, results from a perversion of the
Protestant work ethic in the USA. Nonetheless, it seems that the move from selfish
individualism to collective well-being is to be achieved within reformed and more
278
P. Case and J. Gosling
socially responsible forms of capitalist corporation. Spiritual leadership still plays a
central role in harnessing collective corporate energies for the purposes of enhancing
overall well-being and, indirectly, improving productivity.
Notes on contributors
Downloaded By: [Case, Peter] At: 08:46 22 November 2010
Peter Case is Professor of Organization Studies, Bristol Business School, University of
the West of England and Director of the Bristol Centre for Leadership and Organizational
Ethics. He is general co-editor of Culture & Organization and a member of the editorial
boards of Leadership, Leadership & Organizational Development Journal and the Journal
of Management, Spirituality and Religion. His research interests encompass the ethics of
leadership, organisation theory and studies of technologically mediated organization.
Jonathan Gosling is Professor of Leadership at the University of Exeter Business School,
where he directs the Centre for Leadership Studies and is founder of the One Planet
MBA. Recent research focuses on leadership development in financial services and in
“the arts”, emerging concepts of authority and power amongst academics, and psychoanalytically informed studies of role transitions. He is active in executive education and
consults to top management teams around the world. His work is published in journals
such as Harvard Business Review, Leadership, Higher Education Quarterly, Social
Epistemology, Philosophy of Management.
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