Abstract
Theories of how religion shapes business tend to focus on dominant religious institutions. What happens in the case of minority religions, where the alignment of religion with other dominant institutions may be weak at best? To answer this question, I first develop an emergentist account of religion, explaining how macro-level conditioning shapes meso- and micro-level interactions in religious contexts, leading to either structural change or stasis in business contexts. I illustrate this account by examining how Roman Catholicism as a minority religion shapes corporate capitalism in two cities: Bangalore, India, and Dubai, UAE. Drawing on in-depth interviews (N=200) and 12 months of participant observation, I show how countervailing mechanisms create both assets and liabilities for Catholic professionals’ success in workplaces, contributing to morphostasis rather than change. I argue that such processes cannot be adequately understood without specifying their “macrofoundations,” and identify corresponding macro-level influences at global and local levels. By specifying such macro-micro linkages, this article improves our understanding of how religion shapes business.
Considerations of religion as a macro-social force typically focus on dominant religions in their social contexts—Christianity in the West, Hinduism in India, Islam in the Middle East. Dominant religious institutions tend to have strong relationships with other macro-structures in their contexts, including political, economic, and educational systems and structures. They can shape business through their influences on educational and regulatory systems, working hours and holidays of commercial establishments, proscriptions on the trade of certain goods, tax breaks for or state subsidization of certain faith-based organizations, and so on. But what happens in the case of minority religions, where the alignment of religion with other dominant institutions may be weak, even alienated? How might macro-level effects work in such cases? Answering this question requires revising our default sociological understanding of how macro-level religion shapes capitalism: Weber’s “Protestant ethic” thesis, particularly as expressed through Coleman’s (1986) methodological individualist schematization. Methodological individualism, however, offers an inadequate account of how social structures work, because it assumes a fundamentally untenable social ontology based on an eliminative reduction of macro-structural causal powers.
In this article, I first argue that a more adequate theory of how religion works requires developing an emergentist understanding of religion as a social structure that, while depending on individual persons for its existence, possesses emergent causal powers and properties that cannot be reduced to the individual level (Smith, 2017). These powers are activated and inhibited by contextual factors, including macro-level interactions with other institutions. Meso- and micro-level processes are crucially conditioned by such macro-level processes.
To illustrate this account, I examine the case of how one religion, Roman Catholicism, shapes a particular economic institution (corporate capitalism) in two non-Western cities in which it is a minority religion: Bangalore, India, and Dubai, UAE. Drawing on data from 12 months of participant observation and 200 in-depth interviews, I first explain how structural and cultural conditioning at the macro-level shape the Catholic Church in these contexts, and identify three meso- and micro-level mechanisms through which the church shapes members who are corporate professionals: launching them into corporate jobs, nursing their wounds, and stifling their assimilation. These countervailing mechanisms contribute to a weak morphostasis or maintenance of the status quo in these workplaces, rather than any transformative change. I identify two types of “macrofoundations” (Fine, 1991) that make those mechanisms possible: constraints on perception (which explain why healing-oriented rather than justice-oriented interpretations abound), and institutional “exteriority” necessary for the above micro-level mechanisms to operate. My approach establishes the necessity of taking into account macro-structural conditioning upon which meso- and micro-level mechanisms depend. Such multi-level analysis can significantly improve our understanding of how religion shapes business.
Theoretical Background
It is important from the outset to note that in the sociological literature there is no consensus on the use of the terms “macro” and “micro.” Münch and Smelser (1987, pp. 356-357) identify seven distinct meanings used within a single edited volume on the topic. Without trying to resolve this debate, my own usage here is close to Münch and Smelser’s preference, understanding the micro as involving individual-level interactions and the macro as having to do with social structures, although I use the term “meso” to examine group- and organization-level structures, and reserve “macro” for higher-level processes.
When we think of how, at the macro-level in this sense, religion shapes business or capitalism more generally, the sociological exemplar remains Weber’s (1920/2002) classic argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The general thesis here is that religion at the macro-level (i.e., Protestant religious doctrine, produces a macro-level economic system—modern capitalism). As Coleman (1986) argues, this constitutes a form of methodological holism, which is difficult to empirically test, and requires the assumption of a homeostatic system. He proposes instead a methodological individualism which specifies individual-level mechanisms that underpin macro-macro relations.
Weber, ironically, invented methodological individualism, which he saw as the proper approach of the human sciences: In general, … such concepts as “state,” “association,” “feudalism,” and the like, designate certain categories of human interaction. Hence it is the task of sociology to reduce these concepts to “understandable” action, that is without exception, to the actions of participating individual men. (Weber, 1958, p. 55)
This approach, especially as modeled by Coleman in his famous “boat” diagram, has become considerably influential in explaining not only how religion can shape the economy, but also how macro-level mechanisms work in general (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012, p. 82). Recasting the Protestant Ethic thesis in these terms, macro-level religious doctrine shapes individual actors’ beliefs and values, which then drives their economic actions, which in turn sediment over time to form modern capitalism. This model continues to underpin scholarly assumptions in research on the effects of religion on economic development, where individual-level variables related to beliefs are used to predict religion’s effect on economic growth, producing findings that are contradictory and largely inconclusive (Offutt, Probasco, & Vaidyanathan, 2016, p. 3; cf. Barro & McCleary, 2003; de Jong, 2011; Durlauf, Kourtellos, & Tan, 2012). This confusion, I argue, is rooted in a flawed theoretical understanding of social-structural causation.
In Weber’s formulation, the macro-level concepts (Protestantism and capitalism) are simply ideal types—theoretical tools for the analyst’s use, not real entities in the world. But in what sense does religion in the real world exist and act? If it is only actors at the micro-level that exist, what is it that systematically patterns their actions? We need to address here the often-bracketed question of social ontology: in what sense do social structures (like religion) exist and exert causal influence in the world? Here, while appreciating the growing recognition of the need to specify “microfoundations” (Powell & Colyvas, 2008), and even to conduct multi-level analysis (Bitektine & Haack, 2015), I want to push back against tendencies to either explain away higher-level phenomena by lower-level explanation, or to reduce the ontological status of social structures to that of merely analytical tools or shorthand (Collins, 1981). To adequately understand how religion operates at the macro-level, we need to overcome on one hand, a kind of reification and holism with mysterious agentic powers, and on the other hand, an ontological individualism that reduces social structures to nothing but aggregates of individuals. 1 The best solution, I argue, lies in an emergentist account of social structures (such as religion), which can help specify “macrofoundations” of micro-level processes.
Emergent Structures and Macrofoundations
Methodological individualism (MI) in its original Weberian formulation is crucial to an interpretivist social science, the goal of which is to understand human action from the actor’s point of view. However, over time, proponents of MI rejected Weber’s focus on understanding (verstehen) in favor of causal explanation and prediction (Popper, 1945, p. 78; Watkins, 1957, p. 105). As Heath (2015) notes, this eliminates the methodological necessity for actor-level explanations. Yet, varieties of MI abound today. As critics have noted (Goldstein, 1958; Lukes, 1968), many of these versions conflate MI with an ontological individualism, in which the only real entities that exist are individuals.
Recently, proponents of the “analytical sociology” approach, insistent on tracing out mechanisms that “detail the cogs and wheels of the causal process,” have advocated a “structural individualism” that claims to take relational influences more seriously than methodological individualism does (Hedström & Ylikoski, 2010, p. 50). Nevertheless, in spite of their purported ontological agnosticism, this approach succumbs to a reductionist individualism in practice (Norton, 2014, p. 164), since they acknowledge causal mechanisms only at the individual level, and go so far as to say “there exist no macro-level mechanisms” (Hedström & Swedberg, 1996, p. 299). But a vast variety of social phenomena of a relational and systemic nature (e.g., capitalism, patriarchy, or systemic racial bias) simply cannot be reduced to individual-level properties and mechanisms, or to ideal-types in our minds.
It is important, certainly, to preserve the claim of methodological individualists and analytical sociologists that “it is actors and not variables who do the acting” (Hedström & Bearman, 2009, p. 4). We need to admit with MI proponents that “some reference to individuals is a necessary condition for any full explanation of social phenomena” (Kincaid, 1986, p. 493). But as Wan (2016, p. 167) rightly points out, it does not, therefore, follow that “the only units of analysis that can claim to have causal power and significance are situated at the level of individuals and their actions” (Hedström & Bearman, 2009, p. 4). How do we then account for causal powers and explanatory autonomy of macro-social structures without resorting to an equally untenable holism?
One compelling answer is through the concept of emergence. This concept is shared by a number of complementary approaches to social ontology, including Critical Realism (Bhaskar, 1975; Elder-Vass, 2010; Smith, 2017), Mario Bunge’s “systemism” (Bunge, 2003; Wan, 2016), and Daniel Little’s (2016) “methodological localism.” Understanding emergence requires acknowledging a stratified (as opposed to flat) ontology in which the interaction of entities at a “lower” level can generate a “higher”-level entity with properties distinct from and not reducible to those of its components (Bhaskar, 1975, p. 113). For instance, in the natural world, water is an emergent entity with properties very different from those of hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly, social structures, while depending on individuals for their existence, are emergent entities with inherent causal powers or properties that are irreducible to the individual level, and which operate through causal processes or mechanisms that activate or inhibit different powers in different contexts (Elder-Vass, 2010, pp. 17-23). 2 We can understand emergence at work in at least two senses: synchronic or compositional— higher-level “wholes” are constituted by interactions of lower-level “parts” (Elder-Vass, 2010)—and diachronic or temporal, in which socio-cultural interactions at Time 1 can produce an emergent entity at Time 2, which then acts downwardly to structurally condition and shape its components at Time 3, which can then further interact and produce further structural elaborations or reproduction (Archer, 1995). Thus, meso- and micro-level interactions, crucially shaped by macro-level structural and cultural conditioning, can produce either morphogenesis (transformation) or morphostasis (stability).
Applying this approach to religion, we can understand religions as specific kinds of emergent entities with characteristic properties and powers (Smith, 2017). 3 These causal powers can act “downwardly” on the individuals who sustain it, shaping them over time in new ways (e.g., providing new identities and motivations). The causal powers of religion understood in this sense can be primary (i.e., having to do with its uniquely religious aspect, the pursuit of blessings from superhuman powers) or secondary (i.e., having to do with aspects that are not unique to religion, such as providing identity, community, meaning, legitimation, and social control) (Smith, 2017, pp. 77-80).
A further distinction we should add is between “declarative” cultural capacities (i.e., beliefs, values, discourses, etc.) and “nondeclarative” capacities (i.e., skills, habits, routines, deep-seated assumptions, etc.), which are cognitively encoded and activated in very different ways (Lizardo, 2017). Recognizing these distinctions can attune us to how religion can work through mechanisms beyond those simply related to its primary declarative properties (i.e., doctrinal beliefs), and can prevent us from committing the “religious congruence fallacy” by assuming, as is common in studies of religion, that people will act in consistent ways across social contexts reflecting a coherent set of declarative beliefs (Chaves, 2010). Instead, as I will show in this article, religion’s effect on business may at times operate through its secondary and nondeclarative capacities, such as by providing spaces that cultivate job-related skills and capacities.
Causal mechanisms that activate the powers of religious entities include not only prescriptive teachings but also network ties, social capital, secularized transpositions of religious practices, legal codes, and so on (Smith, 2017, pp. 99-118). But the specific mechanisms through which the causal capacities of any particular religious institution are enacted vary considerably because different socio-historic and contextual factors can activate and inhibit different causal powers. Countervailing mechanisms can operate simultaneously, which is why there can be no universal “covering-law” that determines how religion operates in society, even with respect to business or capitalism. 4 Hence, in some cases religion is a force for maintaining the status quo or social order (Marx, 1972; Parsons, 1951), while in other cases it is a “disruptive” force driving social change (Smith, 1998). Indeed, even if we examine the same religious institution (e.g., Roman Catholicism), we see tremendous variation in its support for or opposition to political and economic regimes, even in a geographically delimited context such as Latin America (Blee, 1984; Crahan, 1991; Neuhouser, 1989).
An emergentist account allows us to make sense of mixed and contradictory findings, such as those that characterize research on the effects of religion on economic growth (Offutt et al., 2016), by preserving the relative causal autonomy of religion as a social structure with powers that depend on social contexts for their activation. Understanding the operation of such structures, which depend on socially situated persons for their existence, requires the adoption of a “methodological localism” that examines, across various levels of analysis, “the local social environments through which action is structured and projected” (Little, 2016, pp. 75-76). Studying the relationship between “religion” and “capitalism” therefore needs to proceed through a multi-level examination of the relationship between concrete instantiations of these structures. Any particular religious entity (e.g., Catholicism) can have different powers and properties activated and operating at different levels which can be illuminated through multi-level analysis.
Once we adopt such an approach, it becomes clear that not only do macro-level explanations depend on microfoundations—we need to at least assume them in principle, if not trace them out in our explanations (Little, 2016)— but micro- and meso-level mechanisms at the individual and group levels also depend on “macrofoundations,” since the downward-causal effects of social structures at the macro-level shape their conditions of possibility. 5 Fine (1991) identifies two types of macrofoundations that are presuppositional in ethnographic and symbolic interactionist research on micro-level processes. First, there are interior constraints on individual perceptions, categorizations, interpretations, and decisions that are socially patterned. Understanding why certain principles and logics make sense in certain socio-historic contexts but not in others requires the recognition of emergent macro-level forces at work. Second, beyond perceptions, micro-level interaction is shaped by a number of structural factors, including “physical limits of the built environment” (which can include everything from seating arrangements in a room to urban architecture); “temporal and spatial effects” which structure our time and social situations; “institutional linkages” across organizations and sectors; and the social fact of “tradition” (Fine, 1991, pp. 166-171). 6
In this article, I illustrate this emergentist, macrofoundationalist approach by examining how one specific religion affects one specific form of capitalism. I consider how Roman Catholicism shapes corporate capitalism in two non-Western cities, Bangalore, India, and Dubai, UAE. Roman Catholicism is a global religion; it might even be seen as “a transnational corporation with discrete national units that function independently and as part of the larger operation at the same time” (Levitt, 2007, p. 120). As a global institution it possesses a number of structural properties—its hierarchical governance structure, its organizational structure into archdioceses and parishes, and so on—as well as cultural properties, such as prescriptive teachings. These beliefs remain subject to ongoing interpretation by different groups. In some contexts, such teachings have entailed strong critiques of capitalism and even mobilized social movements, for instance, in the case of liberation theology in Latin America (Crahan, 1991; Neuhouser, 1989). But in other cases, such as the one I examine in this article, Catholicism largely generates mechanisms for social stability or “morphostasis” (Archer, 1995) in providing support for corporate capitalism. Understanding how a minority religion produces such effects requires a dynamic, multi-level analysis, as summarized in Figure 1.
Macro-micro linkages through which minority religion can shape business.
I first examine structural and cultural conditioning at Time 1 (Archer, 1995), showing how macro-level influences from dominant religious and political institutions, as well as global cultural and ideological influences, shape the Catholic Church in these cities. I then examine structural and cultural interactions at Time 2. Here I focus in particular on three key declarative and nondeclarative cultural mechanisms that operate at the level of parish groups: (a) launching professionals into corporate jobs by cultivating social and cultural capital; (b) nursing professionals by providing a rejuvenating refuge from stressful workplaces; and (c) stifling their unbridled ascent up the corporate ladder by providing moral brakes on certain actions. These countervailing mechanisms, which both enable and constrain the success of members in the workplace, contribute to structural reproduction (morphostasis) or maintenance of the status quo in these workplaces, rather than transformative change. I then explain why the “macrofoundations” I identify are necessary for adequately understanding why these specific mechanisms are activated in this case. Such an approach should make clear that neglecting macro-structural powers limits our ability to adequately make sense of meso- and micro-level mechanisms through which religion shapes business.
Data and Method
This article is based on a larger study of the relationship between religion and capitalism in Bangalore and Dubai that entailed 12 months of participant observation and 200 interviews conducted between 2010 and 2012 (Vaidyanathan, 2019). These include interviews with 122 corporate professionals in Bangalore and Dubai, 103 of whom were Catholic (56 in Dubai and 47 in Bangalore) and the remaining 19 of Hindu, Muslim, or Protestant backgrounds. Sixty-six were male and 56 female. Most of these professionals were long-term residents who had lived more than 10 years in these cities, and all participants had lived in these cities for a minimum of 3 years. Respondents had at least 3 years’ work experience, and worked predominantly in multinational companies in middle-management positions. The Catholic professionals I examine in this article were all active in prayer groups, parish councils, and other volunteer positions in church (e.g., lectors or Eucharistic ministers). In each city, I studied 10 prayer groups frequented by these Catholic professionals. The remaining respondents comprised 26 lay religious leaders in church groups who were not corporate professionals (e.g., entrepreneurs, homemakers, etc.), 33 clergy and professed religious (including priests, nuns, bishops, and cardinals), and 19 others who provided additional contextual data (including counselors, journalists, academics, college students about to embark on professional careers, parents and colleagues of respondents, etc.).
In Dubai, all Catholics were expats. Respondents in the total sample included Indians (45), Filipinos (18), Non-Gulf Arabs (Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians: 12), Europeans (French, Italians, Spanish, Swiss: 11), Gulf Arabs (Emiratis, Kuwaitis, Qataris, Saudis: 10), Nigerians (4), and other nationalities (Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the United States: 4). Thirty-three of my Dubai respondents were second-generation residents (i.e., were born and raised in the Gulf). In India, I interviewed 80 Indian citizens and 2 U.S. expats. Sustained conversations with additional informants and academics in these cities as well as my own previous experience of having lived and worked in these cities aided the research process.
The research was carried out over multiple visits to each city over a 2-year period, along with supplemental fieldwork in Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Doha, Kuwait, and Mumbai. Respondents were recruited from church groups and through snowball sampling from prior contacts in these cities. Interviews lasted 90 min on average and were digitally recorded and manually transcribed. I also conducted participant observations in religious settings (e.g., church groups and meetings) and secular settings (e.g., shopping malls, entertainment venues, and workplaces), recorded and coded fieldnotes, and gathered relevant historical and statistical documents where available. The data I discuss below, therefore, are not only restricted to the individual level but also include discussions of contextual factors based on primary and secondary research.
Data were analyzed through an iterative, abductive process in which theoretical insights informed data collection and vice versa (see Strauss & Corbin, 1990; Tavory & Timmermans, 2014). Because the data I present here are primarily to illustrate the workings of causal mechanisms (and my theorization above does not derive from these data), I have limited my description of the methodology. For additional details, see Vaidyanathan (2019).
Context and Macro-Level Conditioning
Bangalore and Dubai are cities situated in markedly different political regimes—the former in secular, democratic, Hindu-majority India; and the latter in nondemocratic, professedly Islamic UAE. Yet, research reveals that central political projects in both cases are to promote neoliberal policies and pursue leadership in the global market (Davidson, 2008; Upadhya, 2009). Both cities have undergone rapid economic growth over the past three decades, propelled primarily by global trade, and have become regional hubs for many global corporations. Both are now recognized as critical nodes in the world economy, and epitomize rapid globalization. Research also identifies similar social transformations in both cities—increasing individualism, consumerism, socioeconomic inequalities, and the rise of a new transnational professional class (Ali, 2010; Radhakrishnan, 2011; Vora, 2013).
Bengaluru, anglicized as Bangalore, is situated in the South Indian state of Karnataka, and is hailed as the “Silicon Valley” of India, for its pioneering role in the country’s information technology and business process outsourcing boom (Heitzman, 1999). The city’s population grew from around 1.7 million in 1971 to 9.6 million in 2011 according to Indian census data. Bangalore has become a prime migration destination not only simply for jobseekers in the technology industry, but also in the newly emergent service and construction sectors. Drawing in skilled and unskilled migrants alike, Bangalore has the second-highest proportion of in-migrants to local population (Sridhar & Venugopala Reddy, 2011) and the highest proportion of highly educated migrants among Indian cities (Center for Policy Research, 2013).
Dubai is a city-state located in the Arabian/Persian Gulf region, which is home to some of the fastest-developing cities in the world. Whether propelled predominantly by oil companies or free trade zones, these cities rely on a workforce of foreign guest workers, the size of which often far surpasses that of the local population (Davidson, 2008; Krane, 2009). Dubai, like the rest of the UAE and Gulf states, is an ethnic hierarchy, in which Gulf Arabs occupy the top place, while South Asians are relegated to the bottom, with pay-scales for jobs varying accordingly by nationality (Vora, 2013). Like Bangalore, Dubai has seen a rapid population boom in recent decades, from 0.2 million in 1975 to 2 million in 2011 according to census figures (Al Awad, 2008; Nazzal, 2013). Dubai’s foreign population accounts for more than 95% of its workforce, nearly half of which is from the Indian subcontinent (Vora, 2013). Its economy in recent years was propelled by a real estate boom, which collapsed during the financial crisis of 2008 (Krane, 2009). It was not until after the Arab Spring that the city started to recover and see renewed economic growth. Bangalore, by contrast, was not similarly affected by the crisis, and this difference in macro-level shocks contributes to the variation between the two cities in the church’s relationship to business, as I will discuss in the next section.
Research on Gulf cities such as Dubai tends to focus either on the increasing consumerism, individualism, and lack of civic engagement among middle- to upper-class residents (Ali, 2010; Kanna, 2011; Krane, 2009), or on the abusive treatment of lower-class workers such as housemaids and laborers (Human Rights Watch, 2006). Most Arabian Gulf countries prohibit foreigners from obtaining citizenship, including thousands of second- and third-generation expatriates. Thus many of these regimes of “permanent impermanence” (Ali, 2010) become extensions of people’s national as well as religious cultures.
Roman Catholicism in Bangalore and Dubai
Despite its minority status, the Roman Catholic Church is institutionally well established in both cities. The size of the Catholic population in both cities is comparable (an estimated 300,000 in Dubai and 400,000 in Bangalore, although it forms a higher proportion of the population in the former).
The presence of the Catholicism in Bangalore dates back to the 1600s, and presently the city has the third-largest Catholic population among Indian archdioceses. According to church statistics, the Catholic population of Bangalore has remained at nearly 2% of the population for several decades (counting baptisms only—a serious underestimate since it neglects migration inflows). In Bangalore, the Catholic population is predominantly composed of internal migrants, from other parts of the state and country (Nair, 2005). The Archdiocese of Bangalore oversees more 135 parishes and more than 80 schools, 30 colleges, and 40 hospitals and health centers, most of which are run by religious orders. The Catholic Church in Bangalore plays a notable role in the professional formation of the business elite, as two of the leading business schools in the city (Christ University and the St. Joseph College of Business Administration) are run by the church.
Dubai, although located in an Islamic country, holds what is believed to be the world’s largest Catholic parish in terms of membership. The entire Catholic population of Dubai is expatriate, since the law prohibits conversion from Islam. In Dubai, the Catholic Church was granted land to build a parish and school in 1965. Both the church and school were built to accommodate 2,000 persons each. A second, smaller parish was built on the outskirts of the city in 2001. The growing influx of Indians and Filipinos contributed the city’s Catholic population, estimated at more than 300,000. Because the church does not run higher education institutions in Dubai, its role in the formation of business elites is limited. Yet the business community is actively engaged in the church in sustaining various activities and events of parish communities through corporate sponsorships.
Local Structural Constraints
Social and political regulations at the macro-level are a pervasive means through which religion is shaped by national contexts (Grim & Finke, 2007). While both Bangalore and Dubai have religiously diverse populations, there are important social and political regulations on minority religions such as Christianity. India professes to be a secular country that espouses equal tolerance of all religions. But extremist Hindu nationalism has been a prominent force in recent decades, both politically and socially. Several states in India have passed anti-conversion laws, and fundamentalist groups have carried out forceful reconversions to Hinduism (Katju, 2015). Minority religions such as Muslims, Christians, and even lower-caste Hindus have experienced discrimination and even violence in Bangalore (“Bishops Express Concern Over Church Attacks, ‘Ghar Wapsi’ in Bengaluru,” 2015; Mohammad-Arif, 2011; Mondal, 2012). Catholic bishops were outspoken in accusing the state government for turning a blind eye to violent attacks on churches, which they claimed were supported by right-wing political parties, and staged public protests (“Archbishop Slams Karnataka CM Over Church Attacks,” 2008; “Karnataka Bishops to Protest Church Attacks,” 2011). Because of the visibility of Catholic parishes and institutions, Catholic leaders felt especially vulnerable to extremist attacks which occurred whenever any Christian group (especially foreign evangelical missionaries) engaged in proselytism. Extremist nationalist groups which wield considerable political power see Christianity as a foreign religion that must be expelled from India. Many Catholics I talked to in Bangalore, in spite of being Indian citizens, expressed a sense of feeling like second-class citizens.
While Christianity in Bangalore experiences social regulation and at times persecution, in Dubai, it does not experience persecution but is subject to government regulation. Indeed, even a fundraiser, if not organized through state-sponsored charities, technically requires prior permission from the Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities Department of the government (The National, 2010). Recognizing the importance of religion for the foreigners who sustain their economies, most countries in the Gulf region—with the exception of Saudi Arabia—have granted foreigners freedom of worship. Foreign religions are allowed to express and practice their traditions within delimited spaces granted by the government. This enables the vibrant community life within these religious spaces that has largely been neglected by studies on the region.
In spite of the religious tolerance in Dubai, however, church members told me that any perceived challenge of the state (e.g., criticizing the unjust treatment of laborers or domestic workers) could result in serious sanctions, including deportations or even the closing down of the parish. Members expressed a sense of fear because of the visibility of the church (and hence its susceptibility to monitoring), and occasional visits by government officials to ensure things are in order. Even Dubai’s position here is fairly recent. When I went to interview the previous bishop of the region in the small convent in Florence to where he retired, he seemed visibly disturbed and would not let me record our conversation or even take notes. When I asked him to describe his experience as a bishop in the region, he looked to his left and right (although we were alone in the room), then gripping the table, expressed in a whisper that Tutto era controllato! (Everything was monitored). The current bishop, by contrast, feels the situation has somewhat improved because of the global media criticism Dubai has received. 7
This combination of macro-level influences from dominant religious and political institutions in both cities creates pressures on Catholicism to maintain its legitimacy to survive. Survival means different things in both cities—avoiding violence in Bangalore and avoiding deportation or extinction in Dubai. And in both cities, the high migrant inflows overwhelm church leaders, who find themselves scrambling to meet people’s practical needs. As a result, in both cities, institutional leaders feel the pressure to be seen as contributors to society and to minimize perceptions of threat. For instance, in both cities, priests I interviewed expressed with a sense of pride that “we have not converted anybody.” As one Indian priest who worked for many decades in several cities in the region told me, When people are morally weak, then there are problems for the country. The government knows this, and that is why they support us. They appreciate us. When people have space to pray, to turn to God, there is moral support, less frustration, less risk of agitation.
Foreign religion is justified as a means of moral and social control—if people have churches, they will have moral community, and will not protest. The counterpart in Bangalore is the manner in which church-run educational institutions partner with corporations, to provide training and development functions, generating not only well-trained but also “ethical” employees (both at the level of MBA programs in Catholic colleges as well as lower-level community college courses), capable of furthering the nation’s economic development. Macro-level actions here certainly proceed through the actions of individuals (bishops, government officials, etc.), but these individuals are not simply micro-actors because they represent institutions; hence we can talk about states and churches acting (Elder-Vass, 2010, p. 173; Fine, 1991, p. 171). The macro-level pressures thus generated provide crucial macrofoundations for the meso- and micro-level mechanisms I detail in the next section.
Global Cultural Influences
A final macro-level factor to note the additional global forces that shape the type of Catholicism we find in these cities, particularly in the English-speaking church groups that corporate professionals attend. These forces stem from American evangelical and Pentecostal influences, in part through the Charismatic Renewal movement in the Catholic Church (itself an expression of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement) which started in the United States in the 1967. By the end of the 1970s, it had gained a worldwide following, including in Bangalore and Dubai. Most of the professionals’ prayer groups in both cities were offshoots of the Charismatic Renewal movement, started by former members who adopted a bricolage of Catholic, evangelical, and Pentecostal/charismatic forms. As a result, these groups look strikingly similar in both cities. They hold to central tenets and creeds of the Catholic Church, including the sacraments, the Church’s teaching authority embodied in the hierarchy, traditional devotions, and so on. They bear the imprint of American evangelicalism, in prioritizing a “personal relationship with Jesus,” “witnessing” and sharing their faith, an emphasis on frequent Bible-reading, and Contemporary Christian Worship music (most groups follow music by the same artists). They adhere to beliefs and practices that are common to Pentecostal/charismatic groups worldwide, which emphasize the power of the Holy Spirit in individuals’ lives, as manifested through praying in tongues, prophesying, and miraculous healings.
Through the media they consume, the influences of popular religious celebrities they follow (such as Rick Warren, Joyce Meyer, and Joel Osteen), the international networks in which they participate, and their religious practices that produce high “emotional energy” (Collins, 2004), such groups generate a distinctive and recognizable form of religion that combines Catholic, evangelical, and Pentecostal/charismatic elements. I call this “therapeutic individualism.” This is a normative structure, shared across these groups in both cities, which over time shapes both declarative beliefs and nondeclarative dispositions of members. Therapeutic individualism proclaims a God who fundamentally wants to heal and empower the individual believer through a deep, personal, intimate relationship, and sees the believer’s fundamental responsibility as being the pursuit and proclamation of such transformation. This shared logic accords the highest moral priority to the individual’s personal relationship with God, and sees the quality of this relationship as being manifested in a person’s healing—not necessarily from physical ailments but especially from the emotional wounds and anxieties generated in neoliberal environments. Such normative structures do not determine individual behavior, but they do shape people’s “strong evaluations” of good/bad, worthy/unworthy, and noble/vile.
Having examined the macro-level structural and cultural conditioning that shapes the Catholic Church in these cities, I now turn to examine meso- and micro-level interactions through which the church shapes corporate professionals, who play prominent lay leadership roles in churches in both cities. The resonance or “elective affinity” (Weber, 1920/2002) between therapeutic individualism and corporate capitalism becomes clear when we examine the mechanisms through which therapeutic individualism cultivated in these groups shapes corporate professionals.
How Churches Shape Corporate Life: Meso- and Micro-Level Interactions
Parishes and prayer groups in Bangalore and Dubai, shaped on one hand by macro-structural pressures for survival and legitimacy, and on the other hand by macro-cultural influences of therapeutic individualism, shape professionals through three processes: launching professionals by providing social and cultural capital for corporate jobs, nursing them by providing a rejuvenating refuge from cutthroat workplace cultures, and providing moral brakes that can stifle their corporate ascent. 8
Launching: Social and Cultural Capital
Religion can enable capitalism by providing social capital in the sense of network ties through which one is able to get a job (Bourdieu, 1986). Research on transnational migration identifies the importance of religious communities in providing the “bounded solidarity” (Portes, 2010, p. 33) that supports community members and fosters their economic success (Cadge & Ecklund, 2007). Both Bangalore and Dubai have large migrant populations, and Catholics, as members of a minority religion, look to Catholic parishes as a primary source of support in navigating a new environment. There are, however, important differences in how churches in these cities provide social capital. In Dubai, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis which left many unemployed, the main parish began actively cultivating this form of capital by transforming parish bulletin boards (which ordinarily advertised only religious events) to display job ads instead, as well as to announce classified ads for people seeking housing, roommates, and so on. The parish even began to hold classes to improve job skills of members. Churches in other cities in the Gulf that were not as adversely effected as Dubai did not see such changes; neither did Bangalore. Rather, parishioners I talked to there thought it would profane the sacred space of the church to use it to advertise jobs. Instead, social capital is cultivated informally through professionals’ prayer groups as well as ethnic associations that meet in churches.
A second mode of “launching” is by cultivating various skills, habits, and practices in religious settings. In these ways, religious institutions can generate cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986)—transferable cultural capacities which match with criteria for success in the workplace and thus enable people to survive and thrive in transnational corporations. Such capacities cultivated in religious settings include more “fuzzy” or “soft” skills such as communication skills and leadership training, practical skills such as PowerPoint presentation skills, and even the cultivation of personality traits and attitudes that people claim are valuable in the corporate environment. Cultivating these capacities invariably requires the participation of “expert” members of these groups who are corporate managers and trainers themselves. Skills in leadership, organizing, time management, and so on are transmitted primarily by professionals drawing on management texts such as Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which they integrate with Bible verses. Church group leaders in both cities expressed a strong sense of compatibility between their faith and effective management.
Many who were involved in church groups in both cities said that such training motivated them to pursue careers in different areas than they had initially planned, such as training, coaching, or organizational development, where they felt they could use the skills cultivated in their church groups. Church groups provide them with skills that not only are helpful for the running of those groups but also are seen as desirable in the workplace. For instance, one IT manager in Bangalore talked about how his church group experience gave him a practical edge over others, since it cultivated valuable capacities: The qualities I have learned, like submission and leadership qualities, they actually [give me an] edge. That is what I have observed . . . My manager did come and tell me that “You are one person who never gives up; you take the challenge and you do the challenge and you are there for the challenge.” All this I got because of the way I was trained spiritually. I have 12 years of history being in the youth group. We have gone into different trainings of financial management, managing your work, managing your studies. So it really helped me to prioritize my work. That’s really important in the work schedule, to prioritize the work. How to handle situations, actually, and how to escalate issues. . . . These are things that I have learned through my spiritual training. That is what I implement.
This respondent also mentioned attending leadership retreats through his church group that taught him very practical basics that were transferable to the workplace. He said he learned, for instance, to use a to-do list every day, for which he uses Windows 7 Post-its, “and I ensure I don’t forget to do even a small job.” The retreat taught him “to list down what you have to do and how to prioritize your work . . . Now I can spend time in prayer, spend quality time at work. I finish 8 hours of work in four hours.”
In Dubai, members of a young adult group of Arab Catholics explicitly focus on cultivating professional skills. One active member of this group credited the presentation skills she learned from her prayer group with landing her a job at one of the top hotel chains in Dubai. She opened her job interview by asking if she could give them a short PowerPoint presentation that she had prepared about herself and why she saw herself to be the right candidate for her job. Her sales pitch, she believed, worked, because it allowed her to highlight her initiative and her positive qualities in ways that she would not have been able to do in a conventional interview.
Some said that religious groups provided them with cultural capital that was lacking in their home and school environments. Several others gave examples of instances in which workplace outcomes and rewards were directly attributed to the possession of skills which the respondent learned primarily (if not exclusively) in religious settings: mentoring, leadership, organizing, planning, public speaking, and so on. Church groups in both cities thus contribute to cultivating and reproducing the habitus of a middle-class global professional and the concomitant cultural capital that can improve their social mobility. It is important to keep in mind that many of these skills that constitute cultural capital are “nondeclarative” capacities (Lizardo, 2017)—they are more akin to riding a bicycle (i.e., knowing “how”) than memorizing religious doctrine (knowing “that”), and require repeated encoding in religious settings as well as opportunities for practice and redeployment in workplace settings.
Nursing: Religion as Rejuvenating Refuge
Religion can enable corporate life by serving as a refuge providing worn-out professionals a means of rejuvenation and release. Analogous to some of their colleagues who “live for the weekend,” Catholic professionals who belong to prayer groups in these cities eagerly look forward to their weekly church meetings where they can unload their burdens, spend time with friends, participate in powerful emotional experiences, and find moral orientation and meaning, thus gaining a new sense of strength to return to their work environments.
“There are times I cry myself to sleep because of the stress and these kinds of intrigues and stuff [in the workplace],” one Filipina manager in Dubai told me: In my field, which is sales, it can be so stressful at times. You just wanna give up and go home and you’re like “what am I doing here?” One fine day you wake up and realize that “why the heck am I doing this job?”
But she says it is primarily because of her prayer group that she is able to persevere. “It’s our source of strength. Every Friday you look forward to it.” Another sales manager similarly described her anticipation of the event: You’re excited to come. . . . When you have one week full of stress or issues or whatever, at the back of your mind you know that Friday is there. You will be having the [prayer group meeting], you will be meeting your friends, you will be listening to the word of God, to [the religious group leader’s] talk.
Then it rejuvenates you for the week ahead that you will be facing.” Many talked about being able to forgive people who had hurt them, and being less afraid of people, especially of bosses at work.
During these prayer meetings, which combine evangelical and Pentecostal forms of worship, the shared group experience of attunement to a common focus of attention helps generate what Randall Collins (2004) calls “emotional energy,” which is “a feeling of confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative in taking action” (p. 49). We are drawn to situations that increase emotional energy, and repelled by situations that decrease it. Successful “interaction rituals” are a key source of emotional energy, and come about when people assemble together around a mutual focus of attention and share a common mood. Such rituals not only amplify individuals’ emotional energy but also generate group solidarity and charge the central symbols of the group with greater value, strengthening their power in individuals’ lives even outside the context of the ritual. In contrast, unsuccessful rituals are characterized by “low level[s] of collective effervescence, the lack of momentary buzz,” and thus generate little emotional energy or group solidarity (Collins, 2004, p. 51). The prayer groups I studied provide regular occasions for successful rituals, bringing people together around ritually charged objects (for instance, the tabernacle in a chapel), with music and teachings evoking emotions of passionate love, devotion, and surrender. Even physiologically, the bodily stances adopted by prayer group members often resemble “high-power poses” with arms outstretched in a V, which might physiologically empower people (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010).
In these groups, members experience a loving God capable of bringing healing and resolution to their problems and stressors, whether personal or professional. Members talk about finding a renewed sense of self-confidence and purpose in these group. One respondent in Bangalore talked about how, having grown up in a working-class home, he felt ostracized from many of his professional peers: There’s a lot of difference from a guy who wears a simple shirt and pants to a guy who wears a Levi’s or branded jeans and t-shirt. It makes a difference. I have been through a lot of inferiority complex. And after I met Jesus, I have been able to overcome a lot of things like that.
The power of these experiences can spill over beyond religious spaces as well, when through various modes of boundary-transitioning (Nippert-Eng, 1996), people attempt to recreate or maintain continuity with their experience in religious spaces. Examples here include listening to religious songs in the car on the way to work, displaying religious images or objects that may serve as ritually charged totems to evoke religious experiences, praying at work, and so on. In such ways, people claim to find occasions of refuge and rejuvenation even in their work realms, moments during which they are able to re-orient themselves, feel more in touch with their “true” (or “better” or “ideal”) selves, awaken their religious sentiments, and experience renewed peace and confidence. One respondent, a public relations (PR) manager in Bangalore, talked about using meditative techniques she learned in her church group to deal with stress at work: I always know that whenever I get anxious or stressed out, I realize at that point of time I’m not really surrendered to God. I’m taking the whole load on my shoulder and doing things my way. It helps at that point to just stop and say in my heart, “Lord you’re here with me, you are my strength. I give this to you.” I literally, like see this big bag, I take it and say, “It’s yours—you tell me what to do!” And then, you know, because of faith or because of grace, you immediately feel much lighter. You feel the stress go off. And you’re not really bothered. Because you know at the end of the day nobody can really fire you unless it’s God’s will for you to leave. And nobody can really retain you unless it’s God’s will for you to stay back, you know? So it works both ways.
It is not only that faith helps her manage stress, but also that the workplace provides her a context outside religious settings in which to regularly extend religious practices and habits, and reactivate concomitant associations, emotions, and dispositions.
Religion’s ability to serve as a rejuvenating refuge is thus contingent on people experiencing religious groups as a compelling source of emotional energy. Its effects can spill over into the workplace depending on cues and stimuli in the workplace context that trigger such experiences (Weaver & Stansbury, 2014), as well as people’s willingness and creativity when it comes to managing the boundary work entailed in integration (Nippert-Eng, 1996).
Stifling: Moral Brakes on Workplace Behavior
Religious commitments can pose ethical constraints on individuals’ behaviors in the workplace when people perceive a conflict between dispositions cultivated in religious settings and some of the practices that might otherwise hasten one’s ascent up the corporate ladder. For instance, sales professionals may be unwilling to lie, despite being required to by their superiors; customer service professionals may be unwilling to make false promises to customers that they are mandated to; managers may be unwilling to downsize employees in spite of pressures from above; people may refuse to take revenge on colleagues who have wronged them, and so on. Many of my respondents talked about how, in such cases, religious injunctions and schematic associations repeatedly cultivated in church groups would eat away at them, becoming the voice of a conscience that grew louder until they eventually either gave in and changed the offensive behavior, or compromised their faith in favor of survival. In all of these cases, religion, to varying degrees, poses an impediment to workplace logics and routines, and can pose an obstacle to a smooth career trajectory. Consider a couple of examples.
One Indian consultant in Dubai talked about how his faith affected some of his work-related tasks when the demands of work conflict with what he understands as the demands of faith. He narrated an incident from his early days in the company when his boss insisted that he and his team in the IT support center not respond to clients’ emails for at least 48 hours, to maintain the impression that they are busy—even if they really had nothing else to do. After complying with this for a few weeks, his conscience began to trouble him; it became increasingly clear to him, he says, that “I should be faithful to God who gave me this job.” As a result, he violated his boss’ orders and began responding to emails as soon as he received them, which led to reprimands from his boss.
Others talked about how their conscience, shaped by their religious conditioning, bothered them when it came to other commonly accepted practices at work, such as over-charging the company for work-related expenses. One finance manager working with a U.K.-based firm in Bangalore talked about how his faith led him to quit his previous job. He had worked for a leading bank in India. He explains why he was forced to quit this job: There were [a] lot of very challenging things. You had to say lies. There was something called buddying. I was a manager, and I had to buddy with another manager to meet with high-net-worth customers. So when we would meet them, I would say the truth. I would say, “A particular investment would not fetch more than this.” But I was not supposed to say that. I was supposed to say that it will fetch, it’s a probability. But that probability has never been a possibility in the last 10 years at least [laughs]. So you were supposed to quote a probability and not a possibility. So coming from a finance background, after doing so much research, I felt what I was doing was injustice to my career, injustice to what I believed in, injustice to the creator who touched my life. So I felt I needed to quit the job. And I did it, but again I had to go through a lot of persecution at home, because my parents were expecting me to take care of the family and things like that. And this was a highly paid job. But I had to quit that, just for Jesus.
In some of these cases, religious influences may lead to lost productivity for the firm when employees and managers reject the use of the typical and accepted means through which the company maximizes its profitability. This might entail detrimental outcomes for the employees in question, including demotions, transfers, or terminations, which were experienced by many of my respondents. In other cases, the effect may be primarily psychological—for instance, when religiously devoted professionals start avoiding colleagues or office events because they do not want to be tempted to gossip or drink or “backslide” in other ways. This might inhibit their chances of promotion if their roles depended on sustained interaction with their teams. Constraints posed by religion may thus adversely affect the workplace success of believers, providing moral brakes on a narrative of untrammeled ascent. Such impediments can then become occasions for the further strengthening of faith commitments when such alienation intensifies one’s need for a religious refuge (or for a miracle that would prevent them from getting fired). Occasions of moral conflict in certain fields (such as sales) also led to many of my respondents moving to other domains, such as human resource (HR) or consulting, where they experienced less conflict with their faith commitments.
Religious groups also help condition what counts as an object of moral attention. Here there are blind spots and inadvertent ethical boundaries (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011) in the application of therapeutic individualist religion to workplace settings. For instance, consider the respondent who in the previous section talked about surrendering her workplace troubles to Jesus. When I asked her later in the interview about her interactions with her subordinates, she complained that they would try to tell her about their personal and family problems. She rolled her eyes, saying that she tells them, “Keep those kinds of things outside the workplace.”
On the whole, my respondents seemed unable to recognize structural obstacles such as unethical working environments and unjust demands (e.g., long working hours which left them with little time for their family), and instead framed faith-work integration as a matter of maintaining continuity with their religious commitments and dealing with challenges such as workplace stressors.
Macrofoundations of Meso- and Micro-Mechanisms
The mechanisms of launching, nursing, and stifling that I have outlined above are crucially shaped by macro-structural factors, without which we cannot adequately understand why these particular mechanisms are activated in these contexts. The macrofoundations proposed by Fine (1991)—interior perceptual constraints as well as institutional exteriority (through the built environment, spatiotemporal effects, institutional linkages, and tradition)—are especially relevant here.
The pressure for survival and legitimacy created by macro-level institutional linkages between dominant religions and socio-political regulations is a significant structuring condition. In both cities, the church needs to be seen as not posing a threat to dominant religions by proselytizing and also wants to be seen as not only legitimate but also indispensable to the polity.
In the case of Dubai, the pressure for survival was amplified by the 2008 financial crisis, an additional macro-level event, which made it an institutional priority for the church there to respond to the needs of members who found themselves laid off, struggling to find new jobs or even to afford tickets to return to their home countries. Temporal and spatial effects imposed by the macro-environment, such as durations of residence visas and the spatial resources of the church, prompted the urgent creation of new modes of social capital and human capital formation. In Bangalore and even in other Gulf cities such as Doha or Muscat that were not as severely affected by the crisis, what Fine (1991) calls “the obdurate reality of tradition” rendered such changes unthinkable.
The availability of church spaces with meeting rooms and technologies such as the Internet and PowerPoint also is a necessary condition for the transmission of cultural capital through which these church groups reproduce the professional habitus. The logic of therapeutic individualism also shapes the ways in which professionals see their ongoing cultivation of such forms of social and cultural capital as being their proper calling. For instance, when I asked the leader of a professionals’ prayer group in Bangalore whether his group participated in any of the church’s various poverty alleviation or social service commitments, he replied: No. I’ll tell you why we don’t do social service. Because Church has been doing that a lot. We don’t need another social service [organization]. What we can do in fact is touch people’s lives. So what we say in [our group] is that let’s build people’s lives in such a way that they become a blessing to others, encouraging people to lead a life that is positive. I mean that’s really what is needed today.
Therapeutic individualism and its emphasis on healing undergirds the continual commitment of these groups to providing a rejuvenating refuge for professionals. One perceptual constraint posed by this framework is that it renders unthinkable the prospect of unionization as a means of voicing and addressing grievances; rather, such problems are seen as best voiced to and resolved by God. While support for unions has been voiced strongly in the body of Catholic doctrine known as Catholic Social Teaching (Catholic Church, 1981), this principle is disconnected from the theological frameworks available to professionals in these cities, and is also bolstered by other macro-level institutional linkages: unionization is structurally ruled out by employment law in the UAE, while among Bangalore corporate professionals, unionization is seen as incompatible with their professional identities (Noronha & D’Cruz, 2009).
In examining the “stifling” mechanisms of moral brakes, it is important to recognize that the sorts of issues and situations that individuals count as morally relevant are also shaped by “cultural conditioning” at the macro-level (Archer, 1995). For the professionals in the church groups I studied, matters related to lying, cheating, stealing, gossip, and sexuality are morally salient. But when it comes to other issues, particularly framed in terms of justice, or that are systemic in nature—also issues addressed in Catholic Social Teaching—there is an ethical blind spot. For instance, professionals who would bemoan that their colleagues’ marriages were falling apart, because of working long hours apart from each other, believed that it was ultimately these colleagues’ fault for choosing such professions in the first place. The structural conditions of exploitative work are thus taken-for-granted and not an object of moral evaluation. Similar to what research shows on American evangelicals (Emerson & Smith, 2000), therapeutic individualism elides systemic and structural causes for social problems, for fear that doing so could undermine personal responsibility.
Discussion and Conclusion
Religion has both “world-maintaining” and “world-shaking” capacities (Berger, 1967). It has been differently understood as a macro-level force for maintaining social order, solidarity, integration, and the status quo (Durkheim, 1951; Marx, 1972), or as a “disruptive” force for social change (Smith, 1998). A religious institution like Catholicism can be a driving force behind capitalism (Novak, 1993) or can produce strong opposition to it (Blee, 1984). In this article, I have argued that making sense of such mixed effects of religion on capitalism requires, on one hand, abandoning the pursuit of futile covering-laws—as found in the slew of inconclusive studies on whether some religions are good or bad for economic growth (see Offutt et al., 2016)—and on the other, avoiding the methodological individualist temptation to explain away macro-level effects at the micro-level. Instead, I have proposed and illustrated an emergentist account of religion along with the macrofoundations that shape meso- and micro-processes, thus contributing to recent injunctions for more multi-level institutional research (Bitektine & Haack, 2015; Little, 2016).
In doing so, I have examined the case of Catholicism as a minority religion shaping corporate capitalism in Bangalore and Dubai. Here I have identified three countervailing mechanisms that serve as both assets and liabilities for professionals’ corporate success: launching, nursing, and stifling. Churches in these cities produce professionals who may possess certain skills and dispositions valued in corporate life, but are unwilling to play by the rules of a cutthroat culture which entails compromising moral commitments cultivated in their churches. The net result of these countervailing mechanisms is a particular type of morphostasis—weak support of the status quo. Catholicism here offers neither enthusiastic support of corporate capitalism nor a systemic critique. At the same time, the resources of Catholic Social Teaching, which one might assume to be readily available to Catholic leaders around the world, remain largely untapped and unused in this context. Meso- and micro-level analyses are insufficient to make sense of these findings. Rather, it is crucial to recognize how these mechanisms are shaped by macro-level factors at the local and global levels, including pressures from survival and legitimacy exerted by dominant religious institutions and socio-political regulations, and the “therapeutic individualism” that emerges from the interaction of multiple global cultural flows.
The approach I have adopted here helps us make sense of variations in macro-level outcomes of religion by recognizing that the activation and inhibition of powers and properties of any particular religious institution depend heavily on local contextual factors.
In contexts where we find direct symbiosis between religion and capitalism, religious groups align with nationalist parties to promote loyalty to neoliberal development as key to being a good citizen as well as a good member of the religious community—a good Muslim worker in Indonesia or a good Hindu professional in India (Radhakrishnan, 2011; Rudnyckyj, 2009). Because of its minority status in my contexts, however, Catholicism is alienated from nationalist projects of neoliberalism. One does not easily equate being a good Indian or Bangalorean or Dubayyan with being a good Christian. So the Catholic Church here does not lend itself to any ideological justification for such symbiosis; it remains somewhat removed, in spite of attempts to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of dominant groups, such as by running elite business schools in Bangalore or convincing Arabian Gulf leaders of its contribution to social control. When one is rendered second-class by the state, it becomes more difficult to assent wholeheartedly to its ideological commitments. Conversely, while the Catholic Church in some parts of Latin America has served as an oppositional force to challenge the established order (Crahan, 1991), in the cases I have studied, it offers no systemic critique of capitalism. This is not only because of the therapeutic individualism which blinds many lay Catholics to systemic factors, but also due to pressures faced by institutional leaders to foster the practical survival of members in a context of high migration flows. Also, the individualist ethic I identify among Catholics in my cases starkly contrasts the “community-centered” ethic typically associated with Catholicism (Tropman, 2001). The net result of these influences, therefore, is a weak contribution to the status quo, or morphostasis, rather than structural change.
A secondary contribution of this article is to show how religion works not only through its primary and declarative capacities (such as religious doctrine) but through its secondary (i.e., not unique to religion as such) and nondeclarative capacities, such as by providing spaces that foster the social reproduction of corporate professionals who equip new generations with organizational and technological skills. Research on how religion shapes corporate life tends to focus overwhelmingly on primary and belief-related capacities (Tracey, Phillips, & Lounsbury, 2014; Weaver & Agle, 2002; Weaver & Stansbury, 2014). But as considerable sociological research shows, religious belief is only loosely coupled with any consistent action-outcomes; rather, religious congruence is rare and difficult to obtain (Chaves, 2010). Swidler (2003) has argued that people’s strategies of action, such as career paths, are driven more by their nondeclarative skills and capacities rather than their declarative values. This might help explain, for instance, why Mormons, although constituting only 2% of the U.S. population, hold a disproportionately high percentage of senior leadership positions in major corporations. Winter (2011) suggests that these capacities may originate in the leadership, organizational, and public speaking skills cultivated in religious settings from an early age, as well as the resilience created by the demanding experience of foreign mission trips that involve cultural immersion and persistent rejection. Similarly, many of the Catholic professionals I studied tended to opted out of high-moral-conflict professions like sales and moved to functions such as HR where they found themselves implementing skills already cultivated in church settings, without having to navigate as much moral conflict. Future research needs to attend to such nondeclarative capacities more seriously. Recognizing that declarative and nondeclarative forms of culture are encoded, activated, and deployed very differently (Lizardo, 2017) can open up new and promising avenues of research on how religion shapes business. However, even in such examples as the Mormon case, it is crucial to acknowledge that different macro-level structural and cultural influences would yield different results.
The case study I have used to illustrate my theory is admittedly limited in a number of ways. While I have mentioned some of the structural mechanisms through which Catholicism shapes capitalism (e.g., running business schools in Bangalore), the bulk of my data are at the individual level. Furthermore, the individuals I studied are the more active members of their parishes. Assessing the effects of religion on the working lives of the majority of ordinary members would require a further large-scale study. However, my data offer some hints as to what these effects might be. First, declarative cultural mechanisms that they are exposed to, such as religious sermons, focus on themes such as obedience and honesty, rather than, for instance, exhortations to success or resistance. Also, as discussed above, social capital cultivated through interactions with co-ethnics in church settings facilitate access to corporate jobs. The orientation of religious leaders to support corporate capitalism (e.g., structurally supporting business education in Bangalore, and claiming to serve as moral support for the regime in Dubai) also suggests that any religious influences on average members would at most contribute in weaker ways to the same morphostasis. In any case, the theoretical model developed here should be further assessed in cases of morphogenesis, where religion fosters structural changes in capitalist institutions.
I have proposed in this article an emergentist theory of religion that can better identify mechanisms through which macro-level religion can shape capitalism. But we need to remember that religion and capitalism are multifaceted concepts. Religions contain diverse elements (beliefs, practices, dispositions, and communities) that can differently support and challenge different aspects of business. I have focused here on corporate life, and the conditions that produce morphostasis, rather than other outcomes, in this particular context. One might consider capitalism as ideology, or examine a different mode of business, such as entrepreneurship, and identify different mechanisms. A study of other “varieties of capitalism,” such as coordinated market economies, would also likely yield different results. The configuration of the religion-capitalism relationship will thus always be highly contingent on what properties of these entities are activated by different contexts, resulting in diverse hybridized forms. No universal law or formula can determine it.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 2012 and the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University in 2013.
This article also benefited considerably from feedback received through the Business & Society manuscript development workshop at Brigham Young University in April 2017, and the workshop on Critical Realism and Human Flourishing in Montreal in August 2017. I would like to thank Elaine Howard Ecklund, David Johnson, Pawan Dhingra, Stephen Offutt, Margarita Mooney, Nicolette Manglos-Weber, Tim Rutzou, Ali Gumusay, Vishnu Poruthiyil, Maurice Murphy, Collins Ntim, Hussein Abdou, Raza Mir, Harry Van Buren, and the anonymous reviewers at Business & Society for their feedback on various iterations of this article. All errors are mine.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by grants from the Graduate School, the Institute for the Study of Liberal Arts, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.