Managing people ‘spiritually’: a Bourdieusian critique

Abstract

This article draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology to examine how organizational spirituality is being framed as a new way to manage people. The article takes a critical look at the way much of the literature prescribes spiritual values with the subtext that human resource practices infused with spiritual values, inter alia, improve organizational performance. This article demonstrates how ‘symbolic violence’ provides an analytical tool to unravel the theoretical make-up of organizational spirituality. This critique posits that the ‘top-down’ approach to organizational spirituality relies on a Bourdieusian ‘cultural arbitrary’ and the ‘power of pedagogy’ to seek the active consent of organizational members. The article proceeds to identify the ideological underpinnings of this process, thus paving the way for new critical theorizing on organizational spirituality.

Keywords

Bourdieu organizational spirituality religion symbolic violence

Introduction

This article seeks to enhance understanding of the theoretical make-up and ideological underpinnings of organizational spirituality through a Bourdieusian critique of the extant literature (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990). The analysis fills a gap in the emerging critique through the innovative use of the analytical tool of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). A Bourdieusian analysis considers how ‘meaning’ is constituted through processes of social reproduction which involve complicity on the part of organizational members and how this in turn seeks legitimacy for the pursuit of organizational spirituality.

Organizational spirituality has emerged as a ‘resource’ which is said to confer a competitive advantage upon organizations that infuse spiritual values into management practice (Bandsuch and Cavanagh, 2005; Cash et al., 2000; Chappell, 1993; Craigie, 1999; Giacalone and Jurkiewicz, 2003; Neal and Biberman, 2003; Novak, 1996; Preville, 1999). Yet there is little consensus as to its status as an organizational construct given its reliance on nebulous notions such as ‘connectedness’, ‘soul’, ‘being fully alive’, ‘religiosity’, etc. This has led some to describe organizational spirituality as ‘anecdotal, conceptual, or pure conjecture’ (Neal and Biberman, 2003). Sass (2000) laments that many authors advocate spirituality and ignore its implications for the processes of organizing. For example, Mitroff and Denton (1999a: 91) assert that ‘We need to integrate spirituality into management. No organization can survive for long without spirituality and soul.’ This article examines why the discourse of organizational spirituality is being pursued, by whom and for what ideological ends. It then proceeds to tackle the phenomenon with regard to Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory to determine how this discourse seeks to achieve ‘symbolic capital’ within the workplace through a managerial rhetorical device that has problematic ideological underpinnings.

The phenomenon, which is variously described as ‘organizational spirituality’, ‘workplace spirituality’ and ‘management, spirituality and religion’ (MSR), first came into prominence in the early 1990s. This article opts for the term ‘organizational spirituality’, and focuses on the literature on spirituality which is driven from the top and managed in a manner reminiscent of corporate culture. The concern here is not with the ‘positive aspects’ that emanate from within and are based on personal choices about religious observances and spiritual nourishment (Boyle and Healy, 2003; Brown, 2000; Graber et al., 2001).

Much of the initial literature was by North American scholars and business executives, such as the CEOs of frequently cited cases, including ServiceMaster, the Beckett Corporation, Medtronic, Tom’s of Maine and so forth. These writers popularized the notion that values derived from the Christian faith can be wedded effectively to human resource and business practices in order to achieve strategic business goals while at the same time helping employees find ‘inner meaning’ in the workplace. In other cases, such as Southwest Airlines, spirituality is not linked to religion, but ‘manifests itself in humour, compassion, and relational competence’ (Benefiel, 2005: 9).

A perusal of the field’s flagship journal, the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion, reveals that scholars from around the world are now engaging with spirituality in a wide range of organizations and from different religious perspectives. Within the UK, a key contribution is Lamont’s (2002) search for spirituality in organizations such as Happy Computers, Bayer (UK), NatWest, IMG and Microsoft (UK). The literature embraces a variety of organizational phenomena including human resources, leadership, business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR), as in the case of the Body Shop which links spirituality to CSR.

While most of the organizational spirituality literature has concerned itself with the western spiritual tradition and is heavily influenced by religions such as Christianity, others have tried to relate eastern spiritual principles to management and leadership (Hawley, 1993), and African spiritual values to management (Mbigi, 2000). Greyston Family Support Services, one of Benefiel’s (2005) case studies, is based on Buddhist principles. Islamic influences are evident for example in the Gulen network, which runs organizations that seek to promote peace, love, tolerance for diversity, etc. (Karakas, 2008), or in Islamic banking which is based on sharia principles such as ethical investing and the prohibition of usury (Banaji, 2007).

Spirituality is not synonymous with religion. Spirituality ‘avoids the formal and ceremonial connotations of “religion”; it is non-denominational, non-hierarchical and non-ecclesiastical’ (Graber et al., 2001: 40). Thus, while religion in the workplace is about the observance of established faiths, for example Islam, Judaism and Christianity (Chappell, 1993; Novak, 1996), spirituality is generally defined as a quest for meaning, the experience of a relational connectedness between the complete self and the world around one (Mitroff and Denton, 1999a). It is maintained here that the two cannot be completely disconnected from each other. Therefore, the quest for spiritual meaning and the inculcation of religious values are part of the broader organizational spirituality discourse.

While organizational spirituality has not been theorized within the human resources (HR) context, it has been promulgated as an approach for managing people. Given the debate on ethics and human resource management (HRM) (Pinnington et al., 2007; Winstanley and Woodall, 2000), organizational spirituality needs further theoretical articulation since it is an ethically grounded worldview for managing people. The voluntary and very personal efforts to experience spirituality (Boyle and Healy, 2003; Lips-Wiersma, 2002a) should be separated from the deliberate inculcation of business and HR values which are couched in spiritual and religious terms. There is a danger in imposing religious/spiritual values on employees, and tying organizational spirituality to the social construction of competence and performance, hence defining performativity and potentially influencing employability.

For Cullen (2008: 286), the challenge is to strike a balance between having ‘spiritualized’ managers who recognize the transcendent needs of employees and organizations, but ‘who are also aware of the dangers of organizational and workplace spirituality being “hi-jacked” as a tool of ideological control.’ It is not only managers, but also scholars, who are prone to ignore the ideological angle. Nadesan (1999) argues that employees are likely to question the legitimacy of a spiritual discourse that marginalizes, obscures or de-politicizes events and circumstances that employees experience, while Mirvis (1997: 203) urges researchers to ‘assess whose interests are served by organizations introducing spirituality into their modus operandi’. This article aims to contribute to the debate on theorizing organizational spirituality by critiquing the ‘corporate’ organizational spirituality which is often instigated by business owners and driven by managers who may also find themselves required to embrace it.

Organizational spirituality and Bourdieu’s social theory

There is currently a dearth of empirical research into the manifestations of spirituality in the workplace. Fornaciari and Lund Dean (2009) identify six key themes in the literature: research methodologies and seminal instruments; the meaning of spirituality and religion; practical considerations for introducing organizational spirituality; education and training issues; organization-level issues; and the relationship between religion and spirituality. This article makes a two-fold contribution: it aims at theory-building and is at the same time a critique of the emergent literature with reference, where possible, to those studies that describe how spirituality has been fused with management practice.

Recent evidence suggests that researchers are increasingly cognizant of the risks and implications of prescribing spiritual values. This article builds on the relatively small but emergent critical literature (Bell, 2008; Bell and Taylor, 2003; Brown, 2003; Cunha et al., 2006; Driver, 2005; Nadesan, 1999; Sass, 2000; Tourish and Pinnington, 2002), not by reinterpreting these perspectives, but by offering a hitherto unexplored Bourdieusian perspective within this context. Brown (2003) notes that the 1990s optimism and prescription have since been replaced by greater scepticism and proposes that workplace spirituality might in fact be a repackaging of earlier organizational development concepts such as ‘values’ and ‘participation’. Similarly, Benefiel (2003: 390) argues that ‘if the study of spirituality in organizations is to be taken seriously in the larger scholarly community, a solid philosophical base must be established’. It is the purpose of this article to heed this call.

For Cunha et al. (2006), ‘spiritualities’ manifest themselves in a variety of forms and are based on theories of the firm which all have an ideological component. Arguing that workplace spirituality is not neutral with respect to power relations, Bell and Taylor (2003) frame their critique in terms of the Foucauldian notion of ‘pastoral power’ in which spiritual expression becomes an integral part of working life as opposed to a quest for salvation in the next world. In a subsequent contribution, Bell (2008) argues that the relative neglect of a ‘critical spirituality’ of organization is attributable to the perception of ‘critical’ as being concerned with the ‘dark side’, while spirituality is concerned with something more positive. Driver (2005) adopts a psychoanalytical approach to show how spirituality promises its converts a lived experience of ‘authentic selfhood’ yet leads to delusion, and then suggests how delusion might be avoided.

This article takes this critical perspective further with reference to Bourdieu’s work. It begins by acknowledging Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘active consent’ (as opposed to ‘coercion’) which has notable resonances with Bourdieu’s notion of ‘complicity’. However, in Gramscian terms, hegemony remains philosophical, not purely ideological, since for him, ideology connotes something false, or disguises other material interests (Bocock, 1986). While recognizing how hegemony can become ideological (Degiuli and Kollmeyer, 2007), this article opts for the less understood but equally analytically powerful concept of symbolic violence which facilitates a critique of organizational spirituality while fully retaining its ideological cloak.

Some forms of organizational spirituality such as the ones Lamont (2002) identifies in UK firms closely resemble organizational culture, with values such as ‘respect’, ‘an emphasis on relationships’, ‘a happy workplace’, ‘doing to others what you would like them to do to you’ and so forth. In a similar vein, Bandsuch and Cavanagh (2005) contend that workplace spirituality is comparable but not identical to organizational socialization. Some of Lamont’s (2002) firms do not even explicitly acknowledge themselves as pursuing organizational spirituality, as in the case of Happy Computers which claim to be committed to giving their employees and clients a ‘happy experience’. Lamont considers this to be consistent with respecting individuals’ spirituality or soul. Similarly, when a Microsoft director talks of ‘spirit’, it sounds like esprit de corps for effective teamwork, rather than a deep quest for meaning in life, often involving God as in Mitroff and Denton’s (1999b) study, or the search for a superior being through prayer as in the Canadian firm Ouimet-Bleu (Preville, 1999).

This article focuses on this latter form of organizational spirituality which involves the inculcation of values steeped in religion (explicitly or implicitly), by business leaders and senior managers, and is consistent with prior work on the role of ideology in creating integrative values for functional (productivity) and symbolic consequences (Kamoche, 2000). The critique here delves into ideological domination, legitimation and the subtle structuring of social relations through what Bourdieu calls a ‘cultural arbitrary’. Though Bourdieu has largely been ignored by organizational theorists (as compared to, say, Foucault and Giddens), his social theory has significant implications for the critical study of organizational spirituality, particularly with regard to the questions of legitimacy and ideology. The relevance of his relational theory of sociology which embraces his key constructs, capital, habitus and field, is now increasingly acknowledged (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008). Since the earlier introduction of Bourdieu’s work to a broader sociological and organizational studies audience (DiMaggio, 1979; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), researchers have been drawing from his work to explore identity, cultural capital and life choices, class structures and power, moral norms and so forth (Atkinson, 2010; Bauder, 2006; Cooper, 2008; Corsun and Costen, 2001; Crompton, 2010; Liversage, 2009; McDonough, 2006; McLeod et al., 2009; Morean, 2009; Mutch, 2003; O’Mahoney, 2007; Oakes et al., 1998; Townley et al., 2009; Warhurst and Nickson, 2007).

This article focuses on Bourdieu’s less well known concept of symbolic violence. That is not to say that symbolic violence should be viewed as separate from the three concepts above. In fact, these four are best seen as ‘an architecture’ of interrelated concepts, whereby symbolic violence is objectified in physical objects, certificates and other forms of cultural capital as well as in persons as habitus (Robinson and Kerr, 2009). Except for authors such as Robinson and Kerr (2009) who investigate how charismatic leadership manifests itself as a form of symbolic violence, symbolic violence has not received as much attention in organization studies as Bourdieu’s other concepts. These authors argue that:

if symbolic violence is a way of conceptualizing legitimate domination, then habitus conceptualizes how structural domination is mediated at the interpersonal, everyday level (and misrecognized by followers as ‘charm’ for example or as the attributes of the ‘natural leader’). (Robinson and Kerr, 2009: 881)

The pursuit of meaning within the ‘enterprise culture’ reflects not just an economic revival but a ‘moral crusade’ (Du Gay, 1991) that involves hidden forms of persuasion based on achieving a complicit agreement between objective and cognitive structures (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 168). Though not without controversy, symbolic violence is one of Bourdieu’s more deeply elaborated concepts developed initially through extensive anthropological and sociological research commencing in the late 1950s (Bourdieu, 1958) and occurring particularly during the 1960s and 1970s (Bourdieu, 1990). Bourdieu (1977: 192) describes it as a gentle and invisible form of violence involving codes of honour and virtue and claims it to be the most economical mode of domination. Symbolic violence lends itself to critical thinking by encouraging researchers to attend in detail to ways that naming and categories of thought contribute to relations of domination. It is in this regard that it is applied here as an analytical lens to cast a critical gaze on organizational spirituality.

Symbolic violence provides an important theoretical perspective for unraveling the structure of power relations inherent in discourses that reproduce while concealing embedded social hierarchies and power asymmetries. This concept is especially pertinent for the way it captures the forces that underpin the construction, reproduction and re-affirmation of social relations. The fusion of human resource practices and spiritual ideals or the ‘search for meaning’ is problematic, especially when the exercise is presented as value neutral, while at the same time being promoted as ‘a good thing’, and rationalized on the grounds of competitive advantage (Mitroff and Denton, 1999a).

Symbolic violence is about the exercise of force or power upon social agents with their complicit acceptance (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). Illustrating with the example of non-reciprocal gift giving which creates a peaceful, cooperative attitude and a form of domination over the recipient, Bourdieu argues that the misrepresentation of the economic reality of the exchange is embedded within the habitus of the group, thus sustaining the desired system of power relations.

Symbolic violence in practice

This section determines the extent to which symbolic violence manifests itself within organizational spirituality through the ‘cultural arbitrary’ of managerial power and the effects of ‘pedagogy’. This will shed light on the extent to which organizational spirituality can be said to have acquired symbolic capital. Symbolic violence takes three forms: it works through mechanisms of social control which are not always explicit; it applies the power of pedagogy to change what is at stake; and it is manifest by denying yet at the same time reinforcing realities such as hierarchy (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). As Legge (1995: 193) notes, the use of managerial/bureaucratic controls involves an attempt ‘to bind individuals to behavioural acts that are coherent with (newly) espoused values’. This is evident in organizational spirituality practices such as prayer meetings before work (Mitroff and Denton, 1999b; Preville, 1999), Konosuke Matsushita’s blending of spiritual faith and industry (Kotter, 1997), Cadbury’s fusion of Quakerism with business practices (Rowlinson and Hassard, 1993) and the claimed positive correlations between ‘dimensions’ of spirituality and employee job outcomes such as retention, commitment and productivity (Bandsuch and Cavavagh, 2005; Milliman et al., 2003).

The cultural arbitrary and misrecognition

Bourdieu (1977) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) demonstrate how the French educational system imposes a ‘cultural arbitrary’ to express the objective interests of the dominant groups/classes, allowing it to ‘mask the contribution it makes towards reproducing the class distribution of cultural capital’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977: 199). While presenting itself as an autonomous established order, the educational system reproduces and legitimizes class relations by concealing the fact that it reproduces social hierarchies and systems of domination. Using the concept of reconnaissance sans connaissance (recognition without knowledge), Bourdieu and Boltanski (1975) demonstrate how those who lack the ability to speak the official language nevertheless recognize its legitimacy, thus lending their complicity to the affirmation of its legitimacy. The dominated thus succumb to this méconnaisance (misrecognition) implied by reconnaissance (recognition). Thus, the dominant group determines the appropriate cultural capital (of a ‘superior’ language) which they themselves embody, and without expressly requiring others to speak it, manage to ensure that others accept it as the correct way to speak/behave, and more importantly, are in no position to reject it.

To analyse how this relates to organizational spirituality, this article puts forward the proposition that the ‘dominant group’ (in this case the managerial cadres and/or business owners) who infuse management practices with spiritual values can be said to be applying the notion of méconnaisance (misrecognition) to achieve legitimacy for the organizational spirituality discourse. In particular this relates to those organizations in which work and customer service are related not only to personal pursuit of inner meaning but are also tied to service to a superior being. Some examples from Mitroff and Denton (1999b) illustrate this point. The senior executives and managers in their study describe organizational spirituality in ways that portray it as a unique and privileged phenomenon, for the chosen ones, and one which inevitably rewards them with profitability.

For these managers, organizational spirituality is about the connectedness with everything and everyone in the universe, a higher power that affects us all. Everything affects and is affected by everything else. Spirituality is about caring, hope, love, kindness, optimism so if spiritual and ethical values are pursued, profits will naturally follow. Those who see their organizations as spiritual also see them as ‘better’ than their less spiritual counterparts. Similarly, other authors have cited business owners and senior executives who claim that the core purpose of business is to serve people rather than to make profits (Bickham, 1996; Conger et al., 1994; Daniels et al., 2000; Mitroff and Denton, 1999b), and that business is supposed to serve God (Preville, 1999). Therefore God must be listened to and God’s guidance sought through prayer and meditation especially when a business is experiencing a crisis (Benefiel, 2005). Lamont (2002) reports that values such as relationships, honesty, forgiveness, tolerance, patience and humility are practised hundreds of times a day at companies including IMG, as decisions are made on how to increase sales, how to handle redundancies, how to work with a difficult colleague and so forth.

Mitroff and Denton (1999b: 59) write about an ordained church minister, the president of Huntsman Chemical Corporation, who sees the organization as his ministry whose purpose is to serve Christ and who reports that ‘even though I see it as a fundamental part of my mission to convert the entire organization to Christ, I am very careful to conceal this’. This is a telling statement that goes to the heart of the notion of misrecognition. The authors state that ‘the mission statement is unmistakable: to bring religion into the workplace and take over the entire organization for Christ’ (1999b: 59). In this organization, business decisions are based on biblical teachings, such as ‘unlimited patience’ with unproductive employees, and God is viewed as the CEO and Satan as the ‘major/supreme competitor’. This form of spirituality is defined specifically with reference to the Christian faith.

Taken together, these views constitute a Bourdieusian ‘cultural arbitrary’ which works through ‘misrecognition’ of the reality. It legitimizes economic objectives not by denying the pursuit of profits and enhanced employee productivity, but by concealing these objectives behind a veil of higher spiritual ideals. It is argued here that this cultural arbitrary is not so idealized as some of Bourdieu’s critics have suggested (Garnham, 1993) for it is aimed at converting organizational spirituality into a form of economic capital with the complicity of organizational members. Ackers and Preston (1997) have recognized that initiatives such as management development conceal the power relations which reassert themselves in the real organization. Similarly, Bell and Taylor have identified a slightly different but related aspect of this tension and concealment when they observe that ‘advocates of workplace spirituality also recommend that organizations should have a greater involvement in managing the self while simultaneously seeking to define the self and spirituality as beyond management’ (2003: 343).

The cultural arbitrary acts by pursuing while at the same time denying a course of action. In the studies above, it is manifest in the irony whereby managers elevate the significance of organizational spirituality, underplay that of profits/productivity, yet accept that the one leads to the other. Rather than draw direct attention to the quest for profitability, an increasing body of work has rationalized organizational spirituality on the basis of positive employee and work-related outcomes such as creativity and personal fulfilment (Chappell, 1993; Krishnakumar and Neck, 2002; Mirvis, 1997), fairness (Biberman and Whitty, 1997), increased commitment and reduced turnover and absenteeism (Giacalone and Jurkiewicz, 2003). Organizational spirituality has also been justified on the basis of altruism, valuing, improving and developing people such that at Peach Personnel, ‘They believe passionately that if you treat people well, your rewards will come’ (Lamont, 2002: 78), while at Scott Bader, ‘personal growth is more important than big profits’ (Lamont, 2002: 212).

A further illustration of what Bourdieu meant by ‘cultural arbitrary’ is found in Oakes et al. (1998), who argued that business planning in museums and cultural heritage sites excludes certain ideas as ‘unthinkable’, for example being businesslike, efficiency, revenue seeking and so forth, while actively promoting a vision of an organization as a business. To reject an economic objective as ‘unthinkable’ is to consider it unpalatable, inferior or unacceptable, when viewed vis-a-vis some ‘higher’, perhaps symbolic, ideal. Paradoxically, this higher ideal only derives value when it realizes these supposedly ‘unthinkable’ economic outcomes, thus exemplifying ‘concealment’ as discussed above. Within the context of organizational spirituality, terms such as profits, productivity and cost reduction become ‘unthinkable’ (when leaders ‘conceal’ them through a ‘cultural arbitrary’) and yet, without pursuing them relentlessly, there would be no business to speak of, spiritual or otherwise. The perception of organizational spirituality as a form of economic capital (which represents and is recognized as ‘symbolic capital’) is sought- after when spirituality is introduced as a management tool (Milliman et al., 1999), pursued as an end in itself (Mitroff and Denton, 1999b), tied to the individual’s pursuit of meaning and individual transformation (Benefiel, 2005; Lips-Wiersma, 2002a, 2002b; Preville, 1999), or promoted as therapeutic and entrepreneurial (Nadesan, 1999). This conversion process is a recurrent theme of interest in Bourdieu’s study of how autonomous sub-fields of successful cultural production in the literary, dramatic and visual arts produce economic capital and profits (Bourdieu, 1996). This is consistent with the effects of the cultural arbitrary in organizational spirituality.

The power of pedagogy

Bourdieu’s notion of pedagogy involves learning, for example learning a new language or jargon that allows social actors to forge and sustain the definitive characteristics of a new identity, and by so doing, secure legitimacy for their actions and identities. Pedagogy is an important complement to the cultural arbitrary. The latter demonstrates the role of the ‘dominant class’ in structuring power relations while pedagogy recognizes the agential role of the ‘dominated’. Hence, the participation of employees (and indeed managers) is won through the voluntarist effects of pedagogy such that organizational spirituality is no longer a phenomenon imposed on them ‘from above’ but one in which they willingly acquiesce either to the extent that it is consistent with their own spiritual values, or because they are bound to the rhetoric of the spiritual narrative.

In organizational spirituality, the emergent language blends business jargon and spiritual terms in a way which gives new meaning to the language of business. This rhetorical device claims that organizations that adopt spirituality are concerned with soul, compassion, happiness, inner meaning and so forth (Bolman and Deal, 1995; Deal, 1994; McCormick, 1994; Mirvis, 1997; Mitroff and Denton, 1999b; Preville, 1999). Not only are these rhetorical claims difficult to sustain empirically, they also potentially discriminate against those who do not subscribe to the spiritual narrative. As Tourish and Pinnington (2002: 165) argue, ‘Promoting spirituality in the workplace is to declare that those who dissent from the ideology no longer belong.’ In Reell, one of Benefiel’s (2005) case studies, the use of a Christian narrative threatened to derail an organization’s spirituality when a section of the workforce became disillusioned with the idea of invoking God in the workplace, thus forcing management to adopt a more inclusivist approach.

When employees are persuaded to believe they are engaged in something that involves a higher calling, the organization’s quest for their commitment and complicity is premised on the belief that they can replace one set of meanings with another and ultimately change the world. The notion of realizing personal and organizational transformation is key to the organizational spirituality narrative. It is realizable through the power of pedagogy and their complicity, and echoes the critique of culturism in which a new mode of control systematizes and legitimizes the ‘unconscious strivings’ of employees (Willmott, 1993: 523).

The quest for a higher calling and the concomitant denial of the existence of power structures is exemplified in the argument that spirituality is about the search for ‘inner meaning’ and that it is non-‘hierarchical’ (Graber et al., 2001). Similarly, Nadesan (1999) argues that the spiritual discourse masks while at the same time reinforcing hierarchy, power and privilege. The search for commitment based on faith and psychic meaning means that employees are unable to question or reject the legitimacy of the organization’s spiritual crusade without rejecting their own personal sense of spirituality. This is evident for example in Benefiel’s (2005) view that at Reell, the organization’s spiritual transformation was about the individuals’ own spiritual transformation. Benefiel contends that ‘rather than worrying about the organization starting on the spiritual path for the “wrong” reason, that is, to enhance organizational performance, leaders need to recognize this as a natural starting point for a spiritual journey, for individuals and for organizations’ (2005: 144).

A Bourdieusian critique would predict that by perpetuating the notion that the organization’s mission and ultimate purpose are intertwined with the individual’s raison d’etre, the employee’s duty to internalize, uphold and support the organization’s goals is presumed to be a fait accompli. The evidence suggests, however, that willing participation, scepticism and the fact that employees are not only prepared to resist but are fully aware of the vacuity of the claims made about organizational spirituality (for example, the ‘unthinkable’ idea that it is not about profits, but something else; the feeling of exclusion, etc.) all mean that while the organizational spirituality narrative relies on a cultural arbitrary and the power of pedagogy, realizing complicity, i.e. active and informed consent, remains a challenge. The section below considers how organizational spirituality serves as an ideological, potentially contested device to manage people and define power relations, and how this device is legitimized.

Spirituality, ideology and legitimation

Business owners and managers who actively foster their personally derived spiritual ideals, values and language are laying claims to certain unique qualities which they expect subordinates to emulate and internalize. This can be illustrated with reference to individuals such as Tom Chappell at Tom’s of Maine and Jon Huntsman of Huntsman Chemicals (Mitroff and Denton, 1999b), the families at Scott Bader (Lamont, 2002) and Cadbury (Rowlinson and Hassard, 1993) and so forth. The imposition of such ideals thus renders their purpose ideological in the way it not only promulgates putative shared norms and values (Beyer, 1981; Starbuck, 1982; Weiss and Miller, 1987), but also because there is an underlying objective to reconfirm or reconfigure material interests among groups that are defined by potential contention as much as by supposedly shared norms and values.

Through the pedagogy of spirituality tied to a holistic approach for valuing and respecting people, employees come to see themselves as ‘the chosen ones’; for example when they are recognized as the organization’s ‘wealth’ (Microsoft), where not merely are teams part of the corporate family, but families are embraced as part of the corporate entity (IMG), where joining the organization is described as ‘landing in heaven where they are truly cared for’ (Scott Bader) (Lamont, 2002) and so forth. These special people who are imbued with spirit in turn have a duty to perpetuate the performative purpose and functions of the spiritual organization. This is evident in organizational evangelism and religious conversion (Ackers and Preston, 1997) and brings to the fore the question of legitimacy: how can the managerial imposition of spiritual values acquire legitimacy while denying the oppressive effects they generate? Nadesan (1999: 36) points out that a spiritual discourse’s ‘efforts to marginalize, obscure, or de-politicize events and circumstances that employees experience will lead them to question the discourse’s legitimacy and value.’

Pedagogy plays a critical role in securing legitimacy while ‘misrecognizing’ that the habitus is capable of reproducing what produces it (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). In organizational spirituality, this legitimation process works by having HRM and business practices filtered through spiritual values, which results in organizational spirituality being re-affirmed as a legitimate established order with power to define moral-ethical values and social behaviour. This is evident in the observations in the literature about the fusion of meetings and teamwork with prayers, the holistic approaches for valuing and developing people, meditation and spiritual counseling (Benefiel, 2005; Bickham, 1996; Cash et al., 2000; Lamont, 2002; Preville, 1999). Such managerial efforts to evoke misrecognition (which should not be assumed to imply an attempt to deceive) are essentially ideological. The ideological overtones of the view that worker compliance can be secured if managers can shape workers’ attitudes, values and sentiments has been recognized since Bendix’s (1956) classic study (see also Edwards, 2006). Bendix argued that minorities legitimize their exercise of authority by claims to ‘qualities of excellence’ which the majority lacks. With echoes of Marxian ‘false consciousness’, Bourdieu’s social theory brings the argument full-circle by incorporating into this process the assumed complicity lent by those upon whom the authority is exercised. Employees (the ‘chosen ones’) who internalize these values are unlikely to fault the process of spirituality that has accorded them this privilege. As various authors claim, employees come to believe they have been offered a chance to find ‘self-actualization’, for example through spiritual management development (Bell and Taylor, 2004), find ‘inner meaning’, achieve ‘therapy’ and ‘serve God’ through the organization’s products and services and in one case, believe they have ‘landed in heaven’. In Bourdieusian terms, they have been given a ‘gift’, yet it is a gift which demands reciprocal action through the implied complicity and acceptance of the narrative.

The risk of resistance against spiritual control is reduced by continuously encouraging and reproducing a collective recognition and congruence of habitus (Calhoun, 1993: 82–4). This is evidenced in the internalization of spiritual practices and values such as prayers, meditation, retreats, rituals and celebrations, remembrances and special religious services in the workplace, as well as reflexively revising the organizational spirituality narrative to accommodate dissenting views, as in the case of Reell (Benefiel, 2005). This approach is also reminiscent of Quaker unitarist social ideals and the abhorrence of conflict (Palmer, 2007). Leaders of organizations that pursue spirituality also protect their spiritual purpose by retaining a controlling interest, as in Tom’s of Maine (Mitroff and Denton, 1999b), or by vesting ownership in an employee Commonwealth, as in Scott Bader (Lamont, 2002). This article suggests that in spite of the power of the underlying ideology, serious doubts remain about the legitimacy of the approach identified here as top-down ‘corporate’ spirituality.

Conclusion

This article recognizes there are several manifestations of spirituality. On one end of the scale are those that relate to a personal quest for spiritual nourishment, healthcare and religious observances. The other end of the scale entails the inculcation of spiritual values in the workplace, tying business practices to service to God, and the conversion of organizational members to a religious faith. The latter raises ethical and ideological concerns which cannot be glossed over as simply an agenda by managers and best-selling executives to manipulate voiceless employees. With reference to Bourdieu’s social theory this article sought to unravel the ideological and legitimacy implications of managerial efforts to cultivate spirituality (including religious and quasi-religious values) in the workplace. This article argued that at the level of theory, managerial/executive efforts to foster spirituality reflect a reconfiguration and re-affirmation of social relations through the quest for complicity from organizational members. Organizational spirituality emerges both as a subtle agenda that blends performativity and the ‘search for meaning’, and as an elaborate mechanism to restructure and legitimize power relations that relies on the use of language.

Prior research has not fully engaged with the way the imposition of spiritual values on employees is embedded in the structure of power relations and how this in turn reproduces while concealing organizational social hierarchies and power inequalities. This article attempted to fill this gap with reference to Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, a concept that is not without shortcomings. For example, as Thompson (1984: 60) has argued, ‘Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, however suggestive it may be, is at best a signpost which points to social phenomena worthy of attention, but which obscures as many issues as it illuminates.’ Possibly, this and other (e.g. Alexander, 1995) criticisms do not take sufficient account of the significance of Bourdieu’s ambitious qualitative empirical research projects in Algeria and France which sought to comprehend individual experience and evaluate how micro social interactions influence people’s experience of their social position in society more broadly. As DiMaggio (1979) has argued, future exploratory research might be fruitfully conducted which is reflexively informed by Bourdieu’s exploratory propositions without remaining bound to being limited exclusively to Bourdieusian concepts. The critique of spirituality posited here is in keeping with this suggestion.

Thus, this article examined how management efforts to seek legitimacy for organizational spirituality are tied to the search for meaning while assuring performance standards and productivity. Organizational spirituality is consistent with forms of corporate culture which seek to bind everyone to the organization, thus containing dissent and perceived deviance, while maintaining control through extensive surveillance. The reconfigured corporate theologies constitute an organizational morality that offers organizations a new device for achieving strategic objectives, performance standards and management control. This morality requires that adherents internalize the corporate theology in part because spirituality is tied to consumerist and entrepreneurial ideals upon which, it is made clear, the employees’ livelihood ultimately depends, and also because it is tied to the search for meaning and service to God. Hence a need to recognize that this narrative promises salvation while often being unable to satisfy the more worldly demands connected with employment and job security in an increasingly uncertain business world. Thus, while the often harsh realities of workplace uncertainty and job insecurity are likely to engender a quest for liberation, self-determination and agency (Driver, 2005), it is doubtful whether employees’ interests are best served through a form of top-down corporate spirituality. Thus, compliance – where available – does not equate with acceptance of the spiritual values but may well be a defense mechanism by employees concerned about their career prospects. Resistance to the discourse, real or latent, means that the scope for organizational spirituality to realize the status of symbolic capital is effectively challenged.

While acknowledging the need to tread carefully in applying Bourdieu’s social theory to new areas of organizational and sociological analysis (Anheier et al., 1995; Fowler, 2000), hopefully this article will stimulate more critical empirical research into the actual manifestations of spirituality than has been the case so far. The article identified a number of problems in the literature, such as the preponderance on the perspective of the business leader/owner, prescriptions on how organizational spirituality should be studied, the best way to link it to management practice or to leadership (Fry, 2003) and so forth. A common claim is that organizations that pursue spirituality never lay people off, because they place people before profits, as reported by managers/leaders. Further research might pay more attention to the lived experience of ordinary employees and how they make choices about the extent to which they wish to engage in organizational spirituality. Such research might query how employees, and indeed managers, negotiate the spiritual disposition, the extent to which their moral judgments come into play and how contests over habitus are tied to questions of individual identity.

Furthermore, the issue of complicity cannot always be taken for granted and is a likely candidate for further research. If employees reject the pedagogy, or find that it raises ethically problematic questions, this imposes constraints on the efficacy and consistency of symbolic violence which would require further theoretical articulation. It is also hoped that this discussion will encourage empirical research into the ethical and ideological implications of spirituality for employees who do not subscribe to managerially defined spiritual ideals or indeed religious initiatives, particularly in the areas of employee selection and career development, and in multi-faith contexts where the corporate spiritual discourse draws predominantly from one particular religion. Given that the organizational spirituality literature critiqued here is largely grounded within Christianity, further research might consider how spirituality is manifesting itself with reference to other world faiths.

Footnotes

Ken Kamoche is Professor of HRM and Organization Studies at Nottingham University. He obtained his DPhil at Oxford University. He has previously taught at Birmingham University, City University of Hong Kong and Nottingham Trent University, and serves as a Visiting Professor at universities in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Africa. Ken’s research is in the areas of international HRM, organizational improvisation, knowledge appropriation and Africa-China business relations. Ken’s work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Human Relations, the British Journal of Management, the Journal of World Business and the International Journal of Human Resource Management. He has published four books, including Understanding Human Resource Management (Open University Press/McGraw-Hill) and Managing Human Resources in Africa (Routledge).

Ashly H Pinnington is Professor and Dean of Faculty of Business, based at The British University in Dubai, and teaches on the MSc in HRM and MSc in Project Management. Ashly is an Honorary Fellow, Manchester Business School, Faculty of Humanities, The University of Manchester and Visiting Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His current research work is on employee perspectives in knowledge intensive organizations, employee development and HRM in the UAE. His two most recent books (co-edited) are HRM Ethics and Employment (Oxford University Press, 2007) and International Human Resource Management (Sage, 2010). He has published numerous articles in journals such as Human Relations, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies and the British Journal of Management.

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