Abstract
This article argues that the expression of religious beliefs within organizations, often made manifest through the notion of soul, provides insight into the ethics of organization in postsecular society. Using examples to illustrate the discursive representation of organizational soul in three US-based multinational companies, we argue that religious organizational beliefs must be located within cultural and material contexts of practice in order to fully appreciate their ethical implications. We show how the use of soul is a contemporary reiteration of the 19th century religious attitude that William James termed ‘healthy-mindedness’. We suggest that this variety of religious experience is limiting through its neglect of the social and political contexts of ethical thought and action and the definition of evil or harm as external to the believer and the organization. Drawing on a pragmatist perspective, we critique this approach to belief-led business and propose that the Jamesian notion of a ‘sick soul’ constitutes a more robust ethical framework for belief-led businesses by encouraging ethical skepticism concerning the nature of organizational activities. We conclude by exploring what our analysis means for the development of postsecular critical organization theory.
The idea of soul has long been invoked as a means of questioning the ethics of organizations. Marchand (1998) refers to accusations of corporate soullessness that followed the legal constitution of business organizations as individuals in late 19th century US society, arguing that this was stimulated by a spate of corporate mergers which led to public and media critique of their weak social and ethical legitimacy. The idea of soul has also been used metaphorically to critique the quasi-religious power entailed in the disciplinary production of employee subjectivities. This usage draws on the Aristotelian distinction between body and soul, which designates the former as a materialized object and the latter as the abstract essence of existence. These analyses portray individual soul as the ultimate target of discipline onto which organizational power relations are inscribed. By focusing on therapeutic organizational discourses of self-realization and discovery in the colonization of identity, managerial processes of normative control are suggested to enable the individual soul to be possessed or governed by greedy organizations (Kunda, 1992; Rose, 1990; Whyte, 1956). For these writers, the soul is a normalizing, imaginary ideal through which the body is trained, an instrument of power that constitutes a prison to form and frame the body.
During the 1990s, however, charges of corporate soullessness were reduced, as managerial theorists argued that corporations could indeed have souls (Frank, 2001). Ideas such as the learning organization (Senge, 1990) and the hungry spirit (Handy, 1998) sought to demonstrate the spiritual nature of organizations by introducing transcendent notions of authenticity, meaning, higher consciousness and purpose. Towards the turn of this century, these assertions have been further strengthened through the emergence of the workplace spirituality movement (Ashmos and Duchon, 2000; Bell and Taylor, 2003, 2004; Giacalone and Jurkiewicz, 2003a; Mitroff and Denton, 1999; Neal and Biberman, 2003). Populist writers within this field use the term soul to signify corporations that promote belief through culture, values and the actions of leaders (Benefiel, 2008; Bolman and Deal, 1995; Canfield et al., 1996; Chappell, 1996; Cox, 1996; Gallagher, 2002; Mirvis, 1997; Peppers and Briskin, 2000). They define soul as what the organization ‘most deeply is’, suggesting that it transcends and supports practical, material organizational activities. Soul is portrayed as an intangible inner resource that is possessed by all organizations and individuals who await revelation through ‘saving’ (Batstone, 2003), ‘liberating’ (Barrett, 1998), ‘stirring’ (Briskin, 1996), ‘rediscovering’ (DeFoore et al., 1995) or ‘awakening’ (Klein and Izzo, 1999).
Such normative or ‘cheerleading’ (Giacalone, 2010) accounts of organizational soul make significant claims in relation to the ethics of organization. For example, Gull and Doh (2004: 134) state that if an ‘organization is spiritually oriented, it is more likely to avoid situations of ethical misconduct’. Similarly, Giacalone and Jurkiewicz (2003b) claim a positive relationship between personal spirituality and ethical workplace behaviour. Ethical action is suggested to be more likely in contexts where religious values and ideas such as soul are promoted, as this enables employees to develop their spiritual identities for the good of themselves and the organization. These assertions are often based on evidence from a small number of mainly American organizations which are cited as pioneers of excellence within the workplace spirituality movement. Companies such as South West Airlines (Benefiel, 2005; Milliman et al., 1999) and Tom’s of Maine (Benefiel, 2008; Canfield et al., 1996; Chappell, 1996; Marques et al., 2007; Mitroff and Denton, 1999) are discussed at length in multiple sources in a way which relies heavily on stories told by founders or senior executives. In this article we focus on Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart and Staples, as illustrative of the discursive representation of soulful organizations. We draw on corporate materials and material from other sources such as protest groups, to reveal the contested ethical reputation of these organizations.
Following William James, we argue that the normative use of soul as an ethical resource reiterates the historically embedded, culturally specific norm of ‘healthy-mindedness’, which derives from the North American cultural traditions of mind cure, inspirational religion and positive thought. The healthy organizational soul is thus neither a neutral metaphor (Oswick et al., 2004) nor an experientially free space, but a notion that is highly dependent upon the cultural-historical context in which it is constituted. This has significant material consequences for understanding organizational ethics because the promotion of a healthy-minded belief system limits ethical behaviour and action by excluding the disruptive potential of belief systems (Smith, 1996) as a means of questioning cultural norms and structural conditions. In contrast, the development of a ‘sick’ organizational soul may be more ethically productive in the pursuit of a good organizational life, as the existence of evil or unethical action is recognized as an inherent aspect of organization (Dallmayr, 2006).
The article is organized as follows. First, we explore the ideas of William James, reading his insights on religious belief into contemporary debates about belief in organizations. Next we examine the practices of belief-led businesses such as Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart and Staples, which we suggest exemplify a healthy-minded attitude to organizational soul, before tracing the 19th century North American Protestant roots of these contemporary exhortations. Finally, we explain how the development of James’ alternative of the sick soul as a belief position is likely to encourage more productive ethical reflection and action. We conclude by exploring the critical potential of analysing religious belief in respect of postsecular organization and management.
William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience
Just over one hundred years ago, during a period of religious fervour, William James wrote what would become his most widely read book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (James, 1982[1902]; hereafter Varieties). The book is simultaneously philosophical, ethnographic, mystical and rational (Carrette, 2005), a conceptually expansive work that is provocative and radical in argument and empirics (Lamberth, 2005). Varieties is influenced by James’ cultural roots in North American Protestantism, but also reflects his fascination with the religious marketplace emerging around him. James presents religious belief as real phenomenological experience of the divine, but also insists on analysing these experiences as embedded in everyday social or political realities. His work is therefore especially relevant to understanding belief in organizations.
In Varieties James set out to develop a psychological perspective on religion to complement sociological analyses of belief. He also lays the groundwork for his subsequent development of philosophical pragmatism, for which he is best known today. However, religion was the major interest in James’ personal and professional life (Suckiel, 1996) and the status of belief was the central problematic that his pragmatist philosophy was designed to address. For James, pragmatism resolved the conflict between two philosophical camps: scientific rationalists and ‘speculative’ philosophers or theologians. He argues that each of these groups is mistaken epistemologically; the rationalists define empirical evidence too narrowly and unimaginatively, while speculative philosophers neglect the phenomenological experience of belief through an overly scholastic perspective.
James was not then unusual in seeking to understand belief as a fundamental aspect of human experience. As a self-declared intellectual pluralist with a respectful sympathy for religion’s significance to the human condition, he was committed to open mindedness concerning the role of religion in seeking forms of truth and guiding action (Capps and Jacobs, 1995; Marty, 1982; Taylor, 2002). James cautioned that he wanted only to commentate on the psychological aspects of belief. However Varieties goes well beyond an individualistic psychological perspective. Reading it alongside James’ (1907) version of pragmatist philosophy provides the basis for a coherent sociological perspective for understanding the role of belief in social (Suckiel, 1996) and organizational settings.
In Varieties James develops an account of the ontological and phenomenological status of religion and associated concepts such as soul. He insists that analysis of religious belief systems must refer to the patterns of behaviour they are likely to produce, in dialogue with the social world rather than as a detached or epistemologically distinctive theology. This pragmatist position implies that the moral and metaphysical scope of belief systems can then be set alongside those of secular postenlightenment doctrines such as Marxism. Consequently the inclusion of God in a philosophical system does not preclude rational analysis of its implications for human and social morality (MacIntyre, 1995). Religious beliefs and notions such as soul can therefore be understood at individual (agentic) and organizational (structural) levels as frameworks of ethical meaning which produce real effects, of which we can ask social scientific questions. This locates religious belief alongside other philosophical or analytical positions, as open to the same rational social scientific analysis and argument as empiricism, positivism or poststructuralism (Rorty, 1997). It also defines religious belief as an aspect of culture, structure and agency.
James’ version of pragmatism is ontologically realist (Suckiel, 1996). Among contemporary realist philosophers, Bhaskar (e.g. 2000) is notable for engaging closely with the ontology of religious belief. He attempts to construct philosophical foundations that allow religious belief, God, and the transcendent into analysis as active agents and generative forces. However, such a position is vulnerable to critique. Callinicos (2006: 282), for example, dismisses Bhaskar’s ‘lapse into spiritualism’ as indicative of ‘an intellectual decline’, but others accept the possibility that religious experience or belief are respectable philosophical objects that refer to aspects of reality (Archer et al., 2004; Porpora 2001) and may therefore form part of sociological investigation. These pragmatist or realist ontologies conceptualize religious experience as the irreducible foundation of religious knowledge. This suggests that the social sciences should see belief and religion as epiphenomenal, rather than as manifestations or functions of other social and cultural dynamics, as explanans rather than explanandum. Summarizing these ideas, Fleetwood (2005: 199) notes that ‘God may or may not be real, but the idea of God is as real as Mount Everest, because the idea of God makes a difference to people’s actions’. God and the transcendent are therefore understood as ideally real for believers, an aspect of their human experience that retains explanatory power in the practical consequences of social action.
Most commentators agree that religious belief is especially significant in terms of the value framework it brings to considerations of ethics (Hollinger, 1997; James, 1907). This involves accepting that individuals and communities believe in something potentially real in a theological sense, but unknowable in a sociological sense except in terms of conduct, action or material effects. James further addressed the epistemological status of religious belief in a short essay, ‘The Will to Believe’ (1897), before developing these ideas into a ‘scientifically respectable framework in which the essential religious sensibility of the liberal Protestantism of his milieu could be affirmed’ (Hollinger, 1997: 70). Above all he sought to understand the difference that religious belief could make. James thus refused to adhere to the evidence-driven, atheist, scientistic orthodoxy which he saw as having been enshrined and transformed into doctrine by ‘trusting monks of the positivist faith’ (Hollinger, 1997: 73). In developing his analytical position on belief, James consistently returned to pragmatism as a means of framing religion in a way which focuses consideration on the ethics of actions that make a practical difference to people’s lives.
James’ work remains relevant to a number of contemporary psychologists, sociologists and philosophers of religion (Baert, 2005; Barzun, 2002[1983]; Taylor, 2002) who take belief seriously as a means of understanding experiences, feelings and actions (Suckiel, 1996). Despite mid-20th century predictions that secularization is an inherent aspect of modern life, a growing number of scholars observe that belief in the divine or transcendent remains a significant feature of developed societies. This intellectual shift began almost two decades ago when Berger (1992) began to question the secularization thesis, noting that even Western European societies continue to be ‘furiously religious’, or at least not as disbelieving as they initially appear to be (Davie, 1999, 2006). This leads McLennan (2007) to argue that we are experiencing a postsecular moment, in which we must at least acknowledge the continuing existence of religious consciousness. James’ home country of the US, which is where many of the organizations that promote belief-led business originate, is characterized by high levels of individual belief and a wide range of religious organizations (Finke and Stark, 1998), including religiously-led work organizations (Biggart, 1989; Demerath et al., 1998; Pratt, 2000). This pragmatic Jamesian framework thus provides a conceptually useful basis for the analysis of religious belief-led business ethics. In the following section we highlight the practices of discursive representation that characterize belief-led soulful organizations, using Tyson, Wal-Mart and Staples as examples of US multinational companies that are illustrative of this phenomenon.
In search of organizational soul
Arkansas-based Tyson Foods Inc., founded in 1935 by John Tyson, has been described as ‘the Wal-Mart of meat’. The company appears in Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s 500 largest corporations, employing around 104,000 people. In 2007, the organization recorded sales of almost 27 billion US dollars. Tyson operates over three hundred facilities to supply meat in eighty countries, and is the world’s largest supplier of chicken, beef and pork. In 2005, the company received Fortune magazine’s award as ‘America’s Most Admired Food Company’. The organization’s primary goal is to provide products that are ‘sustainable and meaningful’. The corporate culture involves the active promotion of the concept of belief-led business to employees and customers, as illustrated by its ‘core values’, which are printed onto a plastic card designed to be carried by employees:
We feed our families, the nation, and the world with trusted food products. We serve as stewards of the animals, land, and environment entrusted to us. We strive to provide a safe work environment for our Team Members. We strive to be a faith-friendly company. We strive to honor God and be respectful of each other, our customers, and other stakeholders.
‘Giving Thanks at Mealtime’ booklets containing prayers from a variety of religions are distributed throughout the company and via its website. Senior executives have invited academic consultants into the organization to explore how to integrate religious beliefs and values more effectively into the business (see Miller, 2007). In 2000, Tyson introduced a Chaplain Service Program to provide belief-led pastoral care and counseling to employees regardless of religious affiliation, employing 120 part-time chaplains to work across 250 locations. In recognition of this and other related initiatives that encouraged ‘global transformation’, Tyson received the International Spirit at Work Award in 2007. In 2008, the company announced sponsorship of a faculty position, the John Tyson Chair in Faith and Spirituality in the Workplace, in the Department of Management at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.
Founded in 1962 in Arkansas by Sam M. Walton, and incorporated in 1969, Wal-Mart (formally Wal-Mart Stores Inc.) has over 8,000 retail outlets and more than 2 million employees around the world. Wal-Mart is an even more familiar and larger corporate presence than Tyson—Fortune consistently ranks it in the top ten of global corporations, often in the top three. The company has been a strong presence in accounts of best practice in discussions of workplace spirituality and religion. For instance, Cash and Grey (2000) note Wal-Mart’s early provision of ‘religious accommodation’ training to encourage employees to respect each other’s beliefs. Wal-Mart also helps ‘employees to examine their own personal visions and align them with the organization’s vision’ to contribute towards identifying the company’s ‘inner voice’ (Cacciope, 2000: 50). This process is presented by commentators as a way of constructing meaning at work, moving beyond materialism and scientism to achieve harmony in the presence of the transcendent. Wal-Mart is listed alongside other iconic US brands such as Intel, Nike and Ford as exemplars of good practice in enabling the development of individual and organizational soul (Oliviera, 2004). Celebratory accounts link religious belief to improvements in performance as an aspect of corporate culture, in which a soulful approach to doing business results in success and profits (Pfeffer, 1998). However, the strong cultural-religious norms which inform managerial systems at Wal-Mart limit ethical reflection to a narrow procedural form in which the individual is paramount (Moreton, 2009). The organizational culture and its associated belief system are thus not open to question.
Senior executives at another US-based multinational, Staples, also a Fortune 500 company, use the term soul to indicate their ethical commitments. Staples is the world’s largest office products provider, operating in 25 countries and generating sales of around $24 billion through the work of about 100,000 employees. In 2006, senior executives rebranded their annual corporate responsibility document the ‘Soul Report’, 1 using it to communicate stories of positive action to illustrate their approach to ethics, environment, community and diversity. These aspects of corporate activity are separated from the business of retail—as the 2006 report puts it, ‘selling office products is what we do, but Staples Soul is what moves us’. An annual Soul Award is given to the employee who best ‘demonstrates aspects of Soul in work and life’. The two reports represent employees who are engaged in good works around the world, promoting environmental responsibility, encouraging diversity, and supporting the achievement of human potential and flourishing.
As these organizational examples illustrate, the concept of the soulful organization suggests that belief-led businesses enable positive ethical actions that benefit employer, employee and society. However the possibilities of unethical action, institutionalized harm, or tortured souls experiencing doubt are all absent. Alongside these discursive representations of organizational life as soulful and positively ethical, there is a darker side. Both Wal-Mart and Tyson make frequent legal appearances to contest employee rights cases and respond to accusations of ethical-legal transgression. They are strongly represented in the publications of protest groups such as Corporate Watch, and journalists often cite all three organizations as typical of unethical transnational behemoths that damage local communities and the natural environment. In 2000, Tyson was ranked by Corporate Crime Reporter and Multinational Monitor pressure groups as among the ten worst corporations in the US for its record on human and animal rights violations and environmental abuses. Even in comparison to other companies within the US meat and poultry industry which has a general reputation for low wages, intensive production lines and hazardous working conditions, Tyson has been singled out for its poor record on these issues.
Tyson’s anti-union policies have been compared to those of Wal-Mart, and the company has faced critical scrutiny regarding its corporate governance practices. Media and ministry organizations such as Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), a pressure group that represents low paid workers, have also been critical of the organization’s chaplaincy program, arguing that chaplains are reluctant to challenge exploitative or illegal practices because their primary loyalty is to the employer. 2 In his attempt to understand the exceptional success and intense criticism of Wal-Mart, Fishman (2006) cites examples of employee abuse, community destruction, and corporate misbehaviour, which contravene the company’s own narrowly procedural published code of corporate ethics, and are also contrary to an everyday understanding of human flourishing or what it is to live a good life. Fishman further notes Wal-Mart managers’ remarkable attempts to control information, suppressing both damaging and more positive accounts of corporate practice. Tyson is similarly secretive about animal welfare and employment practices. Moreton (2009) provides numerous accounts of managerial misconduct at Wal-Mart in the pursuit of market dominance, employee compliance and cheap products. She argues that Wal-Mart managers publicly stress a ‘narrow form of procedural ethics, while simultaneously employing ruthless tactics’ (Moreton, 2009: 45) in dealing with employees, suppliers, and competitors. These detailed journalistic and academic analyses challenge the discursive representation of these corporations as belief-led, soulful and consequently ethical.
Discussion: Healthy-mindedness, sick souls and ethical action
In this discussion we explore the limitations associated with healthy-mindedness as a framework for ethical action through contrasting this with the Jamesian notion of the sick soul. However, first we must consider why the notion of healthy-mindedness dominates practice within the contemporary US-based belief-led organizations that are highlighted as pioneers of excellence by the workplace spirituality movement, by exploring the cultural-historical roots of the healthy-minded attitude which James first observed in mid-19th century New England.
The origins of healthy-mindedness lie in a period of intense 19th century metaphysical experimentation and progressive religion which James referred to as ‘mind cure’. Mind cure was a universal, non-sectarian religious movement that combined Christian Science, the religious sect founded by Mary Baker Eddy, and ‘new thought’, a loosely affiliated network of spiritual healers. Its followers argued that individuals and society could be ‘cured’ by developing the right mental attitude (Schmit, 2000), in which physical disease and social dis-ease are viewed as originating in the mind. The cause of defect or disorder was therefore taken to be ideational and spiritual, rather than physical, material or societal (Braden, 1963).
The principles of mind cure are relatively simple. First, ideas must come to the individual as revelation, facilitated by techniques such as guided meditation or visualization; second, believers must surrender their will or ‘let go’; and third, believers must see the subconscious as an untapped resource that can positively impact on conscious life and health (Duclow, 2002). Key figures communicated these principles through experimental techniques including hypnotism and metaphysical healing. Many also delivered public lectures and wrote popular texts which became bestsellers (Parker, 1973). In a Puritan, Protestant culture that emphasized seeking out inward sin, mind cure provided support for moral piety by inviting followers to see themselves as the individualization of God.
James associates voluntary, systematic healthy-mindedness with the emergence of these new forms of religious belief in 19th century US society. The popularity of mind cure, particularly among the white middle classes, was closely linked to dissatisfaction with industrial life and materialism. Modernization was portrayed as the cause of ‘a spreading sense of moral impotence and spiritual sterility’ (Lears, 1981: 4–5), a condition that James called ‘Americanitis’ (Ross, 1991). Lears (1981) describes American society at this time as characterized by ‘evasive banality’, a collective revulsion felt by a people living in a consumption-oriented context increasingly dominated by scientism and technical rationality. Mind cure has been interpreted as an anti-modernist response to feelings of weightlessness and lack of existential meaning, expressing the desire of Victorian intellectuals seeking to cast off the burden of overcivilization—a Romantic attempt to recapture intense experience and overturn the rationalized self-control associated with modernity through a therapeutic quest for authenticity.
Mind cure and healthy-mindedness were also expressions of a broader and longer lasting American cultural attitude towards religion that encourages the use of faith to gain personal advantage in the secular, material world. Variously termed inspirational, prosperity or popular religion (Anker, 1999; Clebsch, 1973; Meyer, 1980; Schneider and Dornbusch, 1958; Woodhead and Heelas, 2000), this attitude encourages individuals to believe they can deal with their hopes and fears alone, ignore the structural conditions of their material reality, and solve problems through mental techniques of positive thinking. Religious beliefs are thus an individual means of healing ills and achieving wealth, on the basis that ‘salvation and success might be one and the same’ (Parker, 1973: 26). This idea is revisited in Norman Vincent Peale’s (1952) bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking, which promised success and status through positive thought and individual action. The inspirational appeal of this religious attitude derives in part from the self-verifying nature of the thought system; any attempt to expose the healthy-minded attitude to critique will be dismissed as precisely the kind of negativity of thought that advocates seek to exclude as problematizing and unhelpful.
The widespread phenomenon of mind cure communicated a philosophy of positive thinking and belief in the power of metaphysical mental healing as a means of curing disease, anxiety and poverty (Parker, 1973), by linking to the subconscious and the transcendent. James was critical of this individualistic idealism, which he saw as encouraging people to become passive and give up ethical responsibility for the material, social world. However, he also knew that mind cure represented a significant moral force in American society. Its popularity was demonstrated in the voluminous and widely read literature published by advocates, of which James observed: ‘[mind cure offers] a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side… [that] must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power’ (James, 1982: 94). Mind cure promoted an ‘intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes’ (James, 1982: 95), through a refusal to dwell on the possibility of evil. For the healthy-minded, the tendency to see goodness in everything and reject unhappiness is enabled by ‘letting go’ of pessimistic thoughts. Actions are motivated by the view that unethical behaviour will be exacerbated by internalizing or worrying over it.
James presents an alternative to healthy-mindedness in the form of the sick soul who has adopted the ‘misery-habit’ and recognizes sinful or unethical behaviour. For the sick soul, evil exists as ‘a wrongness or vice in… essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure’ (James, 1982: 134). Pity, loss, damage, pain and fear lie at the heart of human consciousness and generate a despair that cannot be alleviated by living in the happiness of the moment or concentrating on what’s good. However, the sick soul does not necessarily collapse in the face of these dimensions of existence, but insists the pervasiveness of evil within individuals or institutions must be acknowledged and incorporated into ethical thinking. Although his terminology seems to imply that having a healthy soul is preferable, this is not James’ intention. The once-born healthy-minded individual’s inability to experience the negative aspects of human life makes them less able to interpret its meaning or act in socially responsible ways. Sick souls are more insightful; their melancholy concerning loss of meaning, fear, personal sin, and inequitable social structures provides the basis for strenuous activity through which a more sophisticated ethical sensibility can be achieved (Taylor, 2002). Those able to embrace the unethical potential of humanity or society and come to terms with this experience a more mature form of belief, as their action is characterized by a ‘willingness to be’ despite negative or damaging realities. For James, the healthy soul is blind to conflicting components of human experience, exclusive and incomplete (Alexander, 1980; Dittes, 1995; Duclow, 2002), whereas the sick soul offers the opportunity for a more ethically informed engagement with self, others and society.
Commentators observing contemporary spiritualities note that these belief systems draw on and revise the culturally specific ideas and moralities associated with mind cure, and are hence neither as ‘new’ nor as universal as they might appear (Albanese, 1993). The practices and ideas that James observed are also revived in the beliefs that underpin the promotion of organizational soul in belief-led businesses. The optimistic focus is expressed in the promotion of positive rather than negative states of being, promising the achievement of positive states such as transcendence, connectedness, completeness, authenticity, creativity, love and joy, rooted in values such as trust, humility and forgiveness. This approach to religious experiences at work excludes critique, evil, suffering, or recognition of inequity as deriving from cultural norms and social structures. Instead, belief in organizations is portrayed as a means of achieving organizational success and ethical action through promoting individual goodness. Within this thought system, as self-verifying as mind cure, the failure to achieve positive spiritual or material outcomes is dismissed as a consequence of lack of sufficiently positive faith, rather than as a result of the structural conditions of work and organization (Bell and Taylor, 2004). The emphasis on healing, organizational well-being and the development of healthy organizations free from ethical doubt suggests, again in an echo of mind cure, that material well-being arises from spiritual growth based on positive thought.
Through their discursive attempts to present a healthy-minded organizational soul, companies like Tyson, Staples and Wal-Mart preclude individual or collective recognition of organizational practices that might be construed as unethical or harmful. Belief is thereby mobilized to dissociate the organization from painful or unhappy structural conditions or practices, such as those that adversely affect people, animals or the environment, enabling such concerns to be overlooked in the hope that their significance will recede. Belief in these organizations means ‘getting away from the sin, not groaning and writhing over its commission’ (James, 1982: 128, emphasis in original). This optimistic religious attitude enables issues associated with the material organizational body, such as employee rights, environmental abuses, human health, animal welfare or factory farming, to be set aside. Development of a healthy organizational soul focuses attention on authenticity and growth at the expense of a concern for the material consequences of organizational actions and their ethical implications. This perspective is dangerous because of the ethical passivity it invites (Pava, 2003). The healthy soul is not concerned with challenging organizational cultural norms or recognizing material structures of oppression, because the principle cause of problems, and therefore the means of solving them, is individual rather than structural, ideal rather than material. This attitude consequently restricts organizational members’ ability to develop a practice-based morality and ensures that the extent of any organizational change is severely limited. As a belief position, healthy-mindedness perpetuates structural conditions rather than encouraging critical reflection or agentic challenge to organizational practices that produce inequity or damage (Bell, 2008; Carrette and King, 2005).
Both mind-cure and healthy-minded organizational souls can be seen as conservative and pseudo-transformational, since they promote conformity to the ethical status quo rather than encouraging challenges to organizational values and practices (Carrette and King, 2005; Hicks, 2003). In contrast, a Jamesian sick organizational soul would reflect on and critique the tenets of faith according to their effects in everyday life on self and others. Positive ethical development arises from consideration of the practiced, or pragmatic, effects of the belief system. This perspective is ethically idealistic, in the sense that ethical progress may happen through critical engagement with religious belief systems and the co-creation of social and material worlds. Responsibility always remains with the ethical individual, in agentic moral action rather than uncritical acceptance and reproduction of religious catechisms.
Conclusion
We have argued that assertions of the inherent goodness of soulful organizations, as promulgated by certain leading organizations and practitioners within the workplace spirituality movement, are overstated and somewhat simplistic. We have used the Jamesian notions of sick and healthy soul to highlight the implications of these discursive representations for organizational ethics, arguing that the healthy-minded organizational soul restricts ethical reflection through systematic exclusion of even the possibility of unethical or damaging activities. We have therefore proposed the Jamesian alternative of the sick organizational soul which we suggest constitutes a more robust ethical framework for belief-led business through its emphasis on structural conditions of action which enable social, cultural and structural realities to be confronted and influenced. However, this analysis has also raised broader issues relating to the role of religion in critical organization theory.
While religion remains a relatively marginal issue in critical organization theory, for example in comparison to culture, a forthcoming special issue of this journal on the subject of theology and organization suggests that critical organizational scholars are increasingly turning to theological concepts to explore notionally secular organizational dynamics such as leadership (Grint, 2010) and hierarchy (Parker, 2009). We have suggested that the work of William James provides a productive methodological and epistemological basis for confronting the complexities of belief and organization that is respectful of the cognitive or philosophical content of religion, yet critically reflexive in engaging with this-worldly ethical action and the material effects of belief.
However, we have also suggested that debates surrounding religion in critical organization theory do not take sufficient account of the complexity of belief systems. Engaging with religion sociologically does not necessitate realist ontological recognition of transcendent beings as active agents in worldly concerns. Scholars should be able to ask interpretive and ethical questions as to what forms of religious experience mean to individuals and communities, who benefits from them, who loses, and what the material effects of religious beliefs are. Faith can be conceptualized as explanans, understood as an analytical perspective on social and cultural life with its own integrity (Geertz, 1990). Observation, interpretation, and analysis of religious belief systems can therefore be conducted with a respectful agnosticism, open to their potential to effect ethical change as well as their disciplinary capabilities.
James’ work and our analysis provide a means of locating organizational belief systems epistemologically that contributes towards the development of a postsecular critical organization theory (Hope, 2010). The reintroduction of theology and religious belief to critical organization theory should be located as an aspect of the wider postsecular turn in society and social theory. While social scientific analysis remains ‘attuned to a secular world and a naturalistic worldview’ (McLennan, 2007: 869), it is clear that everyday action may be structured by religious, supernatural values. We have shown here how people working in three of the world’s largest companies are encouraged to believe that they and the organization have eternal souls, to be developed, managed, reported and capitalized on. Numerous self-help books and practitioner oriented accounts of organizational practice written by consultants and academics convey a similar message. The increased attention paid to religious belief in organizations could be interpreted as managers, consultants and organizational scholars once again turning to religious beliefs as a means of engaging with ‘ultimate concerns’ (Tillich, 1957). However, all religious experience takes place within and is shaped by social, cultural or political contexts, each of which can reframe the questions we ask of it (Jantzen, 2005). Healthy-minded belief, the form of religious experience found in our three case companies, practitioner texts, and uncritical scholarly analyses, limits thought, action and subjectivity through exclusion of the surrounding contexts of reflection, critique and action.
Building on McLennan’s (2007) observations on how social science might engage with postsecularism, we have also offered a route through the complexities of the ‘faith-reason’ debate as it impinges on organization analysis by addressing three key issues. On the epistemological status of religious faith James’ position is clear; faith itself is beyond argument, perhaps even beyond language (Rorty, 1997), and therefore only open to analysis through the difference it might make to an individual or organization. Second, on the ethical implications of practicing religious faith we have argued that belief systems that encourage the production of healthy-minded subjects and organizational cultures are emerging as dominant in practice and in practitioner-oriented literature. We see this as problematic, and therefore propose the alternative of the sick soul as a means of being more ethically engaged and productive in constructing less individually or environmentally damaging organizations. This acknowledgement of religious belief as a legitimate basis for critical social action does not imply endorsement of the faith position itself or adherence to the ontology of the religious belief. Practice-based religious moralities can enable organizational exploitation and inequality to be challenged as effectively as, for example, Marxist perspectives (MacIntyre, 1995).
There is considerable potential for belief-led ethics in organizations engaged with the social and material world that acknowledge the damaging aspects of managerial or workplace practice (Bell, 2008). Seeing religion as a critical resource is especially important at a time when organizational members and scholars are being accused of failing to acknowledge or respond to the damaging material effects of corporate activity, including environmental destruction, prejudice and corruption (Dunne et al., 2008). As MacIntyre (1995) emphasizes, neither secular social theory nor religious belief systems can be separated off from social, environmental, political and economic realities, empirically or analytically. Instead they can be recognized as potential contributors to developing an ethic that conceptualizes the material and immaterial, organizational body and soul, internal and external transformation, as inevitably interconnected.
Finally we have argued that there are complex empirical and conceptual issues surrounding organizational and scholarly engagement with religious belief. The workplace spirituality movement is a primary context for understanding the interplay of religious belief and organization. Many commentators note the inherent ambiguity of the concept of spirituality. However, if we understand contemporary spiritualities as a form of religious belief, and engage with the phenomenological reality of the experiences their practice involves, then we are better able to interpret their social and ethical significance. William James’ writings on religion and his pragmatic philosophical position provide analytical resources that allow the religious values manifest in these organizational practices to be explored in exactly this way, at the level of action.