Theology and organization

What is theology of organization, and how is it different from traditional theology and sociology of religion?

If theology of organization is based on the idea that theological concepts structure the way we think about organizations, where would that situate theology of organization in relation to classical theology and sociology of religion, since it cannot be placed in either? At the outset, one is able to identify in academia a longstanding schism between theology on the one hand and sociology of religion on the other. The traditional way of understanding this distinction is that theology is founded in (predominantly Jewish-Christian) revelation, whereas sociology of religion (or religious studies) is interested in the practice of faith of other people. Ford (1998: 5) offers a clear account of this traditional distinction:

Religious studies at its crudest uses an ideology of academic neutrality which presumes a cool, objective approach to the phenomena of religions. (…) Theology at its crudest presumes sole privileged access of believers to theological truth … and draws its boundaries with reference to one community’s confessional position.

Both of these positions can also be recognized in organization and management studies. The first, a study of organization that is in line with sociology of religion, has become fairly mainstream in organization studies. The focus is particularly on spirituality and religion in the workplace (e.g. Ashmos and Duchon, 2000; Burack, 1999; Mitroff and Denton, 1999), which has become increasingly popular in recent years (Oswick, 2009). The launch of the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion in 2005 also attests to the growing interest in religion and spirituality in organizations.

The second of these positions, a theological position as traditionally conceived, is at first sight much less established within organization and management studies. When starting as editor-in-chief of Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion, Giacalone (2010) stressed that the journal ‘will only publish articles reflecting the social science tradition’ (p. 4), which is distinguished from ‘an advocacy group for people’s religious or spiritual beliefs, armchair philosophers, or activists’ (p. 3). This way Giacalone maintains the strict traditional distinction between sociology of religion and theology, and advocates the former.

But even though management and organization journals only hesitantly publish studies that are explicitly faith- or spirituality-based, the theological position can still be recognized in organization studies, particularly within the United States. For example, Sandelands (2003) in the article ‘An Argument for God in Organization Studies’, is very open about his theological point of departure: ‘I hope to recall an old idea that we should never have lost—namely, that God exists and He matters’ (p. 1). We may further refer to ‘Spiritually-Informed Management Theory’ (Steingard, 2005) which is also explicit about its spiritual point of departure. In some cases, however, the distinction between ‘spiritually-informed’ and a study of spirituality is less clear. The growing literature on servant leadership, for example, is sometimes explicit about its (predominantly) Christian roots (e.g. Greenleaf, 1977), while at other times it appears to be ashamed of these roots, as it attempts to establish itself as a neutral form of social science (e.g. Russell and Stone, 2002).

This leads us to the observation that Ford’s (1998: 5) ‘crude’ distinction between theology and social science does not simply refer to two different bodies of knowledge; it is also the articulation of a faith in the power of objective, or disinterested, science. When it comes to the topic of spirituality and religion, this ideal is often transformed into a stylistic habit, since the very topic of spirituality tends to attract scholarship that has an interested relation to the phenomenon in question. In other words, a scholarly interest in religion and spirituality is often guided by a personal conviction. The split between theology and sociology of religion, as far as management and organization studies goes, is often a split in form (i.e. a more personal style versus a more methodical style) rather than content, where management scholars are, more often than not, forced to write in a neutral style, even in the more critical corners of the field (O’Shea, 2002).

The connections and, as we suggest, the possible structural isomorphism between the social sciences and theology are being debated more and more, although this debate takes place outside of management and organization studies. One of the most notable attempts to deconstruct the traditional distinction between theology and sociology of religion is John Milbank’s (2006) insistence on theology as a social science. In Milbank’s ‘radical orthodox’ view the social sciences are founded on violence, a thought he takes from René Girard’s (1977) theory of mimetic desire: archaic societies are based on the fact that humans desire what others desire, irrespective of the desired object. This leads to violent social competition and, eventually, to a scapegoatism that, through the sacrifice of the scapegoat, reinstantiates peace (if only for a time). The social sciences, says Milbank (2006: 278ff), suffer from replicating this order, whereas a Christian theology would be able to break this vicious circle. This leads him to propose theology as the basis for a social science, alongside an ethics supplanting ‘a way of life based on the victimization of others with one where we choose voluntarily to bear each others burden’ (Milbank, 2006: 402).

At the heart of Milbank’s refusal to pick a side between theology on the one hand and sociology of religion on the other is a dual refusal of the idea that theology’s starting point is a revelation of truth that is culturally independent and ahistorical and that sociology of religion can assure its objectivity by means of a view from nowhere. Given that no single form of sociology is free from ideological presuppositions and given that Milbank does not accept the idea of theology’s privileged access to truth, there is no reason why theology cannot itself be a form of sociology. Although we do not follow Milbank’s suggestion to turn theology into a social science, we take some central insights from his work. Like Milbank, we do not accept the idea of a proper social science that can assure its objectivity by means of disinterested method. If anything, such a position is itself based on a certain faith in the redemptive powers of science (Eagleton, 2009; Feyerabend, 1993). We also do not consider theology as having privileged access to a higher truth, based on some form of revelation. But our approach differs from Milbank in that we do not attempt to establish, in our case, a theology of organization as a separate tradition with its own ethics and politics. Instead, our interest is in how theological concepts are already at work within organizational theory and practice, and how theological concepts can help us in understanding and intervening in these theories and practices. This relates to the observation which we will discuss in the next section, that concepts of organization can often be recognized as secularized, theological concepts.

Political theology of organization: from miracle to innovation

Even though theology of organization is not yet recognized as an integral part of organization studies, we contend that it goes to the heart of the way we think about organizations. Our argument is similar to political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s (1985/1922: 36) famous claim that ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’. In this section we will argue that Schmitt’s observation of political theory also holds for organization studies: organization studies, despite its appearance of being a ‘proper’ social science, is already theological. That is to say, the way organization studies conceptualizes organization, as well as (anti-)organizational figures such as the entrepreneur and the leader, is realized through theological motives. Theology of organization, as we propose to understand it, not only brings these theological motives to light, but also uses theological concepts to challenge these established ways of thinking about organization and management.

The central example that Schmitt gives for his argument that theories of the state are informed by theology, is the concept of miracle. According to Schmitt (1985/1922: 36), ‘the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology’. Schmitt asserts that modern theories of the state conceptualize the sovereign in the same way as theology has conceptualized God: when the sovereign decides when the rule of law will be suspended, or when the rule of law will make room for politics, he acts in a way that the Scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1975 [ca. 1270]), for example, understood God to act: as having the capacity to disrupt His own laws, by means of the miracle.

We suggest that this scheme not only accounts for theories of the state, but that it also is central in organization studies. Max Weber (1978/1922) famously argued that charismatic authority entails a transgression of the formal organization. The character that is today known as the charismatic leader is again someone who has been given the authority to decide when the rules are to be broken. But the influence of this theological scheme goes much further and can also be seen in literature on, for example, innovation, entrepreneurship and change management, which all build upon the distinction between law and intervention, organization and the new, or bureaucracy and creativity.

This opposition between calcified laws and reinvention (or intervention) is evident, for example, in critiques of bureaucracy within organization studies and business literature. When du Gay points to the burgeoning ‘bureaucracy-bashing’ literature that draws heavily on a ‘formal organizations versus innovations’-scheme, he does so by quoting Tom Peters: ‘I beg each and every one of you to develop a passionate and public hatred of bureaucracy’ (cited in du Gay, 2000: 61; see also du Gay, 1994: 655). This statement is itself framed theologically: this world, devoid of (true) passion, repetitive and somnambulist as it appears, is rooted in a satanic bureaucracy that all true innovators must passionately and publicly denounce. As a historical antecedent to this protest one may think of the European reformations, which based themselves on the premise that anything that came between the believer and God was of satanic origin (Taylor, 2004). The great Other was, needless to say, the Catholic Church, or more precisely the gigantic bureaucratic machine that the Church installed to embody its continuous substitution of Christ on earth. Luther and Calvin, the greatest of the reformers, insisted that the Catholic Church in this way withdrew from the believers their direct, individual contact to God. And converts had to publicly denounce the Catholic Church to become a member of the reformed churches.

The reason for Tom Peters’ anger is, of course, not that the member of the bureaucratic business is bereft of his or her contact to God, but rather that s/he is deprived of contact to innovation and creativity, caught up in the iron cage of norms and rule-following behaviour. However, a large part of the innovation and entrepreneurship literature, with Tom Peters as an emblematic case, is steeped in a thoroughly theological narrative that places miraculous innovation as the result of the gracious act of the entrepreneur or innovator (Bill, 2006; Sørensen, 2008; Spoelstra, 2010). This entrepreneur appears, through overcoming myriads of obstacles if not direct humiliation and lack of initial acknowledgement, as the saviour of mankind, or more precisely of the late modern economies. Even when these economies fail, the call for the entrepreneur as saviour seems to get only stronger.

We shall provide some further examples of theology of organization in a later section when we outline the different ways in which one can engage with theology of organization. The reason why we highlight Schmitt’s thesis here is the suggestion that theology is fundamental for organization studies as such. In a similar way to Schmitt, we suggest that organization studies is far from a disenchanted form of theorizing; it rather transfers enchantment from a religious context towards a secular, economic context. In the next section, we will go one step further by arguing that not only is organization studies shaped by theological concepts, but also that organization in practice often entails a theological movement, in the sense that it produces the sacred: it sets apart figures (such as the entrepreneur, but also the leader, consumer and knowledge worker), activities (e.g. strategy, human resource management) or techniques (Business Process Re-engineering, Lean, etc.) to the extent that they obtain a sacred status. Organization studies, on its side, often partakes in this production of the sacred by offering scientific legitimacy for these separations. We link this argument to Agamben’s (2009, 2011) recent writings on ‘economic theology’.

From political theology of organization to economic theology of organization

Theology of organization, we propose, aims at working with and working on theological concepts that problematize or oppose contemporary forms of organization. In the previous section, we showed how theology of organization may be understood as an extension of Schmitt’s analysis of political theory: like theories of the state, influential organizational theories stem from a theological distinction between natural law and an intervening deity. In this section we add to this analysis by showing that theology of organization is also informed by what Agamben (2009, 2011) has recently called ‘economic theology’. We introduce the idea of an economic theology of organization by means of the concept of the sacred, a concept that we see as central to the fundamental operation of organization.

The word sacred derives from sacer meaning what is set apart (Grint, 2010) or something that is distinct (Nancy, 2005: 1). A sacred object is removed from the real world of things: it belongs to the gods. To sacralize is to destroy the reality of a thing in order to give it a divine status (Agamben, 2007). The sacred is therefore untouchable, unavailable and unobservable. Only by cutting a thing off from its worldly bonds, and thereby its possible utility, can an object (e.g. an animal as a resource) be lifted from the material world to the divine. Here we see a fundamental isomorphism with organization. To organize something is to set it apart from something else: in organizational practice hierarchy is a technology that separates matters and ensures that they remain apart. In his influential Summa Theologia (written 1265–1274), Aquinas connects hierarchy directly with the sacred: a ‘sacred rule, which is what hierarchy means, exists among men and among angels’ (quoted in Agamben, 2011: 157). For Aquinas, the earthly hierarchies of men mirror the heavenly, angelic hierarchies. Most straightforwardly, hierarchy divides matter high and low: the sacred high above us in the sky or in the executive lounge, the profane deep below on earth and among the most ordinary of men. Yet, as Cooper (1986) points out, a division simultaneously separates and conjoins, and the sacred remains in an intricate relationship to the secularized or the profane, just as the organization remains in an intricate relationship to what is outside it, its disorganized other.

But to sacralize something through organization, be it a god or a leader, paradoxically also somehow makes this god or this leader impotent: the sacred is cut off from the empirical world, and therefore cannot intervene in it. In terms of leadership this happens when the leader is elevated to an untouchable, therefore safe, sacred level, and the employees are kept in a profane, therefore insecure and contingent space. This separation makes it difficult to bridge the sacred and the profane: if the leader is elevated to a transcendent level, how can s/he act in the organization?

The early Christian theologians first reflected on this problem in relation to the ultimate sacral and transcendent nature of God, that is, His radical otherworldly nature. Sacrality posed a practical problem for theology, the solution to which turned out to have direct influence on how we today understand the concept of ‘economy’. The problem was, theologically speaking: how could God administer the world or home (Gr. oikos) He has created, when He is entirely transcendent? (for a discussion, see Agamben, 2009: 8ff). It boils down to a problematic relationship between being and acting. As God’s being is transcendent, He cannot act in the earthly, immanent world. The solution that the theologians of early Christianity after the second century worked out, argues Agamben, lies in the concept of the trinity. The God of the trinity (who is three yet one) entrusts ‘to Christ the “economy”, the administration and government of human history’ (Agamben, 2009: 10). The incarnated Christ becomes in economic theology the locus and energy of action in the world. In some Gnostic sects, Christ was known as ho anthropos tes oikonomias, which means ‘the economic man’, whose concern was the oikonomia or the administration of the house (Agamben, 2009: 10). This suggests that theology is already, prior to secularization, economic and that economy is already, prior to any functional differentiation of society, theological.

We have seen that Schmitt derives a political theology from the isomorphic relationship between the single, transcendent God and the transcendent, sovereign power of the state. The above development lets us add an economic theology to the political theology. The economic theology deploys, instead of transcendent authority, an oikonomia, which is ‘an immanent ordering … of both divine and human life’ (Agamben, 2011: 1). Agamben is then able to conclude that

Political philosophy and the modern theory of sovereignty derive from the first paradigm [that is, political theology]; modern biopolitics up to the current triumph of economy and government over every other aspect of social life derive from the second paradigm [economic theology]. (Agamben, 2011: 1)

This ‘double’ paradigmatic influence of theology—both political and economic—is now seen to extend way beyond the boundaries of public law, which is Schmitt’s concern. It continues and prolongs itself ‘up to the fundamental concepts of the economy and the very idea of the reproductive life of human societies’ (Agamben 2011: 1). It is beyond the scope of this editorial to explore the consequences of Agamben’s analysis for organization studies in any detail. However, one link that may be worth mentioning is that the concept of oikonomia merges with the idea of ‘providence’ from the second century onwards, and is later to be translated from the Greek into Latin as dispositio, where Michel Foucault (1977) picks it up in his analysis of the dispositive or apparatus. This suggests that the concept of the apparatus, influential in organization studies (e.g. Ahonen and Tienari, 2009) is a concept with deep theological implications and a much larger historical horizon than normally acknowledged.

Agamben’s analysis suggests that economic theology, or really the modern concept of oikonomia, was developed to deal with the problems connected to the organizational production of sacrality. The sacred lies at the heart of the fundamental operation of organization, yet it is also this sacrality which administers a certain impotence to what is set apart and elevated into transcendence. Whereas political theology establishes the sovereign’s glory, economic theology makes, through the trinitarian oikonomia, administration and governance possible, and creates power structures. Not only are these power structures still with us, they spread and intensify in our contemporary world. Theology of organization emerges as an indispensable resource for the analysis and critique of this situation, and for a potential resistance (Bell, 2008; Critchley, 2012). Such resistance may also, as a resistance against theological sacralizations of power, take the form of profanation (Agamben, 2007; Murtola, 2010). Profanation annuls the separation between the sacred and the profane, by means of ‘an entirely inappropriate use’ of the sacred (Agamben, 2007: 76). That is to say, profanation neutralizes the power structures that come with the sacred, not by secularization, but by using the sacred out of context, in illegitimate ways. Reverend Billy’s ludic anti-consumerist practices could be seen as an example of this (see Murtola, 2012: xx–xx).

In the next section we will try to distinguish three ways in which organization studies can, and in our view should, use theology as an analytical resource. These different ways are meant to serve as a broad overview that maps past studies and could serve as a guidance for future studies in the field of what we call theology of organization.

Three forms of theology of organization

Theology is, as we have already indicated, quite far from being recognized as a focus and a resource within organization studies or within any other social science for that matter. This is why we contend that a heuristic map of possible theological analyses of organization may have some value for organization scholars. We delineate these analyses according to how they identify and make use of theological concepts within organization studies.

Contributions to this issue

If the five contributions that we have collected for this issue could be brought to fit one category, it would be the ‘neo-disciplinarity’ that the founders of Organization (Burrell et al., 1994) called for almost twenty years ago, which encouraged ‘the awkward and beautiful juxtapositions that can happen when ideas from different places meet’ (Parker and Thomas, 2011: 54). Theology and organization studies deploy different discourses, a fact the reader will appreciate throughout the issue. Yet as this editorial’s main argument about their intricate relation is being set to work in the different papers, the differences between theology and organization studies are juxtaposed with what they share as common ground, resulting in awkward but also, we think, beautiful juxtapositions.

Stefan Schwarzkopf juxtaposes, in the first contribution to this issue, a theological reading of the modern economy with the views of Hans Blumenberg (1983 [1966]) and the majority of historians that see the modern world as a radical, secularized break with the old world. In particular, Schwarzkopf contends that the naturalized market, in which the individual consumer realizes his or her choice, and hence his or her entire existence, is not a secularized, self-adjusting and emergent phenomenon, but a theologically imbued and highly designed entity. He further points to three genuine theological resources that structure today’s naturalized market and its allegedly free consumers: the Scholastic idea of an accountable Self, the Protestant priesthood of the common man, and post-Reformation Deist theology, which views society as peaceful and self-ordering. While Adam Smith somewhat naively idealized the market as a beautiful and benign machine of Deist nature, his followers, especially the much later consumer researchers at Madison Avenue, directly deployed their Protestant ecclesiology in focusing on individual choice, accounted for in focus groups. A new cult of the Self was born, with its own rituals and ceremonies, which was quite certain about who should pay the price for this brave new world.

Both Schwarzkopf and the following contribution, Bruno Dyck and Elden Wiebe’s work on salvation, are examples of our first category of theological analysis, where modern concepts of organizations are scrutinized and identified as secularized theological concepts. Dyck and Wiebe trace how the theological notion of salvation gets translated into ‘emancipation’ in modern so-called secularized environments, and explore how the acknowledgement of this connection can change basic understandings of contemporary organization. Mankind has always sought salvation from suffering, and instead of reducing social problems to their economic ‘basis’, as a Marxist analysis would tend to do, Dyck and Wiebe follow Weber in insisting on the mutual adaption between religion and economy, or salvation and organization.

Anna-Maria Murtola’s contribution to this issue also falls into our first category, with its central juxtaposition between a theologically founded capitalism and a captured life. Murtola sets out, following Milbank, to analyse capitalism and the resistance against it by identifying the sacralization of capital as working in a double register: capitalism acts as a religion with rituals and ceremonies and it also enjoys a special affinity with the practise of actual, Christian religion, in particular Protestantism. This is the premise for the analysis of Murtula’s case: the US-based Reverend Billy’s ‘Church of Life after Shopping’ and its additional gospel choir. This performance lets Reverend Billy enter into Starbucks and exorcise its cash register and preach his ‘stop shopping’ gospel, backed by the choir. Deploying Žižek material theology’s re-found notion of Truth and his analytical concept of ‘parodic overidentification’, Murtola shows how contemporary resistance against capitalism in a Benjaminian manner digs into theology to find its means of resistance.

Peter Case, Robert French and Peter Simpson follow our third category of ways of doing theology of organization, as their contribution sets out to redeem a forgotten or repressed theological concept, namely that of theoria. They argue that theoria’s original Greek meaning of contemplation, or a ‘direct experiential knowledge of the divine’, is excluded from organizational discourses in favour of the modern, disenchanted notion of ‘theory’, which is guided by a search for certainty rather than a search for truth. Much of the contemporary interest in spiritual management and spiritual leadership only appears to counter this move from theoria to theory. While many ‘spiritually-informed’ management authors appear to realign knowledge of management and organizations with a form of contemplative understanding, Case et al. show—on the basis of an analysis of Spiritual Leadership Theory—that these studies rather align a modern version of theory with a utilitarian focus on usefulness and a contemporary preoccupation with performativity (Lyotard, 1984). Spirituality is allowed to appear in leadership studies, but only as a function of the organization’s bottom line. Case et al. conclude their article by calling for more contemplative understandings of organizations, and suggest how such a possibility may be present in forms of embodied ethics that have received recent attention in organization studies.

In the final contribution to this issue, Alistair Mutch proves that our analytical categories probably already are transgressed, as his article explores the interplay between theology and practice departing from a decidedly empirical stance. It shows how accounting practices partly have theological roots in the Scottish Presbyterian Church, and are particularly concerned with the church’s notion of discipline which focused on ‘the giving, recording and monitoring of accounts, in both textual and numerical form’ (Mutch, 2012 xx–xx). A contemporary concept such as the audit society can partly be traced back, Mutch argues, to this notion of discipline.

So much for categorizing and disciplining our contributor’s texts. As editors we neither hope nor expect this special issue’s ‘neo-disciplinary’ experiment to ever settle into a discipline or sub-discipline, but we do hope that it will inspire more awkward, yet beautiful, juxtapositions of theology and organization studies in the future.