[New Mexico State University] Paper No. ______

December 4, 1999

Paper presented at the 2000 SCOS Conference in Athens

The new asceticism of "spiritual capitalism" is all the rage. Spiritual capitalism is a hybrid of spirituality in business and ecology and New Age postmodern philosophy. On the one hand spiritual capitalism seeks to reunite economics and ethics. On the other hand graying strategy professors are teaching courses on wisdom, spirituality, and every CEO seems to be on some kind of spiritual quest. The purpose of my paper is to raise some critical postmodern challenges. I will look to Bauman and Debord to explore the new spirituality of production and consumption. My data base is the glut of articles on spirituality that have made their way into Journal of Organizational Change Management. Specifically I wonder if this is just another fetish to mask over-production and conspicuous consumption?

Key Words: Postmodern, spirituality, critical theory, & WTO.

• David M. Boje
• Professor of Management
• Department of Management, MSC 3DJ
• New Mexico State University
• P.O. Box 30001
• Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003-8001
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• Phone (505) 532-1693 Home Office
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It is the age of the "spirituality counseling boom." Spiritual capitalism experts are available to help one narrate their work life as a spirituality journey story. This new ontology of corporate existence has been the subject of numerous Journal of Organizational Change Management special issues. The ontological uncertainty of modern organization and the free-floating anxiety of postmodern fragmentation appear to be resolvable in spirituality consultation. In this presentation, I propose to question the new guru-spiritualism that equates "organic" organizations, "self-deconstructing" organizations, and "fragmenting network organizations" as the new philosophy of management and capitalist enlightenment.

And it is not only consulting but the hallowed Academy that is being colonized by the spiritualist. In 1998, the Academy of Management meeting was erupting with spirituality sessions. Cavanagh (1999) comments that the1998 theme was "What matters most?" and hosted seven symposia (six were showcase sessions) that explicitly discussed spirituality and/or religion. I must confess that I too have been ambassador to the new spiritualists. Between 1992 and 1999, Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM) alone published 68 articles that mention spirituality, of which 36 make it a key focus (beginning with Bullis & Glaser, 1992). This statistic was established using MCB publisher's on line search engine using a key word search on "Spirit" (which includes spirituality" and reading the context of the 68 articles. And there are two journals devoted just to spirit at work (Spirit at Work and Business Spirit).

Spiritual capitalism sells.

There is also a glut of books on spiritual capitalism and associated business practices with titles like: Servant Leadership (Greenleaf , 1977; Melrose, 1995), Spirit at Work or in the Workplace (Hawley, 1993; Scherer & Shook, 1993; Conger, 1994; Gozdz, 1995; Schechter, 1995; Guillory, 1997), Leading with Soul (Bolman & Deal, 1995), The Soul of a Business (Chappell, 1993), Soul in the Workplace (Briskin,1996; Canfield & Hansen, 1996; Renesch & DeFoore, 1996), Managing with the Wisdom of Love (Marcic, 1997), The Fourth Wave (Maynard & Mehrtens, 1993) and spiritual leadership books by Covey (1989, 1994). The business list serves are also buzzing: "how many business colleges have one or more spirituality courses in their curriculum?"

Like the characters in the Wizard of Oz, the new spirituality in business, consulting and pedagogy portends certain gifts, the promise of reenchanting mechanical organization with organic spirituality and the living organization (Guillory, 1997) is being given a corporate soul, and predatory capitalism a moral compass (Karliner & Karliner; Mokhiber & Weissman, 1999).

But like the Crusades, it is not Clear Whose Religion has God's Backing. The covert and hegemonic power of large corporations enables corporate agendas to dominate the globalization debate about the state of the environment and sweatshop labor practices. Helvarg (1997) for example maintains that there is a "startling increase in intimidation, vandalism, and violence directed against grassroots environmental activists." The so-called "Wise Use Movement" he maintains is itself a ``Wise Use'' movement, which has launched a ``holy war against the new pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people.'' For example, the Wise Use web site argues (Wise Use, 2000:

"Environmentalists tend to be catastrophists, believing that any human use of the earth is 'damage' and massive human use of the earth is 'a catastrophe.' An environmentalist motto is 'We all live downstream,' the viewpoint of helpless or vengeful victims."

My point is simply this, there is a war of spiritualists and religious prophets. And each accuses the other of being a religious cult: one worshiping the Gaia or Mother Earth and the other worshiping technology and the free market. There are a variety of spiritual capitalism positions.

A common theme is spiritual capitalism, the combination of economic and spiritual ideals:

"When the overarching goals of the organization is only profit and the increase of shareholder wealth, it is difficult to create a spiritual framework, for as soon as the bottom line is threatened, love goes out the window as an expendable commodity" (Marcic, 1997: 21).

Spiritual capitalism experts are available to help one narrate their work life as a spirituality journey story, the new ontology of corporate existence. The ontological uncertainty of modern organization is thus resolvable in spirituality consultation. It is the age of the "spirituality counseling boom." In this presentation, I propose to question the new guru-spiritualism that equates "organic" organizations, "self-deconstructing" organizations, and "fragmenting network organizations" as the new philosophy of management and capitalist enlightenment.

Zygmunt Bauman is one of a few who questions the new spiritualism and its association with postmodernity (1997: 178):

"Postmodernity is the era of experts in ‘identity problems,’ of personality healers, of marriage guides, of writers of ‘how to reassert yourself’ books; it is the era of the ‘counseling boom.’" Business executives need spiritual counseling and their organizations need spiritual healing. "Uncertainty postmodern-style begets not the demand for religion; it gestates instead the ever rising demand for identity-experts" (p. 179).

With the collapse of hierarchy (some say) the postmodern condition is one of getting more spiritual guidance.

A critique can be read in the work of Guy Debord (1967). He applies Marx's concept of fetish to consumption. For Debord (1967: No. 20), "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion." Somehow late capitalism has replaced spiritual worship with commodity worship. " The fetishism of commodities reaches moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism (No. 67).

Another critical voice is that of Heather Höpfl (1994) who in her JOCM article argued that organizations imitate religious forms and invoke even the 'Holy Spirit" to exploit. The religion of the work organization demands submission, obedience, the acceptance of hierarchy and an ambivalent attitude to the body as instrument of the organization (as in "temple of the Holy Spirit") and in mortification and control where the religious parallels are more direct and obvious." She adds " management evangelists and various other prophets of management have engaged in an unreflective or opportunistic rhetoric of change management."

Other voices include Steingard and Fitzgibbons (1995) who argued that global capitalism is a spiritually flawed discourse that is not ecologically sustainable. And Walck (1995) is also cautious about spirituality, reminding us that our global discourse ignores the "spirituality" of the poor.

I will argue that there is a certain missionary zeal to the spiritual capitalism trend that bounces between the extremes of Social Darwinism and a way to curb or transcend the evils of Predatory Capitalism. In the next section I briefly review how spiritualism has been used to legitimate Social Darwinist practices.

In 1889, for example, Andrew Carnegie wrote an article endorsing Social Darwinism by showing how it linked individualism, social divisions, and economic competition. Carnegie’s article is a marvelous defense of the status quo of robber barons rooted in his interpretation of Darwin. Charles Darwin (1859: 164) was aware of the earlier work of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who advocated what we now call "Social Darwinism."

It must be emphasized that Spencer was intellectually active during the height of Britain’s industrial revolution, during a time of Victorian thinking. And, I think that OT has adopted this ideological position without much challenge. Social Darwinism was popular among the Victorians of his day, as an apologetic for the inequities of wealth accumulation and visible poverty. "Free competition, he argued, was a natural law of economics and the best guarantor of a community’s well-being" (Caudill, 1997: 67).

The poor deserved their poverty and interfering would only breed more of the poor race. The divisions of rich and poor, the differential rewards of monopoly, the virtues of civility to a civilization, all these ideals could be legitimated by the Social Darwinism narrative. Spencer's earliest writings (1851) protested all welfare laws for the poor, public education, and any intrusion of government into industry. The gradual progress of society depended upon not interfering in the Natural and purifying struggle of the survival of the fittest. This gave legitimacy to the view that Europeans and Americans, as English speakers were the rightful inheritors of world domination, because "they had been the most enterprising people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" (Caudill, 1997: 76). Social Darwinism is not only survival of the fittest, it is survival of the richest. "Millionaires" Sumner said, "are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done" (Caudill, 1997: 76). In short, spirituality, as in Spencer's and Carnegies' day is still used to legitimate the status quo of wealth and power.

Almost at the other extreme, are writers who look to the new spiritualism in business as a way to counter the trends of predatory capitalism. By predatory capitalism I mean the economic violence of abusive and toxic working conditions for child and female labor in overseas sweatshops, and locating companies in countries where environmental regulation is lax. There are many contemporary examples. For example " Banana union leaders in Guatemala leading a fight against Del Monte's firing of nearly 1,000 workers were surrounded at their union headquarters by 200 heavily armed men on October 13, threatened with death and forced to resign and abandon their homes (Campaign for Labor Right, October 21, 1999 Alert). And, "at least 27 workers have been illegally fired from the DOALL factory in El Salvador, which produces garments for the Liz Claiborne, Perry Ellis, Leslie Fay and Norton clothing lines. The workers were fired for exercising their right to organize" (Campaign for Labor Rights, December 4, 1999). The spiritualists argue that the path to social change is through non-violent protest, and that this will counter/instruct predatory capitalist acts of violence. But as, Tinker (1999b) argues it can be a "preaching convenient moralizing philosophies of passivity and quietism."

WTO and Spiritual Capitalism

Thousands of people march in protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) on the streets in Seattle. During the November 30 to December 3, 1999 WTO meetings, there were also demonstrations taking place in cities around the world. Spiritual groups along with consumer, sweatshop and child labor, environmentalists, human rights activists, fair trade groups, AIDS activists, animal protection organizations, those concerned with Third World development, and women's organizations joined in the global opposition to the WTO.

Demonstrators danced, played drums and chanted "Let them go" into the late afternoon, demanding the release of the "Seattle 500" — those protesters arrested over the last two days. By early evening, the jail was under lockdown, a the protesting crowd had thinned to smaller group staging a sit-in at the jail’s entrance and many other protesters had moved up to the Capitol Hill neighborhood near downtown, the scene of violence Wednesday night

... Besides pummeling innocent bystanders with tear gas and rubber bullets, critics said police in this city that proudly tolerates almost any group also trampled demonstrators’ Constitutional rights of assembly and free speech.

Press here for Slide Show on line

In Front of Nike Building

... Local television showed police kicking and gassing Capitol Hill residents who said they were simply returning home from dinner or work. In another incident, local television showed a riot policeman kick a retreating protester in the groin and shoot a projectile at him from close range. (Huss, 1999).

Is WTO a ground swell of spiritual awareness, a counter-movement to Social Darwinism? Or is this merely a postmodern moral impulse (to use Bauman's words)?

Here is a list of reasons for the protest (Campaign for Labor Rights, November 25, 1999):

1. The WTO prioritizes trade and commercial considerations over al; other values.
2. The WTO undermines democracy. Its rules drastically shrink the choices available to democratically controlled governments, with violations potentially punished with harsh penalties.
3. The WTO does not just regulate, it actively promotes, global trade.
4. The WTO hurts the Third World. WTO rules force Third World countries to open their markets to rich country multinationals, and abandon efforts to protect infant domestic industries.
5. The WTO eviscerates the Precautionary Principle. WTO rules generally block countries from acting in response to potential risk - requiring a probability before governments can move to resolve harms to human health or the environment.
6. The WTO squashes diversity. WTO rules establish international health, environmental and other standards as a global ceiling through a process of "harmonization"; countries or even states and cities can exceed them only by overcoming high hurdles.
7. The WTO operates in secrecy. Its tribunals rule on the "legality" of nations' laws, but carry out their work behind closed doors.
8. The WTO limits governments' ability to use their purchasing dollar for human rights, environmental, worker rights and other non-commercial purposes.
9. The WTO disallows bans on imports of goods made with child labor. In general, WTO rules do not allow countries to treat products differently based on how they were produced - irrespective of whether made with brutalized child labor, with workers exposed to toxics or with no regard for species protection.
10. The WTO legitimizes life patents. WTO rules permit and in some cases require patents or similar exclusive protections for life forms.

While the media lamented the violence of the vandals in Seattle, what was less covered was the corporate violence that as Tinker (1999a) argues "precipitated the Seattle events: the economic violence of abusive working conditions for child and female labor, the climatic and environmental degradation for a quick buck Etc., that shortens peoples lives. Is a brick through the window at Starbucks more violent (and personal) that these cases? And who threw the first brick?" (Tinker, 1999a).

While the vast majority of protestors (estimated at 40,000) engaged in a peaceful protest march, the media attention was on any act of violence. The Seattle papers had headlines like: "Police fire tear gas point-blank"; "Violence: 'As American as cherry pie?,'" "Ceremonies off, but business goes on despite demonstrations"; "Police aid called in from five Seattle-area agencies". And the TV and print media had many pictures of police in full riot gear firing tear gas and pepper spray on protestors and chasing vandals as they kicked out windows in McDonalds, NikeTown, Nordstroms, and Starbucks in downtown Seattle. The photos narrated a story with images of police in Darth-Vader suits protecting corporate capital and free trade. As the days of protest continued, marchers controlled their own in the classic form of non-violent civil disobedience of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

W hat happens "after" the WTO protest? Is this action as monumental as the Paris protest of 1968 that for a brief while shut down the entire country. Or is it as revolutionary as the peace protests during the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement? Certainly not, however, the WTO protest does signal the tolerable limits to predatory capitalism at the end of the millenium. The action is postmodern in the attempt by many small and local boycott interests to say something about universalist systems of thought in late capitalism.

A more moderate position in spiritual capitalism is to look at ways to overcome the oppression of atheist regimes. For example, the spiritual consultants are attempting to counter the brutal crackdown against Falun Gong practitioners in China. Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is the fastest growing spiritual practice in the world. It is based upon ancient Chinese culture, and it has helped over 100 million people worldwide improve their health, purify their minds and uplift their spirits.

Since its introduction in 1992, Falun Gong has grown in popularity and has attracted more people than the members in the Chinese Communist Party. As of July 1999, the Chinese government, an atheist regime, has banned this spiritual practice and enacted new legislation to ?smash? all traditional religious practices including Falun Gong.

"Today in China, practitioners of all ages and professions are being fired from their jobs, taken from their homes, expelled from their schools, and demonized by a vicious state propaganda campaign. The government has punished them for their spiritual beliefs with mass detentions, beatings and torture. Some have even been tortured to death, while under custody, when attempts to [re-educate] them have failed. Many families are now living on the streets and under bridges because they cannot go home. Tens of thousands are being sent to labor camps, for up to three years without trial, while others have been forced to appear in show trials without legal representation or independent

Monitors" (Falun Gong International, 1999).

In this list serve posting, two spirituality consultants from Norway are seeking help to end the acts of oppression. I see in this fragmentation of spiritual movements some variations. There are protest groups forming to demand a more moral economics, confronting WTO and World Bank meetings, to make their demands visible. And within the business school there are courses on "Seven Steps to Wisdom" and "How to be a Servant Leader and a CEO?" One seems to question the material condition, while the other seems to retreat into meditation.

While this is undoubtedly a noble cause, what concerns me is how in OT spirituality becomes a legitimating narrative for status quo capitalism.

The competition of millionaires against the poor in the race to accumulate capital is for Spencer and Carnegie a fundamental Law of Nature in the purifying Struggle of Survival. Millionaires were the products of thousands of years of commerce-evolution and poverty was a part of the progressive social system fodder of any society. This simple story of evolution legitimated the robber baron mindset of Victorian capitalism as just common sense, and continues to serve as an apology to this day. Social Darwinism explains relative wealth and health inequality as the working out of "spirituality laws." I have a related critique. The theory that the fittest CEOs, fittest organizations, and fittest populations of organizations survive, while the weakest do not is a tautology. In the survival of the fittest analogy, it is by definition the "fittest" who always survive (Booher, 1998: 31). The reification of spiritual capitalism into the objectivity of natural law conceals the human agents of power. Finally, there is a teleology or progress imported into OT from Social Darwin theory. In the unilinear theory of progress of evolution, organizations’ progress through stages of developmental evolution, just as human organisms evolve from infants to mature adults. While Spencer leaned toward progress teleology, he also held that some societies and institutions progress, while other degrade and retrogress.

So what is the problem?

First, the "spiritual CEO," "spiritual organization culture" and "spiritual capitalism" narratives invokes the religious and spiritual who prefer to see a divine planner, rather than the brutishness of spectacularly unnatural selection as an explanation for the rift of rich and poor. Second, a spiritually-rational CEO reads the environment, and decides (with or without participation) how to adapt structure, function, size, technology, or advertising in the spiritual journey. Third, the affirmative postmodern position of the spirit and soul at work movement does not grapple with Marxist critique.

While as enthusiastic as I for the affirmative aspects of postmodern ascendancy in the Academy, we all seemed to ignore the skeptical postmodernists (Hassard & Parker, 1993). In the new spirituality narratives executives are saints, hermits, mystics, ascetic monks, or given to the dark side. Spiritual reasons are given to justify the dominance over nature and human exploitation as ethical, lawful, and scientific. "European/Judeo-Christian conception of economic development as exploitation of natural resources..." (Bryant & Bryant, 1998: 115). While I agree that economics needs a more enlightened philosophy and a more ethical practice, somehow the spiritual writing does not get us there. Butts (1994), for example while calling for a more spiritual paradigm to right the evils of predatory capitalism had kind of preachy tone to it. Butts, for example, prophesized what happens to societies that too narrowly focus on materialism and greed and showed his moral and righteous indignation: "I am outraged at the selfishness, greed, and mean-spirited, winner-take-all scapegoating (class warfare) inflicted on the working class and other disfranchised social groups." I see the same in my own writing and think, I too, am not being cautious.

Is spiritual organization a new fundamentalism, one somehow different from the religions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, etc? Is it an escape to premodern native religions and spiritual practices? If spiritual organization counseling and training is not a premodern escape or the old fundamentalism of old time religion, what is it? Bauman (1997: 182) argues it is "having one’s cake and eat it." It is the legitimation of modern technological development in spirituality. It is the new fundamentalism cosmology of late capitalism in the postmodern condition. It is the new legitimation of the cures to the Biotech Century (Rifkin, 1997). It is the blind faith in cyber capitalism to resolve the ills of global economy. The poor are just "flawed consumers" and organizations are flawed producers (Bauman, 1997: 183).

Spirituality in this New Age is the act of each individual seeking abundance in daily life, transplanting existential compass tools from many world religions while seeking to transcend religiosity. The universe, the world, and humankind is alive with spirituality. And again, humankind is at the center of this spiritual universe, able to become whatever thought desires. Spiritualism is a variant of the postmodern nemesis, humanism.

Humanism was not so much about being able to become whatever one may will, as about willing to become what one truly can (given the ample, though not necessarily infinite, richness of human potential): willing only those things that one can do something concrete and practical about making true… The idea of human self-sufficiency undermined the grip of institutionalized religion not by promising an alternative way to eternal life, but by drawing human attention away from it; by focusing instead on tasks which humans may perform and whose consequences they are able to experience as long as they are still ‘experiencing beings’ – and this means here, in this life (Bauman, 1997: 172).

Religiosity is either giving way to spirituality or just reinventing itself. And it is a movement that is making in roads into the Academy and the Business College.

The anecdote to postmodern malaise, disenchantment, and estrangement is the spiritual business movement. Spiritual "fundamentalism brings into the open the underground anxiety and premonition normal and well-nigh universal under the postmodern condition" (p. 183-184). Organizational spirituality is one trend in postmodern culture, the "legitimate child of postmodernity, born of its joys and torments, and heir to its achievements and worries alike" (p. 184). Spiritual "fundamentalism is a radical remedy against the bane of postmodern/market-led/consumer society – risk-contaminated freedom (a remedy that heals the infection by amputating the infected organ – abolishing freedom as such, in as far as there is no freedom free of risks)(Bauman, 1997: 184). Spirituality is a postmodern and fundamentalist response to postmodern fears of privatization, downsizing, deregulated market forces, temporary employment, a world where labor has no safety net and consumers worship at the alter of image consumption. Instead of an escape to pre-modern feudalism, spiritual fundamentalism, argues Bauman, is an "alternative rationality: to the "genuine problems besetting the members of postmodern society" (p. 185). If free market materialism and self-seeking rationality can be subordinated to spirituality, then the miseries of the society of the spectacle has what Adam Smith desired, the moral compassion of the spectator:

"The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment" (Smith, Part VII).

Both Bauman and Smith recognized the poverty of those excluded from the feast of consumption, as the singular pursuit of materiality widens the gap between rich and poor. Smith’s impartial spectator was to be the invisible gaze of moral sentiment, in the midst of market forces that brutalize the peasantariat. Spirituality was the servant of capitalism in Social Darwinism, preaching the rich were chosen by the hand of God to survive because they were fit for prosperity. The poor could therefore be properly excluded from the festive feast of consumption. The postmodern spirituality movement is hopefully a different moral compass. Possibly one in which the festive feast is open to all, and where an over-feast of the few, does not impoverish and starve the billions. It is this issue which apart from the simplicity and ecology movements to consume less, does not reach the agenda of spiritual fundamentalism in business counseling and curriculum.

Many of the current articles in JOCM are not nearly as cautious about warning us about the downside of spirituality as some of the earlier writings. Stephen Porth and John McCall (1999), for example, by my read do not appear too cautious as they pronounce the convergence and divergence they see between the learning organization model (Senge, 1990, 1994) and traditional spiritual understandings of employees and organizations. Sandra King and Dave M. Nicol (1999) do not seem at all cautious as they argue management can recognize the potential for mutual benefit in the nexus of the individual’s spiritual odyssey and the overall health of the organization. John Milliman, Jeffery Ferguson, David Trickett and Bruce Condemi (1999) do not seem cautious as they look at the cultural spirit of Southwest Airlines. In the age of downsizing, Southwest for example, announced the Love Airline has a no layoffs policy and integrated what the authors see as spiritual values throughout the company. Jerry Biberman, Michael Whitty, and Lee Robbins (1999) also look at the implications of the Wizard of Oz story for spiritual transformation without any caution I could find. Mark Kriger and Bruce Hanson (1999) quest with only appreciation for the value paradigm, positing that a truly healthy organizations can overcome the spiritual dis-ease of fanaticism, isolation, separation, and illusion by letting go of delusions and aspiring to enact what is highest and most uplifting to the human spirit. And, Fraya Wagner-Marsh and James Conley (1999), are perhaps the least cautious of all, seeing the bold spiritual corporate culture writers surfing the fourth-wave of Peter Vaill's (1989) permanent white water.

Before waxing your spirit board, I want to expound several concerns about the nouveau spirituality-based philosophies of business. The new books, articles of JOCM and other journals, and teaching seminars may offer the aura of spiritual transformation of work and society, while masking the material conditions and three important needs.

First, there is a need for more basic (I recommend ethnographic as well as additional self-reflective) research before we integrate spirituality with other popular consulting models. Judith Neal, Benyamin Lichtenstein, and David Banner (1999) exercise caution as they assert that spirituality can transform and transcend the individual, organization, and society. And, like the initial 1993 JOCM special issue, they posit that incorporating spirituality into our theorizing can improve our explanations. Kathy Kaplan (1995) for example did a study of the spiritual journey of several women consultants. Brenda Freshman (1999) is a another good example of beginning to do the research. She published the results of an exploratory content analysis of various uses and definitions of the word spirituality and used the software program, "AtlasTI" to assist with coding functions and to help draw graphic networks of relationships between her codes. To me, her findings were cautious. She suggested that more research is needed on the community of scholars who are using the term "spirituality" in so many varied ways. Butts (1999) is also cautious: " Spirituality at work is an idea of revolutionary potential that requires more clarity and theoretical understanding."

Second, we need to understand why spirit at work is becoming so popular in particular societies. Len Tischler (1999), for example sees the soaring interest in spirituality in business as a phenomenon explainable by Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where self-actualization is a luxury that U.S. and Euro economies can enjoy while most of the world is caught up in the need to survive. Elmer Burack (1999) also sees the spirituality movement as a backlash to what he terms the "economic-technological imperative" of downsizing and reengineering and he also embraces Maslow. But, Burack (1999) to me, like so many writers of this genre moves without caution to reinscribe Theory Y and Z, Maslow, corporate culture and everything else with spirituality. It anything the spirituality theory and research could put down the old models and take a fresh look, and as in the Quaker tradition, just listen at the door.

Gerald Cavanagh (1999), in my view, takes a refreshingly critical view of the spirituality movement. He see spirituality growing in emphasis as a backlash to the downsizing craze (as did Burack), the number of 1960s baby-boomers who are now writing, and our imminent change to a new millenium. He is skeptical about mixing the New Age movement in spirituality with the good old time religions. And he questions how "both Evangelical Christianity and the spirituality in business movements" legitimate a "person-centered individualism." And given the diversity of spiritual practices in a complex organization, there can be hegemonic consequences as some spiritual practices gain power in the workplace over others.

Gregory Konz and Francis Ryan (1999) did a study of the mission statements of the 28 US Jesuit universities and revealed that maintaining an organizational spirituality is no easy task. They argue that both individuals and organizations have spirituality and that "it is easier to maintain the established spirituality of an organization than it is to change an organization’s spirituality. At the same time, it is not easy to maintain an organization’s spirituality."

Third, there is a need to raise questions about teaching spirituality in the Business College. Sandra Waddock (1999) argues that " if we hope to influence teaching, scholarship, and practice, and if community is one of the elements on the subjective side of life that reflects spirit, then we need to make it acceptable in our teaching to build small communities." While the literature review is excellent, I am not sure there was much caution. How to accomplish what she asks is a complex issue. For example, Cavanagh (1999) suggests, the service-learning movement is happening with a missionary zeal that will surely lead to backlash as people see parallels to religious and service missions. André Delbecq (1999) uses a Christian definition of spirituality and service that is no doubt a good fit to senior executives in Silicon Valley, but may not be amenable to the variety of spiritual practices in classroom in other locales. For example, his definition of spirituality embeds service in a test: "My test of authenticity is the extent to which progress in the spirit of journey manifests itself in loving and compassionate service." Test of spirituality, service learning, and evoking communities of practice may be antithetical in many learning contexts. And teaching spirituality is a bit easier in Jesuit and other religious universities with a spirit mission than in public universities (I can say this from experience).

In conclusion I am asking for caution in the way we theorize, research, and teach spirituality. This way spirituality will be more than a passing fad and will do the least harm. I am also excited that JOCM was among the first journal to take spirituality seriously and prouder still to say that collectively we have exercised caution. As Biberman, Whitey, and Robbins (1999) remind us, "without spirituality the normative purpose of business is profit." Yet, there is I think a need to be cautious about our enthusiasm for making predatory capitalism bend to the will of the new fundamentalism. One person's spirituality is another's iron cage.

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Wise Use at Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, Web Site http://www.cdfe.org/wiseuse.html 2000.