From Patañjali to the “Gospel of Sweat”: Yoga’s Remarkable Transformation from a Sacred Movement into a Thriving Global Market

Abstract

Movements seeking to infuse markets with moral values often end up utilizing the market mechanism and support from mainstream actors to scale up, even if it comes at the cost of diluting their founding ethos. But this process can be particularly challenging for movements that are explicitly opposed to using a market mechanism as a means of scaling up. Our analysis of yoga between 1975 and 2016 reveals how a countercultural movement fundamentally opposed to a capitalist market economy but seeking to grow can paradoxically become syncretic with or infiltrated by concepts and beliefs that are core to the market system but incompatible with the movement’s original ethos. We show how, before such a movement can be commodified, it must be de-essentialized, a process that requires stripping away key aspects of its history, context, and religious commitments and transforming collective goals into individual ones. This process involves not only external entrepreneurs looking to mine the movement but also movement leaders seeking wider enrollment of resource-rich actors to scale the movement up. We show how codes borrowed from parallel movements and templates borrowed from markets can be instrumental in driving such a movement’s transformation. Through this extreme case of the yoga movement, we advance understandings of how movements can become syncretic with values and practices they fundamentally oppose.

How Do Mind-Body Practices Benefit Employees? A Daily Diary Study of Mind–Body Practices after Work and Employees’ Next-Day Proactive Behavior

“…In an organizational management context, engaging in mind-body practices has also been shown to reduce employees' anxiety and stress levels, develop sustainable affect regulation, and enhance their well-being at work [17]. Furthermore, mind-body practices can serve as a form of spiritual training that helps individuals to adjust their self-awareness to have a higher self-enhancement bias [3] and a more positive self-evaluation [11]. Improved affect regulation allows individuals to manage negative affect more effectively while promoting positive affect, and improved self-perceptions enhance individuals' perception of being capable of facing obstacles.…”

“…With the marketization and secularization of these practices in recent years, they have gained popularity not only in people's daily recreational activities but also as a part of corporate management, with more than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies offering mind-body practices courses for their employees. Employees in organizations engage in mind-body practices mostly in the hope of regulating affect and adjusting their mindset to help them recover from work [11].…”

“…The value of mind-body practices to regulate affect has been widely recognized [4], and studies have also found that participants who engage in mind-body practices report higher levels of self-evaluation and self-esteem [3,11]. Accordingly, we argue that an increase in proactive behavior is a likely form of improvement in employees' workplace behavior as a result of engaging in mind-body practices after work and that this effect is conveyed through improvements in affect regulation and self-perception.…”

Good Corp, Bad Corp, and the Rise of B Corps: How Market Incumbents’ Diverse Responses Reinvigorate Challengers

“…Finally, the B Corp movement managed its boundaries in a paradoxical way. Expansion-focused mobilization tends to curtail the roots in the original movement to make the boundary more porous, while purity-focused mobilization fortifies the boundary by anchoring to the original movement (Thompson and Coskuner-Balli, 2007; Munir, Ansari, and Brown, 2021). Again, the B Corp movement’s paradoxical mobilization pursued both simultaneously.…”

Green to Gone? Regional Institutional Logics and Firm Survival in Moral Markets

“…Further, perceptions of firms in moral markets are likely influenced by the lens through which audiences view the issue the market addresses (Ansari et al 2013, Munir et al 2021. By engaging in environmental and social issues, moral market participants are likely perceived either positively or negatively by different audiences (Hoffman 2015).…”