Power and empowerment: New age managers and the dialectics of modernity/postmodernity

Roberts, Richard

doi:10.1080/13537909408580715

Cited by 29 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…There is a growing market in religious-styled management development workshops and seminars claiming to enable spiritual self-development. By drawing on an ideology of self-fulfilment, self-discovery and selfdevelopment (Roberts, 1992), such courses suggest that individuals are able to influence their work organizations in dramatic, even magical, fashion (Heelas, 1992). These events claim to release managers from negative thoughts, fears or barriers that might impede the development of a successful organization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Elevation of Work: Pastoral Power and the New Age Work Ethic

Bell¹,

Taylor²

2003

Organization

149

156

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This paper seeks to establish the contours of the popular workplace spirituality discourse through analysis of academic and practitioner texts and accounts of organizational practice. We identify several themes, drawing attention to potential contradictions in the notions of meaning, measurement and community, which the discourse seeks to promote. In seeking to understand the means whereby it is embodied as a source of administrative power we draw on a range of historical and contemporary organizational examples, illustrating how pastoral power is reinforced through the construction of disciplinary technologies. We argue that the workplace spirituality discourse shares Weber's acceptance of the structural conditions of capitalism and seeks to resolve the dilemmas this creates for the individual through developing an inner sense of meaning and virtue. In this respect, it represents a revival of the Protestant ethic in a way that involves re-visioning the ambivalent relationship between self and organization. We conclude that the `social ethic' has given way to a New Age work ethic, which relies on the management of individual metaphysics as a source of organizational, as well as personal, transformation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Elevation of Work: Pastoral Power and the New Age Work Ethic

Bell¹,

Taylor²

2003

Organization

149

156

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“…The spiritual practices of selfemptying and identity reconstruction formalised in the vita contemplativa come to HRM as a kind of idolatrous god-send. As, however, the prerogatives and power of the Performative Absolute expand to comprise the totality, so any residual ambiguity between the 'empowerment' granted to the individual and the 'power' of identity construction exercised by management is decisively resolved on the side of the managerial prerogative (Roberts 1994). Under these conditions there is in reality no alternative to conformity, and so preparation of the relevantly competent self for repeated acts of submission becomes an essential part of the training of the self in both in the workplace and the education that may precede it.…”

Section: Religion Managerial Modernity and Post-democracymentioning

confidence: 97%

Contemplation and the ‘Performative Absolute’: submission and identity in managerial modernity

Roberts

2012

Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion

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Practices derived from the ‘vita contemplativa’ and other spiritual sources are drawn upon by management, but as the power of human resources management (HRM) is extended so the relationship between ‘contemplation’ and the surrender of self-identity required by HRM demands critical examination. The conscious construction of the individual has become a social and political goal. Subjects are required to strip away attributes of their identity that might impede protocols that cascade down from the executive. Total transparency becomes a condition of the re-creation of individual identity. Practices drawn from religious and spiritual traditions that enact the surrender of the self facilitate submission to the demands of the Performative Absolute, the immanent sublime, Demiurge or dieu caché articulated by HRM. The informed passivity of the employee precedes oblation, the sacrificial offering of the self that facilitates the donation by HRM of the attuned identity that ensures the organisational survival of the individual.

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“…done in this fi eld (e.g., Mitroff and Denton 1999a;Nadesan 1999;Roberts 1994;Goldschmidt Salamon 2001), 5 this blind spot is probably due to the received wisdom that spirituality lacks public signifi cance, remaining confi ned to "the life-space that is not directly touched by institutional control" (Luckmann 1996: 73) and failing to "generate powerful social innovations and experimental social institutions" (Bruce 2002: 97). But obviously, the very rarity of studies of spirituality in the workplace precludes any premature conclusions to the eff ect that spirituality fails to aff ect our 'primary institutions, ' modern work organizations.…”

Section: Self-spirituality's Public Signifi Cance: Bringing 'Soul' Bamentioning

confidence: 99%