Recycling Stories: Mantras, Communication, and Organizational Materialization

Abstract

Religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs) are becoming powerful organizational actors, but how are these organizations enacted through the communicative practices of their members? To address this question, this article offers a conceptual framework for investigating how the terse retelling of an inspirational organizational story, encapsulated in a mantra, contributes to materializing a Buddhist NGO’s ethos and worldview. The value of this framework is subsequently demonstrated through an in-depth naturalistic case study of a mantra’s constitutive force in the enactment of a large international Buddhist NGO that is increasingly focused on environmental protection. By showing how a mantra acts as a textualization, substantiation, and invocation device in mass, social media, and face-to-face communication, this study makes important contributions to the literature on the intersection between religion and organization as well as the communicative constitution of organizations.

Beyond Entanglement: (Socio-) Materiality and Organization Studies

“…Other clients are being served at the same time and parts of this administration’s activities will always remain foreign or invisible to us (processing client paperwork, making decisions about new procedures, celebrating the birthday of one of its employees, etc.). This means that experiencing the materiality of an organization (through its employees, buildings, technologies) always comes, by definition, with the experience of its (relative) immateriality (Brummans, 2011; Brummans, Hwang, &Cheong, 2020), as this administration can never completely materialize to us at the same time and place.…”

Preparing the Show: Organizational ventriloquism as autocommunication

“…While reiteration of well-known material can help a communicator recall and hold on to a preferred perception of specific events, ideas, or thoughts, it simultaneously has potential to 'elucidate' the communicator to itself (Lotman, 1990, p. 21) thereby enabling discovery, inspiration and eventually change. A similar experience is possible for organizational members who recite a collective mantra (Brummans et al, 2020). A classic study that illustrates both the mnemonic and inventive potential of organizational autocommunication is Sutton and Louis's (1987) investigation of recruiting and socializing newcomers.…”

“…The rally cries of troops and sports teams or the recitation of mantras or business slogans by organizational members are examples of this type of autocommunication (e.g. Brummans, Hwang, & Cheong, 2020). Mnemonic autocommunication has a ritualistic quality and tends to preserve the communicator ‘as is’.…”

Monologue and Organization Studies

“…Although, in principle, CCO is a suitable approach to address monologic organization and, indeed, some research in this tradition is not exclusively dialogic (e.g. Brummans et al, 2020), there tends to be a strong dialogic bias in it. Drawing on the spirit of dominant research conducted in the CCO realm will enable us, therefore, more clearly to present our argument by reversing some of its assumptions.…”