THEOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION

Conveners:  Bent M. Sørensen (bem.lpf@cbs.dk)

Sverre Spoelstra (sverre.spoelstra@fek.lu.se)

The CMS Division of the AOM will conduct a research workshop immediately prior to the 2010 Academy of Management meetings in Montreal in August 2010. The workshop will begin mid-morning of Wednesday Aug 4 and run till the evening of Thursday Aug 5.  We are coordinating a stream called Theology and Organization in this workshop, and seek submissions from interested researchers.

 ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state’, Carl Schmitt once wrote, ‘are secularized theological concepts’. The same might also be said about concepts of the modern theory of management and organization. Leadership theory, for example, revolves around theological concepts such as charisma, spirit, inspiration, sacrifice, and humility.

A less obvious example concerns our concept of work. Theologically understood, work was, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the burden imposed upon man after he had been expelled from Paradise: playfulness now became strictly separated from what was done under the sweat of his brow. One of today’s organizational utopias is an attempt to put work and play together again.

The theological roots of other organizational concepts – such as hierarchy, authority, corporation, community, representation, and vision – appear even less self-evident, which only shows how naturalized theological concepts have become in organization studies and, indeed, in common parlance. The European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) colloquium choose for the 2009 conference an overtly theological theme, ‘Passion for creativity and innovation’, without feeling obliged to acknowledge that both passion and creativity are in fact theological concepts. The AOM theme for 2010, ‘Dare to Care: Passion and Compassion in Management Practice and Research’, goes one step further with this explicit theological footnote to its (theological) theme:

‘Compassion means caring for others as much as caring for oneself, as in the golden rule of “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself” or “love your neighbor as yourself.” All major religions consider compassion to be among the greatest of all virtues.’ 

This workshop stream encourages thinking through organizations by means of theological concepts (could be ‘compassion’, as in this year’s AOM theme). That is to say, we invite contributions that draw upon theological concepts in making sense of organizational issues, beyond the level of metaphorical analogy or sociological description. 

Rather than listing a number of possible topics, we will provide a list of theological concepts that, we think, could shed a new and critical light upon organizational issues and on which we would like to invite papers intended for this stream. This list is naturally by no means complete, and the concepts come in no particular order: 

-         Miracles, wonders

-         Prophets, saints, messiahs, angels, missionaries, pastors

-         Creation, fall

-         Salvation, grace

-         Community, corporation, solidarity

-         Paradise, apocalypse, utopia

-         Belief, faith, guilt, confession

-         Charisma, the gift

-         The sacred, the profane, holiness

-         God, gold, mammon

-         Ghost, spirit, soul

-         The haunted, the possessed

-         Enchantment, disenchantment

-         Light and darkness, brilliance, vision

-         Revelation, saturation

-         Hierarchy, authority

-         Resurrection, transubstantiation

-         Idol, icon

-         Good, evil, sin

-         Passion, compassion, piety

-         Fear, terror, trembling, fascination, judgement

 In light of the above, this stream attempts to ask the following research questions: 

·   What is the relation between theology and management studies?

·   How can theological discussions help us in critically exploring organizational issues?      

·   How do theological concepts function within managerial discourse? 

·   How did, historically, management detach itself from its theological roots, and what are the benefits for re-connecting these two practices?

·   How is theology’s metaphysical paradigm transformed when transferred into an apparently secular practice of management? What would a ‘metaphysics of management’ look like?