A methodology for doing research into corporate spirituality should enable us to deal with the religious component of spirituality instead of trying to separate spirituality from religious beliefs, as the positivist school proposes. Waaijman’s phenomenological-dialogical research cycle enables us to deal with religious diversity in a scientific way. Sölle’s concept of democratized spirituality allows for discovering everyday (corporate) life as a finding place and workplace for spirituality. Replacing theistic terms by the concept of ‘alterity’ in a definition of spirituality may stimulate corporate spirituality without excluding or disqualifying spiritual diversity. Arendt’s concept of ‘action’ is closely connected to democratised spirituality. From that we can deduce a number of characteristics of corporate spirituality that give flesh and bone to what corporate spirituality can be. This allows us to see that many elements of corporate spirituality are already present in our organizational praxis. It also tells us that we need to become more aware of them and practice them. In doing so we set out on a ‘via transformativa’ that eventually may transform our organizations.
Social innovation and spirituality are often associated with each other. This association is one the main reasons for this study, especially because it has not been studied very much. Therefore the goal of this study is to explore the different levels and aspects of spirituality in the field of social innovation to set them into relation with each other. In doing so this study wants to make a contribution to the area of spirituality in organizations as a sub-discipline of spirituality research and to management science.
This paper theorizes the spiritual processes of community entrepreneuring as navigating tensions that arise when community-based enterprises (CBEs) emerge within communities and generate socio-economic inequality. Grounded on an ethnographic study of a dairy CBE in rural Malawi, findings reveal that intra-community tensions revolve around the occurrence of ‘bad events’ – mysterious tragedies that, among their multiple meanings, are also framed as witchcraft. Community members prepare for, frame, cope and build collective sustenance from ‘bad events’ by intertwining witchcraft and mundane socio-material practices. Together, these practices reflect the mystery and the ambiguity that surround ‘bad events’ and prevent intra-community tensions from overtly erupting. Through witchcraft, intra-community tensions are channelled, amplified and tamed cyclically as this process first destabilizes community social order and then restabilizes it after partial compensation for socio-economic inequality. Generalizing beyond witchcraft, this spiritual view of community entrepreneuring enriches our understanding of entrepreneuring – meant as organization-creation process in an already organized world – in the context of communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on the dynamics of socio-economic inequality surrounding CBEs, and on how spirituality helps community members to cope with inequality and its effects.
