The Libertarian Ethic and The Spirit of Global Capital: Post-Industrial Spirituality of the American Workplace Pubblico

LoRusso, James Dennis (2014)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/np193938p?locale=it
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Abstract

In recent decades, the business world has demonstrated an elevated interest in the role that "spirituality" might play in the workplace. Corporate executives, researchers in fields such as management and organizational behavior, and popular authors suggest that recognizing the "spiritual" dimensions of work can not only have a positive effect on employee morale, but simultaneously elevate productivity as well as bottom-line profits.

Although scholars of religion have asserted a number reasons for this trend, their explanations prove myopic. I contend that "workplace spirituality," as it has been dubbed, is neither a coherent religious movement in its own right, nor is it merely the extension of the church into business, as others have suggested. Instead, my analysis, which employs ethnography as well as social history, reveals something more basic has changed over the last half century in the way Americans think and behave towards work, and these changes remain inextricably bound to large-scale socio-economic trends over the latter half of the twenty-first century. It is part of a shift from a national economy defined by heavy industry, to a globalized one driven by high technology, finance, and mass consumption. New forms of work that depend greatly on interpersonal skills and emotional labor have risen to the fore. Amidst these new forms of work, I argue, some Americans have turned to rhetorics of spirituality to understand the role of work in their lives, in the society, and in the world.

This dissertation, however, pushes the discussion further, to elucidate the political dimensions of workplace spirituality. Neoliberalism, a range of pro-business attitudes that seeks to minimize government intervention into the economy, is an integral and underappreciated component of workplace spirituality. The rhetoric of spirituality at work embraces the "spirit" of global capitalism; it celebrates the power of business, operating under the auspices of deregulated markets, to advance human material and spiritual progress. Moreover, it instills within its practitioners a libertarian ethos that valorizes personal responsibility and affords individuals with a sense of power and significance in a world shaped less by nation-states and increasingly dominated by the dynamics of a global marketplace.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

1

CHAPTER 1: The Welfare State and Its Discontents

The American Workplace in 1950

Agency Panic and Fears of the Welfare State

Human Freedom and a Nascent Neoliberalism

22

25

30

39

CHAPTER 2: Work in Post-Industrial America: Towards a Humanistic Capitalism

Abraham Maslow and the Humanistic Work Ethic

Willis Harman: Post-Industrial Spiritual Prophet

Subjective Knowledge, Spirituality, and Post-Industrial Society

The Legacy of Willis Harman

47

51

58

63

66

CHAPTER 3: Management, Spirituality, and Religion: Business Scholarship as Theology

The Servant Leader

Spirit at Work

Workplace Spirituality as Theology

73

75

79

85

CHAPTER 4: Zen and the Art of Micro-processing: Liberating the Entrepreneurial Spirit in Silicon Valley

Steve Jobs: The Seeker Entrepreneur

Spiritual Bricolage

The "Reality Distortion Field"

Les Kaye: Zen and Work

103

106

112

114

118

CHAPTER 5: Looser selves, Freer Markets

A Texas-Sized Counterculture

A Turn to the Political Right

The Genesis of Conscious Capitalism

Mapping a Post-Industrial Habitus

129

132

136

141

144

CHAPTER 6: Not the Usual Suspects: Real Estate Rabbis, Monastic Managers, and Spiritual Salesmen in the Big Apple

The New York Groups

Competing Aims

Class Power, The Great Recession, and Neoliberalism

149

151

153

163

CHAPTER 7: SACRED COMMERCE: Neoliberal Spiritualities in a West-Coast Coffee Chain

Café Gratitude and Sacred Commerce

Spiritual Rhetoric at Café Gratitude

Embodying Neoliberalism

Abounding River

177

178

182

188

192

CONCLUSION

199

BIBLOGRAPHY

209

Figures

Figure 1

166

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