Seeking the Spirit: Communication and the (Re)Development of a “Spiritual” Organization

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a 10-month ethnographic case study of a Midwestern U.S. health care system's transition to an avowedly spiritual approach to organizing. Using structuration theory as our guiding framework, we identify and explore participants' meanings for “spiritual” organizing, the communicative processes through which spirituality was created and sustained, and the motives of organizational leaders for linking the spiritual with the corporate. We examine whether spirituality is used to create a system of unobtrusive control used to exploit and manipulate organizational members. We conclude that organizational leaders must balance a dialectic of inspiration and control in striving to create models of organizing that disrupt the subjugation of the spiritual in organizational life.

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