Invoking spirits in the material world: Spiritualism, surrealism, and spirituality at work

Abstract

This article considers the recent upsurge of interest in workplace spirituality through an analysis of three cultural movements – late 19th-century spiritualism, early 20th-century surrealism, and late 20th-/early 21st-century ‘spirituality at work’.These movements share a common interest in harnessing the power of the human spirit in the transformation and ‘betterment’ of social life. It is argued that these movements have successively adopted and de-radicalized invocations of the spirit world such that the proto-feminism and utopianism of spiritualism and the revolutionary pretensions of surrealism have been usurped by a strongly managerialist discourse of workplace spirituality. The paper ends with a consideration of the implications of these developments for the critical study of spirituality, management and organization.

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