Researching workplace spiritualization through auto/ethnography

Abstract

Studying the spiritual in workplace settings presents a significant challenge to the organizational ethnographer. Spirituality is such a fluid and deeply subjective concept that is often understood and practiced in ways that are implicit to individuals and attempts to study it in the workplace risk producing accounts that reductive and inaccurate. In an effort to craft a rigorous and representative account of the deployment of a Spiritual Management Development (SMD) initiative in large Irish services organization, I experimented with a form of autoethnography, referred to as ‘auto/ethnography’ in this article, which attempted to produce a rounded and holistic account of reactions to the initiative. The generic elements of this method are presented with a view to demonstrating the possibilities and difficulties associated with adopting this research approach to the study of workplace spirituality.

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