Description of a Multi-Paper Double-Session associated with the theme-cluster "New Age and mainstream Western culture, globalisation, September 11^th" of the Conference on Alternative Spirituality and New Age Studies

Date: Friday May 30 to Sunday 1 June 2003

Venue: The Open University, Department of Religious Studies, Milton Keynes, UK

Once regarded as the pinnacle of rationality, sobriety and conformity, the corporate world has undergone a culture change that attests to the increasing influence of various currents of alternative "self-religion" (Paul Heelas). It is not only various New Religious Movements (NRMs), like e.g. Scientology or the Satya Sai Baba Movement, that take a positive stance towards worldly success and doing business, consequently offering theories and trainings of how to be successful, how to do business, and how to be an accomplished manager and leader. There are also individual counselors and coaches as well as individual managers without an affiliation to a particular NRM, who explicitly or implicitly employ different "New Age" theories and techniques in their work. The introduction of concepts, such as "lean production", "lean management", "emotional intelligence", "glocalisation" or "intercultural competence" to modern business (often by Japanese managers) coincided with a psychologization and culturalization of the management discourse, which seems to have contributed to the increasing convergence of alternative spirituality and the corporate world. Alternative firms, such as The Body Shop and others, have at any rate proven that spirituality and profit can be reconciled.

Does the emergence of alternative spirituality in the corporate world testify to a shift in the development of "New Age" spirituality from a counter-cultural to an affirmative movement? Do similar notions of the "authority of experience" contribute to the convergence of alternative spirituality and the corporate world? Is there a link between consumerism and the appropriation of "New Age" concepts and techniques by segments of the corporate world?

In order to explore the dimensions of these and further questions, we have organized the following panel:

Spiritual Capitalism? Alternative Spirituality in the Corporate World

Organizers and chairs: Martin Ramstedt and Karen L. Goldschmidt Salamon

• Introduction to the panel by the two chairs
• Karen Lisa Goldschmidt Salamon: Investing in the Self: Values-based Self-Management in Virtualist Capitalism
• Monica Emerich: Capitalizing on Nature or Spiritualizing Capitalism? The Case of the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) Journal
• Martin Ramstedt: Facilitating Self: The Emergence of Alternative Spirituality in the Dutch Corporate World
• Leonie Cornips: A Sociolinguist's Approach to the Study of Shared Lexicon of Alternative Spirituality and Corporate Culture
• Claire Pearson: Corporate Aikido: Putting the Whole Body to Work
• Ineke Hogema: The Game of Your Life? Transformation Management Training of Oibibio
• Introduction to the plenary discussion by the two chairs
• Plenary discussion

Format of the panel:

Each individual presenter will be alloted 20 minutes. After each individual presentation, there will be 10 minutes of immediate question-and-answer exchange between the audience and the presenter pertaining to her or his presentation. Both the introduction to the panel and the introduction to the plenary discussion will be allotted 10 minutes each. 40 minutes will be apportioned to the plenary discussion. Total length of time required for the panel: 240 minutes or 4 hours.

The chairs will jointly introduce the thematic framework of the panel and will sum up those points made in the individual presentations which will be suitable topics for the plenary discussion. In order to be able to do so, the chairs will have to receive (either by email or by postal service) a copy of each individual presentation at least a week before the start of the conference.

Organisers, chairs and presenters:

Trained in cultural anthropology, European ethnology and social psychology, Dr. Martin Ramstedt is currently post-doctoral researcher at the Meertens Institute, a Royal Dutch Academy of the Sciences institute in Amsterdam, specialising in the documentation of and research on contemporary Dutch language and culture. His five-year research project investigates new forms of religiosity in secularised Dutch society, focusing on two contrasting cases: (1) neo-paganism and the fantasy-hype, and (2) alternative spirituality in the corporate world. His previous research projects were largely dedicated to the study of religion in modern Indonesia. (martin.ramstedt@meertens.knaw.nl)

Trained in social anthropology, European ethnology and management studies, Dr. Karen Lisa Goldschmidt Salamon is currently post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Recently she has studied spiritual tendencies in business management discourse and consulting practices, and has published discussions of neo-spiritual consulting, spiritual globalism and organisational holism. She currently works on a research project focusing on the role and consequences of values based management in the production of subjectivities and sociality in the workplace. (ks.lpf@cbs.dk)

Presenters:
Specialising in sociolinguistics, Dr. Leonie Cornips is a senior researcher at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam. She has also been teaching syntactic variation, multi-cultural variation, and sociolinguistics at different universities in the Netherlands as well as in Leipzig, Germany. (leonie.cornips@meertens.knaw.nl)

Monica Emerich is a PhD candidate at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado at Boulder, US. (monica.emerich@colorado.edu)

Ineke Hogema is a PhD candidate at the Department for the Study of Culture / Organization / Management (COM), Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (bos.hogema@hetnet.nl)

Dr. Claire E. Pearson is lecturer at the School of Geographical Sciences, Bristol University, UK. She teaches economic geography and social theory; geographies of management training and the New Age, performance theory and non-representational theories and practice. (C.E.Pearson@bristol.ac.uk)