A “Spiritual Turn” in Organizational Studies: Meaning Making or Meaningless?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on organizational spirituality in an effort to distil the importance of spirituality research and make the case for the “spiritual turn” in organization studies. The paper examines current arguments for and against spirituality in organizations. It suggests that despite dilemmas and controversies in the literature, spirituality research makes a significant contribution. Particularly, the benefit of taking the “spiritual turn” as a response to a crisis of meaning in organizations may be to better define the spaces of programmatic versus existential meaning making and to gain more insights into where organizational meaning making and existential, individual meaning can exist in their respective spaces. It is suggested that spirituality research may need to build on a variety of perspectives from critical management theories to discourse studies to protect existential meaning making as a lived and socially constructed experience. The paper develops some approaches for how this may be accomplished and discusses future directions of the “spiritual turn” in organizational studies.