Review: Globalizing Asian Religions: Management and Marketing, edited by Wendy Smith, Hirochika Nakamaki, Louella Matsunaga, and Tamasin Ramsay

Abstract

The chapters of this book expand upon and develop presentations from a symposium held in Osaka in 2009 on the “Management and Marketing of Globalizing Asian Religions.” The editors’ objective is to emphasize the transnational administrative structures and proselytizing strategies deployed by Asian religious traditions, with particular emphasis on the ways these structures and strategies reflect transnational systems of management and marketing in businesses. For the most part, the contributors explore this premise through case studies of contemporary new religious movements with strong ties to South, Southeast, and East Asia. The editors note that these groups tend to have an innate transnational orientation and must operate in a spiritual marketplace. Consequently, the challenges facing contemporary new religions are similar to the challenges multinational companies must confront. Most chapters in this volume analyze a case study within the framework provided by this comparison in an effort to demonstrate the impact of globalization on Asian religion.The book consists of an introductory chapter followed by sixteen chapters organized into five sections. The first section, “Theoretical Approaches” has two chapters that establish a paradigm for discussing religion through the lens of management and marketing. The next three sections comprise the body of the work, and comprise case studies covering East Asia, Southeast and South Asia, and finally Japanese religions in Europe and the Americas. The fifth section includes a single chapter on the concept of internet-based religions that reject local identities and traditions. In terms of the cases these chapters explore, it is worth noting that Japan is a significant focus of the book, with twelve out of seventeen chapters dealing with the spread of traditions to or from Japan. Nova Religio readers may also find it pertinent that while many articles deal with new religions like the Church of World Messianity and Sōka Gakkai, several deal with traditions like Jōdo Shinshū that are well established at least at one location in their transnational network—but importantly, not in the places to which they are spreading.The volume’s theoretical project of applying insights from management and marketing studies to Asian religious institutions yields uneven results. Between the two, management provides a stronger lens. It is particularly effective for analyzing institutions that have adopted corporate organizational structures or mutated into business ventures, as in Shamsul A. B.’s chapter on Arqam in Malaysia or Yoshihide Sakurai’s discussion of the Unification Church in Japan. But even in other instances, being attentive to management prompts the authors to provide richly detailed descriptions of the administrative structures and processes of the institutions they are studying. Rather than exclusively emphasizing charismatic leadership or the lived religion of ordinary lay followers, the book exposes the elaborate machinery that mediates between them.When the authors turn their attention to marketing, as the volume’s other theme, their analyses highlight the challenges of transcultural proselytization for religious institutions. There is a large body of literature examining how missionaries and the institutions they represent adapt their traditions to new cultural contexts, and it is not always clear how marketing provides a framework that sheds new light on this process more than any other type of heuristic device. In their introduction to the volume, the editors suggest that the emergence of a global “spiritual marketplace” has added new complexity to transcultural proselytization, and some analyses are attentive to this situation (21). For example, Wendy Smith and Tamasin Ramsay’s chapter discusses the Brahma Kumaris’ need to accommodate their traditions to the spiritual marketplace by making them available piecemeal rather than demanding total commitment immediately. In such cases, it is unclear how the marketing framework differs from the extant consumer culture framework, as both approaches seem to proceed from similar premises and lead to similar conclusions.Nevertheless, Globalizing Asian Religions offers readers a wealth of information, especially if they are interested in its soft focus on new religious movements and Japanese traditions. Most of the chapters provide meticulous descriptions of the movements they are analyzing and offer substantial background information for readers who might be less familiar with each movement. This makes the book quite accessible and very teachable. It also raises questions about religious middle management that could make it a good starting point for additional research.