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

University of Warwick, martin.corbett{at}wbs.ac.uk

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.

Key Words: invocation • spirituality • surrealism • spiritualism • technology • materialism

Management & Organizational History, Vol. 4, No. 4, 339-357 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1744935909340189


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