Spirituality, Inc.: Religion in the American Workplace (review)

Lake Lambert III, a professor of religion at Wartburg College in Iowa, offers a thoughtful, engagingly written, and well-informed introduction to the recent upsurge in religious expression on the job. Spirituality, Inc., will make for rewarding reading for scholars of post-World War II American business history, and the bibliography produces an excellent reading list for those looking to update their knowledge of this important topic. In the author's words, "The book examines contemporary practices of workplace spirituality [the term of art in the field] and demonstrates that they constitute an important religious movement shaping and being shaped by American business culture" (18). This claim is refreshingly accurate and represents a worthy achievement in itself, and yet it will alert historians to the book's chief shortcoming: by addressing the phenomenon on its own terms, Professor Lambert misses the opportunity to contextualize it adequately or probe it for more revelation. The book is most useful as an initial roadmap to a field that still needs much broader study.

This is not to suggest that Lambert fails to make connections between religion and the changed nature of firms and of paid employment. The second chapter provides a "Genealogy of Corporate Spirituality" that will give the nonspecialist a workable understanding of the managerial revolution, Taylorization, and the human relations school of management theory, for example. Additional chapters show Lambert to be an imaginative and respectful student of "lived religion" or the day-to-day social practices of believers through which religious meanings are made, negotiated, and remade. Since workplace spirituality is by definition a form of observance beyond the walls of churches or synagogues, the author takes us instead to such eye-opening arenas as the explicitly Christian companies Chik-Fil-A, ServiceMaster, and HobbyLobby; the business curricula of educational institutions like the Maharishi School of Management and David Lipscomb University's "Business Students Imitating Christ (BASIC) Training Camp"; and the corporate deployment of Christian "life coaches," as well as the movement's popular advice texts like Jesus, CEO, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. While most of the material deals with America's numerically dominant Christians, Dr. Lambert also considers examples from other major faiths as well as the large "spiritual but not religious" contingent.

Yet the depth of research in any one of these arenas is more likely to raise interest among readers of Enterprise & Society than satisfy their curiosity. As a whole, the book skirts analysis in favor of description and typology. The chapter on religiously informed management education, for example, distinguishes "sectarian" approaches from those that emphasize a vaguer "spirituality" rather than asking what moral questions are posed or what outcomes are intended by the various courses on "Engaging Finance and Christian Thought" or "Foundations of Business: A Christian Perspective." Likewise, when the author identifies the managerial discourse about "corporate social responsibility" (CSR) as a sign that business concerns have moved beyond the bottom line, he ignores the widely available critiques that ask how CSR has enabled deregulation and eased corporate tax burdens. The fact that CEOs may well be spiritually engaged by their work does not explain how successfully they have fought for generations to remove the most enforceable aspects of social responsibility—those backed by the democratic rule of law. One need not condescend to managerial spirituality as mere false consciousness or cynical public relations to admit that the question is far more interesting when seen from outside the boardroom as well as inside.

This economic naiveté will be disturbing to historians throughout the book. The author repeatedly compares corporate attention to the soul at work to the legendary perks that attracted highly valued knowledge workers in the 1990s. Missing is much engagement with another, equally relevant genealogy, the one which considers the uses of Christian humility on a cotton plantation, the effects of a temperance revival on a workshop, or the function of a "health...