Spirituality,Symbolism and Storytelling in Twentyfirst-Century Organizations: Understanding and addressing the crisis of imagination

Abstract

This article introduces the Special Issue concerned with organizational spirituality, symbolism and storytelling. Stressing the growing scholarly interest in these topics, the article makes a two-fold contribution. First, it critically assesses their development over time while identifying the emerging trends and new ways in which spirituality, symbolism and storytelling are taken up in management and organization studies. We make a case for utilizing their promise to transcend the epistemic boundaries and extend the scope of our academic practice beyond self-referential approaches or ‘fashionable’ topics. Second, it links them to what we term the current crises of imagination, calling into question extant institutional and organizational paradigms, as well as the theoretical frames we rely on in our teaching and research. The multiple crises we face – economic, financial, food, water, energy, climate, migration and security – we suggest, are partly due to the fragmentation of meaning that bedevils our scholarship and, implicitly, the failure of our collective imagination. Reaching across foundational disciplines and core methodologies, we bring into the conversation the interlocking fields of spirituality, symbolism and storytelling, highlighting their potential for addressing the cardinal challenges we face as citizens of this world as much as organizational scholars.

Introduction

With the acceleration of communication technologies, the fragmentation of meaning in our world has never been greater. It is evidenced in splits and divisions among people within and without our societies, as apparent on the ground as it is in cyberspace. This concerns opportunities and resources that make lives liveable, under conditions of rapidly increasing inequality (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2009; Scheidel, 2017); it also concerns coping in a post-truth era, where boundaries between truth and lies, honesty and dishonesty, fiction and nonfiction have become blurred or, it is argued, even irrelevant (Faroughi, Gabriel, & Fotaki, 2019; Snyder, 2018). While there is common agreement in acknowledging the multiple crises we face – economic, financial, food, water, energy, climate, migration and security – there is an absence of shared understanding of their causes and of ways to address them. This, we suggest, is partly due to the fragmentation of meaning and the failure of imagination.

The failure of imagination concerns the inability to conceive new possibilities, like the refusal to consider the consequences of the world’s better-offs’ action and inaction for tens of millions of dispossessed, manifested in the hostility toward refugees and forced migrants arriving at the shores of the European Union or knocking on the border gates of the USA. Our collective failure to imagine how things could be different concerns burning global issues such as how to fight the rise of anti-Semitism and the spread of Islamophobia; what to do about the pollution of our oceans and about a shortage of drinking water; the ways to embrace new technologies yet prevent encroachment on our privacy and freedom. Here we wish to highlight the issue of moral imagination (or the lack thereof), as capacity to think (Singer, 1999) and create (Narvaez & Mrkva, 2014) solutions to the most pressing and vexing problems we face (Chappell, 2014; Johnson, 1993). In so doing we wish to pay homage to the likes of Frankl (1959), Schumacher (1977), de Beauvoir (1949), Olson (1982) and Levinas (1985) who addressed the crises which the post World War 2 generation faced as it was rebuilding itself from the ashes of Auschwitz, the aftermath of colonialism, the challenge of women’s liberation and in facing the ‘other’.

For organizational scholars like ourselves, who see institutionalization as a value-infused process (Scott, 1987, p. 494) of meaning giving (Selznick, 1957, p. 17) and sense making (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409), extending beyond the functional remit of the organization, the current crises put our responsibility and integrity, as researchers and knowledge producers, square at the forefront of academic debates. Taken together, we felt that these crises have called into question extant institutional and organizational paradigms, as well as the theoretical frames we rely on in our teaching and research (Fotaki & Prasad, 2015). We further argue that these crises have exposed the weaknesses of the dominant imaginaries underpinning the symbolic norms they represent. In an era characterized by the proliferation of populism and the normalization of xenophobia in political discourses and everyday life, the responses to the crises we face seem increasingly inadequate. We must deploy different forms of imagination collectively (Komporozos-Athanasiou & Fotaki, 2015) for radical re-imagining of current governance arrangements and ways of organizing.

The urgency to mobilize collective abilities of organizations in pursuing pathways that will challenge dominant modes of mis-representation and loss of meaning, is self-evident. The turn to ecological visions, cultural myths and spiritual narratives, as well as to philosophy, theology and anthropology as foundational disciplines and to ethnography and storytelling as base methodologies, marks the search for new ways and approaches to re-think and re-imagine, re-write and re-examine the role of organizations, organizing and managing in society – past, present and future. Metaphors, symbols, myths, stories and legends are important means for meaning creation: they shape our imagination and help us represent the world and our experiences that would otherwise be incomprehensible. Moreover, spirituality and religion are in themselves a symbolic representation of worldviews, with storytelling a key mode for the generation of reflection and experience going back to the dawn of (human) history (Greenblatt, 2017). Reaching across disciplines such as anthropology or studies of religion, we bring together the broadly defined and interlocking fields of spirituality, symbolism and storytelling into conversation, to propose an integrative approach for addressing these issues in the context of organization studies.

The ubiquity of spirituality (Carrette & King, 2005) and the central role religion occupies in the lives of so many people (Park, 2005) is mediated and evoked through symbols and stories (Grant, 2001). Symbols such as metaphors are also pervasive in everyday language and thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). In organizations we trace symbolic artefacts to unconscious archetypes (Kociatkiewicz & Kostera, 2012) and images (Gagliardi, 2015), whereby storytelling (Boje, 1991; Gabriel, 2000) is a primary mode of transmission.

The idea for this Special Issue emerged almost four years ago against the background of the global crises we encounter. By bringing together these elements – spirituality, religion, symbolism, ethnography and storytelling – we aim to capture the topics, frameworks and methodological approaches which have until now been under-represented or misrepresented in mainstream organizational scholarship, despite the growing interest in these fields. Furthermore, taken together, we hope that the debates presented here would bring fresh insights and novel understandings to the challenges that we and our organizations face in the new era that has dawned upon us, helping to re-envision ways out of the present mire.

Spirituality and Religion

Spirituality and religion have recently enjoyed a comeback in the social sciences and, consequently, they have started to make inroads into organization studies too. ¹ While recognized as foundational pillars of the social science disciplines – sociology (Durkheim, 1912), psychology (James, 1917), anthropology (Frazer, 1900) and economics (Weber, 1992/1905) – the pivotal role of spirituality and religion in explicating core societal phenomena was considered passé by the second half of the last century, as secularization theory took hold. Posited as a necessary companion to global modernization, the secularization thesis was considered almost sacrosanct. With the progress of the Enlightenment project and modernity comes an inevitable decline in religiosity, it was argued, ultimately leading to the demise of religion itself. This position had changed by the turn of the century, as Peter Berger succinctly put it:

The world today, with some exceptions. . . is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labelled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken. (Berger, 1999, p. 3)

Thus, for example, the post-secular turn is seen to pose challenges to European feminism as it made manifest that the notion of agency, or political subjectivity, could be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, or even engaged spirituality (Braidotti, 2008). For Taylor (2007), religion’s central position in our lives has never really changed since the Axial age ushered in the major religions of the world (Arnason, Eisenstadt & Wittrock, 2012), though it takes different forms with the advent of detraditionalization (Hautman & Aupers, 2007).

Historically, spirituality was not distinguished from religiosity until the rise of secularism at the turn of the last century (Turner, Lukoff, Barnhouse, & Lu, 1995). Conceptually, spirituality and religiosity are thus often posited as closely tied to one another, sharing common characteristics (Seybold & Hill, 2001) yet seen as distinguishable entities (Hill & Pargament, 2003; Zinnbauer et al., 1997). In a ground-breaking study in the United States, a country with a large number of people identifying themselves as ‘religious’ and a large number as ‘spiritual’, Zinnbauer et al. (1997) found that self-rated religiosity and spirituality were ‘modestly but significantly correlated (r = .21), and most respondents indicated that they consider themselves both spiritual and religious (S+R, 74%)’ (p. 561). Thus, both spirituality and religiosity can involve personal transformation and the search for an ultimate truth. In particular, spirituality is harder to define across cultures, as its characteristics are not easily agreed upon, and it may mean different things for different people in different places (Koenig, King, & Carson, 2012). Accordingly, we define religiosity as the communally held beliefs, rituals, knowledge and practices that are related to the commonly accepted notion of the sacred. Spirituality we define as a set of beliefs concerning the individual’s subjective perception of their extended relationships, which may include their construal of ‘the sacred’ or transcendent dimension of existence, i.e. an individual’s convictions about self, others, the community at large and the world, along with their values regarding moral conduct derived from such convictions. In this definition we follow and expand Ashmos and Duchon (2000), the most commonly used definition in the extant literature (Vasconcelos, 2018). Though the two concepts are often considered together, on balance religiosity has received more attention in scholarly work than spirituality (Zimmer et al., 2016). For the purposes of this paper, we treat them together.

Spiritual beliefs play a central role in the lives of religious adherents (Faulkner & De Jong, 1966; Pew Research Center, 2010) as well as the non-religious and atheists (Bullivant, 2013),; and are a prime indicator of an individual’s faith (Angelidis & Ibrahim, 2004) and ways of life (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 2007). Belief in God(s) is the foundational spiritual belief that unfolds a universe of related artefact beliefs, whether beliefs in the Hereafter, Paradise, and Hellfire (Badawi, 2001; Kobeisy, 2004) or beliefs in karma and incarnation (Narayanswamy, Altman, & Sengupta, 2018), for example. Importantly, these beliefs are not confined to followers of organized religion or established faiths. Thus, in the United Kingdom, where church attendance is in continuous decline and at an all-time low, belief in God and related artefact beliefs is nevertheless strong (Davie, 2015).

Ethical values, anchored in principles shared by most faiths, may be seen as a core cluster that amounts to a universal ethical code of conduct (Schwartz, 2012; Smith, 1992) and, importantly to us here, may be extended to organizations too. Thus, for example, extant research has found an overlap between individual and organizational values (beliefs) that may be considered spiritual, as concerns the establishment of trust (Li, Bai & Xi, 2011), and of normative behaviour, as concerns propensity for innovation (Assouad & Parboteeah, 2018). With the inroads that the study of spirituality and religion has made into organization studies, we find, at one end, scholarship on specific faith aspects of organizational life, such as the deployment of industrial chaplains at the workplace (Wolf & Feldbauer-Durstmüller, 2018), and at the other end, the import of religious practice into organizational life, like mindfulness (Vu & Gill, 2018) and discernment (Falque & Duriau, 2004). Leadership, perhaps the most studied aspect of management in organizations, has seen the development of new constructs such as spiritual leadership (Fry, 2003) and servant leadership (Van Dierendonck, 2011), as well as inputs from the realm of spirituality/religion into extant constructs, such as transformational leadership (Pravichai & Ariyabuddhiphongs, 2018). In practically all organization and management scholarly areas, attempts were made to employ the lens of spirituality/religiosity; in some – entrepreneurship (e.g. Hoffman & Shipper, 2018; Kovacs, 2019) and family business (e.g. Madison & Kellermanns, 2013; Mohapatra & Verma, 2018) – more than others. In the field of consumer behaviour (though not, strictly speaking, an organization studies domain), spirituality/religiosity correlates are considered fundamental (Belk, Wallendorf, & Sherry, 1989). It is no surprise therefore that the idea of viewing the entire organization as a spiritual enterprise has been proposed, notably for faith-based organizations (Delbecq, 2010), though secular organizations too were found to be infused with spiritual characteristics (Fry & Altman, 2013). It has been suggested that the spiritually based organization will not be a passing fashion, and ought to be an imperative for the third millennium (e.g. Vasconcelos, 2018). However, in spite of its intuitive appeal, the nature of the relationship between spirituality and religiosity and an individual’s moral stand or an organization’s ethical conduct (let alone performance) remains elusive (Craft, 2013; Longenecker, McKinney, & Moore, 2004; Marquette, Pavarala, & Malik, 2014; Parboteeah, Hoegl, & Cullen, 2008; Weaver & Agle, 2002) and potentially aspirational (Koning & Waistell, 2012).

Are spirituality and religiosity relevant to stakeholders in organizations? Most religions in the world teach a form of the ‘golden rule’ – to treat others as you would have them treat you (Ramasamy, Yeung, & Au, 2010; Smith, 2008; Weaver & Agle, 2002). The majority of religions also provide a system of norms and values, sharing a belief in God or gods as beings who care about morality and punish for transgressions (Calkins, 2000; Longenecker et al., 2004). However, despite these connections, the relationship between spirituality, religiosity and ethical judgement in organizational contexts is not straightforward, nor unidirectional. For example, some studies have suggested that spiritual individuals are more likely to perceive differences between right and wrong (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003), hold moral virtues (Kaptein, 2008), are more humanistic (Lefkowitz, 2008), encourage corporate social responsibility (Gond, El Akremi, Swaen, & Babu, 2017) and are more likely to engage in prosocial behaviours (Ghuman, Ryan, & Park, 2016). Other studies have found no significant connections between religion and work values (Chusmir & Koberg, 1988; Craft, 2013) and contrary to implicit expectations, religiosity, as measured by both religious affiliation and religious attendance, has not been found to predict un/ethical judgement (e.g. Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2007). And yet other studies have shown increased religiosity being associated with unethical judgement. Thus, for example, it is argued that faith-based organizations may be more prone to fraud (Koerber & Neck, 2006), ² that spiritual leadership may be corrupting (Krishnakumar, Houghton, Neck, & Ellison, 2015) and indeed that the entire workplace spirituality movement may have a dark side, detrimental to both individuals and organizations (Lips-Wiersma, Lund-Dean & Fonciari, 2009).

Three recent literature reviews on spirituality and religion in organizations and work offer opposing views. According to Tracey (2012) ‘management literature does not offer a clear picture of the effects of religious beliefs on individual values, attitudes, or behaviors’ (Tracey, 2012, p. 26), due in part to the reluctance of organization behaviour or organization theory scholars to engage with the topic of religion (spirituality) (Tracey, Phillips, & Lounsbury, 2014). On the other hand Vasconcelos (2018) points to a vibrant activity in the field, counting publications in no less than 40 academic journals; and Houghton, Neck and Krishnakumar (2016) comment:

. . .the workplace spirituality construct has showed signs of moving into [a] second stage of development. . . Measurement scales have been advanced and refined resulting in a flurry of empirical research. . . In addition, researchers have begun to explore mediators of the relationships between workplace spirituality and other constructs of interest. A few isolated examples of workplace spirituality serving as mediator or moderator in models of the relationships between other variables are now beginning to appear, indicating that the construct’s development continues to progress. (Houghton et al., 2016, p. 198)

The difference in interpretation among these review articles lies in the body of literature they reviewed. Tracey’s focus on ‘the major journals that count for tenure at the leading business schools’ (Tracey, 2012, p. 38) excluded the principal journal dedicated to the topic – the Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion (Vasconcelos, 2018) that alone published over the period surveyed by Tracey more than the 86 papers he examined. His review also ignored the Journal of Business Ethics that over the period reviewed published over 40 relevant papers and a similar number in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, including four (!) special issues, the earliest appearing in 1994. Similarly, the Journal of Managerial Psychology and the Journal of Management Inquiry published more than 20 papers each during the said period. And that is far from an exhaustive list.

Hence, when Tracey et al. (2014) lament on ‘the paucity of work on religion and organization’ (2014, p. 6) finding it ‘puzzling and unfortunate that management scholars have so studiously avoided one of the most pervasive influences on organizations [religion]’ (2014, p. 4) they, alas, convey a somewhat misleading impression, which amounts to an error of the third type: researching the wrong question with the right methods (Mitroff & Silvers, 2009). Thus the critical question is not why ‘management researchers have not explored the intersection between religion and organization in a more meaningful and determined way’ (Tracey, 2012, p. 1), but rather, why ‘all the major journals that count for tenure at the leading business schools’ (Tracey, 2012, p. 38; italics added) do not publish on the topic. We propose therefore the following question: why is it that so little attention has been devoted to these important issues in prominent and influential management and organizational journals?

King (2008) offers an explanation. He suggests that engaging with such research is a high-risk career strategy for business and management academics, given the field’s emphasis on tangible output variables and since ‘the idea of studying a construct that is closely associated with not just the unknown but also the unknowable seems foreign and disconcerting to some’ (King, 2008, p. 217). Hence, the mindful ambitious high-flying academic, targeting the top journals, may well steer away from entangling oneself in these matters. Vasconcelos (2018) hints at another possible explanation. His exhaustive search identified 882 published studies on spirituality, the workplace, management and organizing over a 16-year period (2000 to 2015) – none in top tier journals; these 882 studies represent ‘encapsulated knowledge derived from research initiatives of a wide range of distinct areas such as religion, psychiatry, psychology, gerontology and nursing’ (Vasconcelos, 2018, p. 809) in addition to organization and management studies. Hence, the dispersion of knowledge among numerous outlets, many of them unknown and inaccessible to business and management scholars, does not facilitate the creation of a canonical body of knowledge that would confer academic ‘respectability’ and drive theorization. We propose two other possible explanations for the lacuna of publications in top tier business and management journals: an apparent reluctance of mainstream academic researchers to engage in religion and spirituality research, and the challenge of finding adequate methodologies to capture the essence of religiosity/spirituality in a work and organization context.

The assumed reluctance of mainstream business and management academics to engage with religion and spirituality may be due to different reasons in different places. We speculate about three geographies noted by Vasconcelos (2018) for their lack of relevant research: France, China and the UK. In the case of France, secularism (laïcité ) is a foundational principle of the Republic and in public affairs whereby academics (in universities) are public servants. In China, officially an atheist nation, religion is frowned upon. Hence, in both countries, engaging in religion and spirituality research may be conceived as politically incorrect (in more than one sense). In the UK, positivist research in organizational spirituality and religion has fallen foul of the influential critical management movement (Lips-Wiersma & Mills, 2014) due to the apparent ‘commodification and appropriation of matters spiritual within predominantly capitalist forms of organization’ (Case & Gosling, 2010, p. 258; italics in original). Since from time immemorial academic scholarship is bound to dogma, conditioned by peer pressure and subject to institutional scrutiny, the conservatism, inherent to top tier journals (Altman & Laguecir, 2012) may have enacted a gate-keeping role to deny access to this field’s scholarship.

Vasconcelos’ (2018) comprehensive review of the field notes the predominance of quantitative methods and the lack of longitudinal, autoethnographic and experimental designs. Criticism has also been levelled that the domain is lacking in sound theoretical foundations (Parboteeah et al., 2008; Steffy, 2013; Weaver & Agle, 2002; Tracey, 2012). Quite possibly, the challenge this field is facing is in finding ways to embrace contributions from outside the social sciences. For example, we only see the beginnings of attempts to import from the vast field of theology into the discourse on workplace spirituality/religion (Tackney, 2018); and the scope to engage with anthropology as a bedrock for theorizing the interface of religion, culture and society remains wide open. ³ Thus, the field may be conceived as yet theoretically underdeveloped, militating against publication in top tier journals.

Other aspects implicit to research in this domain may further impede the advancement of our knowledge. Enquiring about one’s beliefs may be sensitive and, understandably, subjects may be reluctant to reveal information they perceive as private and possibly discriminatory (Alshehri, Kauser, & Fotaki, 2017). Therefore, research into this area is likely to create social desirability biases and self-deceptions that may result in unreliable findings (Jones & Elliott, 2017). Last but not least, the overwhelming majority of empirical studies are concerned with religious norms derived from Western mainstream Christianity. Other major religions – such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Eastern Christianity and Pentecostalism – remain understudied (Alshehri et al., 2017; Essers & Benschop, 2009; Jingjit & Fotaki, 2011; Syed & Van Buren, 2014). We also know very little indeed about African and Afro-Caribbean religions as well as the spirituality of most other indigenous peoples in relation to work, the workplace, management and organizing.

Imagining new pathways for managing and organizing may imply going back in time, listening attentively to the wisdoms of the great religions and old folkways. Management and organizing are not new. They hark back some 10,000 years to the first settlements of Homo sapiens and the development of agriculture. Management and organizing moved up step with the establishments of cities in the third millennium BC. The challenges we face today: coordination, competition, embracing change, power and resistance, have always been around. Perhaps the prophet is right: ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1: 9). Learning from the past may well be the best pathway into the future.

In conclusion, it would be fair to say that religion and spirituality have made significant contributions to organization studies in the past twenty years. It would be also fair to say that as yet it is unclear whether these would make lasting impressions. In any case, given that spiritual and religious beliefs have become recognized as pivotal in numerous societies (Pew Research Center, 2010), of relevance for a diversified workforce in a global world (Ghuman et al., 2016; King, 2008; Treviño, Weaver, & Reynolds, 2006), and since the intertwinement of the spiritual and the religious with the secular is fast becoming a hallmark of twentyfirst-century ‘post-secular’ societies (Molendijk, 2015), their contribution to organizational studies should no longer be ignored by top mainstream management and organization journals (Gebert et al., 2013; Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003; Longenecker et al., 2004; Tracey, 2012; Weaver & Agle, 2002) – a deficiency this Special Issue aims to address.

Symbolism and Meaning-Making in Organizations

Organizations exist as systems of shared meanings that are developed and sustained through the symbolic process (Smircich, 1983). Indeed, the notion of culture has been described as ‘consisting of symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life’ (Swidler, 1986, p. 273). The power of symbols and their significance lies in their ability to carry and communicate cultural meaning beyond their utilitarian value (for instance in consumer goods – see McCracken, 1986). Symbolism and power are the two major variables that pervade all social life (Hallett, 2003).

Organizational symbolism emerged from the ‘cultural turn’ in the study of organizations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ⁴ Devoted to the analysis of organizations as ‘cultures’ characterized by distinct paradigms, symbolism developed in parallel with the research strand examining how cultural values shape organizational forms beyond the pursuit of their rational goals. It was closely linked to the postmodernist view of organizations calling for non-traditional positivist theories and methods (Alvesson & Berg, 1992) to capture not only their instrumental and economic aspects, but also their ideational and symbolic ones, using holistic and interpretative research models (Gagliardi, 2015, p. 179).

Symbolism expresses the underlying character, ideology, or value system of an organization: it provides a prism through which organizational stakeholders can communicate their experiences, successful actions as well as dysfunctional aspects of organizational work (Dandridge, Mitroff, & Joyce, 1980) integrating emotions, cognition and behaviour into shared codes, which undergird organizational culture and the organization itself (Raffaeli & Worline, 1999). In organizational settings, symbols count as any event, relationship or object that conveys meaning, comprising physical artefacts, institutional routines and group interactions (Pratt & Rafaeli, 2001). Symbols act both as carriers and repositories of meaning, condensing organizational knowledge (Lemon & Sahota, 2004) for instance, through innovation narratives between organizational symbolism and studies of religiosity on the one hand and storytelling on the other hand. Symbolic interpretation has been used in developing an approach for assessing religion’s influence on individuals’ ethical behaviour in organizations (Weaver & Agle, 2002); and the link between symbolism and storytelling is also reflected in a growing interest in religion’s meaning-making (Grant, 2001). Organizational symbolism has also contributed to legitimizing the narrative approach in organization studies by emphasizing the importance of the stories and myths produced in organizations to understanding core processes (Czarniawska & Gagliardi, 2007). Morgan’s Images of Organization (1986) reinterpreted organizational social science and theories of organization from the perspective of metaphor. It has introduced several root metaphorical expressions that influenced subsequent developments in research on metaphors in organization studies (Cornelissen & Kafouros, 2008; Jermier & Forbes, 2011; Örtenblad, Putnam, & Trehan, 2016). Over the years, many researchers used descriptive and critical approaches to understand how metaphors are employed in certain settings, focusing on power, control, resistance and related concepts (e.g. Höpfl & Maddrell, 1996; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2011; Martin, Knopoff, & Beckman, 1998).

Metaphors have been considered as normative constructs in organizational development and planned change (e.g. Burke, 1992; Cornelissen, Holt, & Zundel, 2011; Jacobs & Heracleous, 2006); and together with archetypes, metaphors have also been applied in the context of gender, power and culture to better understand women’s position in organizations and for addressing the pervasive, elusive and ambiguous nature of gender in work settings (Gherardi, 1995, 2000). The research on metaphors extends beyond organizational culture and symbolism to include literature on organizational discourse (e.g. Örtenblad et al., 2016). Metaphors and other forms of analogical reasoning are increasingly being seen as central to all aspects of theory construction (Cornelissen, 2006, Cornelissen et al., 2011); they are now regarded as having positive semantic qualities that grant them the role of developing imaginative thought trials, mental experiments and iterative ways of seeing, sensing, conceptualizing and comprehending organizational phenomena (Cornelissen, 2005).

While metaphors provide essential aspects of cognitive frameworks for organizational members as mechanisms through which they see and construct organizational life, archetypes help us to articulate issues for which we do not have specific language (Bowles, 1990). Archetypes underlying deep structures can be thought of as interpretive schemes of shared understandings that give meaning to experience and guide imagination of organizational members (Greenwood & Hinings, 1993). Archetypes and metaphors may also direct us to the underlying unconscious of an organization’s dynamics (Koçoğlu, Akgün, & Keskin, 2016). In that context, organizational symbols act as the sources of ‘unthought known’ (Dimond, 2008), that is, they stand in for the knowledge that the individuals are unable to think about; while analysis of the dominant metaphors in the public discourse can be helpful for the revealing and assimilating of unconscious content at the level of organizations (Bowles, 1990).

Another strand of related research focusing on the symbolic meaning of language emerges from the recent turn to Lacan’s work in critically oriented organizational scholarship (e.g. Arnaud & Vanheule, 2007; Driver, 2009, 2013; Stavrakakis, 2008; Vidaillet & Gamot, 2015). ⁵ Indeed, as Lacan put it, ‘the unconscious is structured like the language’ (Lacan, 1981, p. 20). Central to Lacan’s re-reading of Freud is the constitution of the subject through its (violent) entry into the language or the symbolic order expressed in a set of prohibitions and rules as the law (of the father). ⁶ The subject recognizes themself in relation to the symbolic order, acknowledging that we cannot exist socially outside a system of symbolic signification: ‘the symbolic provides a form into which the subject is inserted at the level of its being. It’s on this basis that the subject recognizes himself as being this or that’ (Lacan, 1993, p. 179). There is a proliferation of articles using major aspects of his theories to analyse core organizational issues such as identity (Driver, 2009) and identification (Stavrakakis, 2008), leadership (Driver, 2013), resistance (Hoedemaekers & Keegan, 2010; Vidaillet & Gamot, 2015), gendered discourse (Fotaki & Harding, 2013; Kenny, 2009), or social enterprise (Kenny, Haug, & Fotaki, 2019).

A creative fusion of psychoanalysis, organizational narrative and storytelling (Gabriel, 1995) is another manifestation of organizational symbolism. Organizational stories and narratives are expressed as symbolic artefacts drawing on deep mythological archetypes. But they are also a vital part of an individual’s and organization’s sensemaking apparatus; as features of organizational politics representing attempts at control and resistance; as elements of individual and group identities; and as means for sharing, disseminating and contesting knowledge and learning (Gabriel, 2000). The stories can be presented as archetypical tales, that is, as stories that touch profound aspects of culture and psyche (Kociatkiewicz & Kostera, 2013). The unconscious knowledge is also likely to play an important role as individuals translate innovation narratives in ways that activate imagination about the future while drawing on both memory and current experience (Bartel & Garud, 2009).

As the next section will discuss in greater detail, stories and storytelling are a form of reality construction. Their strength relies on constructing a commonality of meaning, but this also suggests that events and knowledge outside such frame of meaning are evaluated and regarded from a common stance of the stories (Boje, 2001). As such, the plurivocality, alternative stories and the voices of the less powerful are excluded or silenced (Boje, 1995). Psychoanalytically inflected notions of fantasy and imagination (Fotaki, 2010; Kenny et al., 2019; Stavrakakis, 2008; Vince, 2018) offer a promise for overcoming these challenges. Fantasy is indispensable for struggling towards a better future (Kenny et al., 2019) while imagination, which is both creative and self-creating, symbolic and material (Komporozos-Athanasiou & Fotaki, 2015), enables us to envision the shapes it might take. Weick (1989) highlighted the role of disciplined imagination for producing better but also useful theorizing, while Morgan (1986) stressed the importance of imagination in creating metaphorical images that drive theory construction. However, the usefulness of theorizing can be very limited if it is confined to the academic community and mainstream fields of knowledge. For scholars to fully claim their role as contributors to society, we must become part of the solution to the multiple challenges we face. This, we suggest, requires developing our capacity of imagination to research topics and issues including political and societal problems that matter to people within and outside our research community and our own paradigmatic commitments.

Anthropology, Ethnography and Storytelling

Current times, characterized by multiple crises, call for sensitizing approaches that can move beyond the technical and operational elements of organizing and managing; approaches that offer us alternatives to re-think and re-imagine, re-formulate and re-examine the role of organizations and the processes by which organizational actors imbue their actions or being with meaning. The discipline of anthropology, and ethnography as its core methodology, are such alternative approaches, their synergy being nicely captured by McGranahan (2018): ‘ethnographic research is attentive to the actual conditions of life, rather than to laboratory-produced or predicted conditions. It traffics in stories rather than numbers’ (2018, p. 5, italics added). Storytelling was at the beginning, long before the written word was invented; much longer before religion was canonized. Storytelling was the communication procedure for oral history, for community bonding, for the first organized work, as we are told in the Babylonian myth of Gilgamesh. Storytelling, if you will, is the first research method. Anthropology, where the method of storytelling is most embedded, is possibly the oldest among the social science disciplines, tracing its origins to Herodotus (Boas, 1904).

Over the years, ethnography (Kostera, 2007; Neyland, 2008; Rosen, 1991; Van Maanen, 1988; Ybema, Yanow, Wels, & Kamsteeg., 2009) ⁷ and storytelling (Boje, 1991, 2001; Czarniawska, 1998; Gabriel, 1991, 1995, 2000) ⁸ have been offering us novel ways of engaging with and examining the complexities of organizational life and the processes of narrative meaning-making, as well as illuminating the interconnectedness (often ignored) of organizations, and organizational members, with their wider environment. Important in these developments has been the ‘interpretive turn’ (hand-in-hand with the ‘linguistic turn’) in the second half of the twentieth century, which (re)focused attention to the centrality of meaning in human life, the importance of language, and a reflexive stance on how knowledge is created. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea (2006) explicate that the turn is both a turning away from and a turning toward: ‘a turning away from . . . the idea of a social scientific practice in which humans are conceptualized as objects’ and ‘turning toward a re-humanized, contextualized set of practices’ (Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2006, p. xiv). ⁹

Ethnography, through its close and personal engagement, and storytelling due to its value in uncovering how we make sense, have delivered on this promise, even though recently both were subject to criticisms for blind spots, to which we will return below. Ethnographic research, subscribing to a historical and culturally sensitive perspective, has shown itself able to make explicit some of the more hidden aspects of organizations and organizing, including ambiguity, complexity, emotions and power, as well as to reveal the daily routines of organizational life (O’Doherty & Neyland, 2019; Ybema et al., 2009). Storytelling research demonstrates how organizations and organizational actors make sense of identities, enact change (power and politics), express resistance, nurture belonging, share ridicule, let off steam and reduce the equivocality of organizational life (Beigi, Callahan, & Michaelson, 2019; Dawson & Sykes, 2019; Rhodes & Brown, 2005; Van Hulst & Ybema, 2019). ¹⁰

Stories, notwithstanding some major differences in how these should be defined (see Beigi et al., 2019 and Dawson & Sykes, 2019 for discussion about the differences between the two core storytelling approaches of Boje and Gabriel) open ‘windows into the emotional, political and symbolic lives of organizations’ (Gabriel, 2000, p. 2), marking organizations as storytelling systems and organization studies as a set of storytelling practices (Rhodes & Brown, 2005). Storytelling research has been able not only to offer a counter narrative to the overly positivistic narrative of management science (as pointed out by Rhodes & Brown, 2005), but also to infuse a more critical voice, juxtaposing sensemaking with subverting, communicating with manipulating, change and learning with challenging, power with dissent and identification with alienation (Beigi et al., 2019). Indeed, if we ‘are to take the lives of others seriously and sympathetically . . . and to engage with lived experience rather than to abstract from it’ (Rhodes & Brown, 2005, p. 182), we cannot do without narratives and storytelling.

While ethnography is ‘part of the staple diet of anthropologists and sociologists’ (Cunliffe, 2010, p. 226), anthropology seems to have mainly played a role on the sidelines of organizational research, confined to the perception as the ‘mother’ discipline from which ethnographic method was brought into the organizational studies field. There is however good reason, against the background of the multiple crises we face, to be more proactive in embracing the discipline that asks questions such as ‘What is it that makes us human?’, ‘What is it that we all share?’, and ‘What is it that we inherit from the circumstances of society and history?’ (Engelke, 2017, p. 5). Not only does anthropology offer an holistic way of thinking and researching (which takes time), paying attention to, and integrating, both the ‘complex’ and the ‘particular’ (Garsten & Nyqvist, 2013); it also strives to challenge and re-examine the ‘taken-for-granted’ through a contextual approach that focuses on actors and their voices (polyphony) within a wider milieu (Bate, 1997). It may be argued that of all main social sciences disciplines that inform organizational studies, anthropology is most attuned to incorporating a historical perspective against the others’ ‘here’ and ‘now’ propensity (Sarason, 1981).

From the early years of the discipline, anthropologists have always had an interest in organizations and organizing since ‘we live most of our lives within and among organisations’ (Garsten & Nyqvist, 2013, p. 1). Indeed, the study of human organizing can be said to be core to anthropology. In their path-breaking paper, Nancy Morey and Fred Luthans (1987, p. 131) ¹¹ present what anthropology has to offer to organization and management studies, starting with the now well-known story of the Hawthorne studies (the role of both Mayo and the anthropologist Warner in the success of the research and research outcomes). They divide these contributions into theoretical ones, such as ‘existence of parallel formal and informal organizations’, ‘participatory management’ and ‘worker morale’, and methodological ones, such as the ‘precise details and thoroughness in direct observation’ (Morey & Luthans, 1987, p. 130).

Since the 1980s, we have seen new subfields emerging, such as organizational anthropology (Garsten & Nyqvist, 2013; Jordan & Caulkins, 2013; Wright, 1994) and business anthropology (Jordan, 2012; Tian, Lillis, & Van Marrewijk, 2013), the latter with its own journal, the Journal of Business Anthropology (since 2012). These fields, instigated by anthropologists, show that there are many synergies in the kind of organizations being studied, from corporations to NGOs and indigenous organizations, as well as in terms of the research themes, which run from internal organizational dynamics, to interorganizational relationships, and the interaction between organizations and their wider context (Jordan & Caulkins, 2013). There are however several important differences, relevant to our call for alternative approaches. Organizational anthropologists demonstrate a greater interest in studying less mainstream organizations and engage a longitudinal research frame (often in cultures other than their own), such as NGO–church links (Kamsteeg, 1998), secret societies (Mahmud, 2013), or monasteries (Lohuis, 2013; Paganopoulos, 2010). At a more theoretical level one finds an emphasis on classical anthropological issues, such as kinship (e.g. Verver & Koning, 2018) and rites of passage (e.g. Popova, 2016) employed in current organizational and managerial research.

Still, there are hesitations (and institutional barriers) that seem to constrain a more fruitful engagement between anthropology and organization studies, interestingly enough, in particular due to the position and meaning ethnography takes in both fields. Although we are able to track a longtime engagement of anthropological research with organizational foci, debates regularly flare up with regard to fieldwork (ethnography, participant observation) performed by non-anthropologists (e.g. Bate, 1997; Gaggiotti, Kostera, & Krzyworzeka, 2017). These include: the neglect of long-term fieldwork, considered a necessity not only to understanding other people’s lives, but also to questioning one’s own understanding of the world (Howell, 2017; Shah, 2017); the lack of a holistic perspective which ‘recognizes that we cannot understand one aspect of social life in isolation from another’ (Shah, 2017, p. 52); and the inseparability of anthropology from ethnography, or how fieldwork and theorizing are intertwined (Bloch, 2017; Howell, 2017). ¹² Not many organizational ethnographers follow these principles, but the few who have, were to put their stamp on and keep pushing the field forward through their ethnographic perspectives: Barbara Czarniawska, John van Maanen, Tony Watson and Sierk Ybema, to name some of our prominent contemporaries. ¹³ For them, as for mainstream anthropologists, ethnography is the doing, thinking, seeing, sensing and writing combined; it is therefore much more than a method (Gaggiotti et al., 2017; Watson, 2012) – it is a cosmology of research and theory development.

Organizational storytelling, and organizational ethnography (particularly through a close interaction with anthropology), we argue, thus have much to offer in addressing the complexities of contemporary organizational worlds and the many internal and external challenges both organizational members and organizational researchers are confronted with. Both approaches however, also have some blind spots and shortcomings that have recently been aired.

Some of the main concerns raised on storytelling as we know it today, include the omission of in situ, contextual or setting-specific considerations in storytelling (Luhman, 2019; Van Hulst & Ybema, 2019), a focus on time and temporality (Dawson & Sykes, 2019), and lack of attention to underrepresented groups and themes such as empathy, as well as a need to engage with current developments in social media and contexts such as the post-truth era (Beigi et al., 2019). We address each of these in more detail below.

Van Hulst and Ybema (2019) make an ethnographically grounded argument for adding a missing layer to organizational storytelling, namely the setting (meetings rooms, canteens, workstations, closed-door rooms) in which storytelling in organizations takes place. This illuminates the point that what is talked about by whom and to whom, matters; for instance, from private one-to-one conversations (closed-door talk) to a joke shared collectively (canteen). Their typology indicates that storytelling varies ‘considerably across settings within the organization’ and that each setting has ‘its own combination of story tellability, story triggers, story(telling) forms and story work’ (Van Hulst & Ybema, 2019, p. 19). The theoretical implications of this setting-sensitive approach to studying storytelling lie in acknowledging that particular settings instigate particular talk (e.g. the intersection of discourse and setting) inviting, for instance, a more nuanced investigation of the situated performance of identity work in organizations. As said, the underlying method to reveal these nuances is ethnography, whereby the researcher spends time in the organization; and by following and engaging with people, can ‘witness’, first hand, the storytelling in multiple settings. ¹⁴ The anthropology of storytelling argues that it is the cultural relevance of the story as exposed via characters, plot and theme that informs us why a particular story appeals to a particular audience (Maggio, 2014).

Organizational storytelling research is also judged to have a rather linear conception of time (and structure; the past, present, future sequence). This, argue Dawson and Sykes (2019), seriously inhibits our understanding of organizational sensemaking as well as the accommodation of ‘multiple accounts’ and ‘multiple times’. A change from retrospective to prospective sensemaking would require some conception of non-linearity, as would the way people story their lived experiences under changing circumstance due to ‘digital technologies and the global convergence of universal standard time’ (Dawson & Sykes, 2019, p. 109). Due to technological developments and innovation, there is furthermore scope to delve deeper into social media storytelling and storytelling manipulation, particularly salient in the post-truth era. Questions are also raised as to the inclusivity of organizational storytelling research, about the voices of underrepresented identities such as disabled workers and LGBTQ+ (Beigi et al., 2019). Beigi et al. (2019) also propose exploring the impact of storytelling at a more emotional level (organizational empathy), for instance via fictional storytelling and the relevance of classic stories and myths for contemporary, political sensitive, organizational circumstances. Storytelling remains an important approach to explore how people make sense of their experiences, more so during times of upheaval and change. Some of these newer storytelling developments, in addition to exposing the value of combining storytelling, ethnography and anthropological sensitivities, are especially suited to address core concerns that permeate our times, such as insecurity, inequality and precarity.

Organizational ethnography too is undergoing important new developments, pulling the field in different directions. One urges us to reclaim the discipline’s roots of social imagination, of ‘being amazed by the world’: ‘a task of great importance and urgency in times of interregnum, when new solutions and even institutions are vitally needed’ (Gaggiotti et al., 2017, p. 327). The other is pushing in the direction of the unknown territory of an ethnography of objects and non-humans in order to ‘push at the limits of our current paradigms in management and organisation studies’ (O’Doherty & Neyland, 2019, p. 13). Both have merit. Showered with breakthrough technology such as algorithms, bitcoins and drones, the question indeed needs to be asked how ethnography and storytelling can help us grasp and represent these. Depending on what is investigated, the ‘complex embedding of organisations in society makes an isolated one-site and in-situ focus next to impossible’ (Schubert & Röhl, 2019, p. 177). A ‘post-reflexive ethnography’ is suggested as ‘solution’, in which ‘there is no divide between theory and practice, or representation and reality, which remain the dominant tropes for ethnographers keen to find a method that permits latitude for their own interpretative efforts and reflexivity’ (O’Doherty & Neyland, 2019, p. 12). This does not imply, however, that the traditional in situ and long-term engagement with social actors is no longer needed or relevant. It is, and ethnography permits us to ‘being perpetually pulled beyond the limits of one’s own taken-for-granted world’ (Narayan in McGranahan, 2018, p. 7). However, alternative modes of organizational ethnography, enabled due to digital developments and electronic accessibility, are coming to the fore, such as participatory organizational ethnographic documentary-making and associated ‘withness’ thinking (the focus being on ‘with’). With filmmakers, organizational researchers and participants joining a common reflexive space, the ethnographic documentary can expose, in novel ways, the ‘inevitably affective and embodied character of organizational life . . . through analysis which stresses human sensitivity, feeling and emotion’ (Hassard, Burns, Hyde, & Burns, 2018, p. 1417).

An ongoing and unsettled matter in discussions on organizational ethnography and ethnographic-based storytelling concerns packaging these approaches into a generalized qualitative research method; a danger also witnessed in organization research (Gaggiotti et al., 2017) whereby time to conduct long-term participant observation or fieldwork in general, striving for total immersion in search of a holistic understanding, is excused due to practical and institutional barriers. This raises the question whether organizational researchers should accept limitations in their ethnographic research or abandon it altogether; or, perhaps, challenge disciplinary confines and institutional barriers by questioning our own cultural mores in research, writing and publishing. A starting point would be the provision of adequate space in journals to present the richness of ethnographic and storytelling work.

To address the acute crises of today, instead of self-referential conversations on ‘fashionable’ topics in closed epistemic communities, we need research that pushes and crosses the boundaries: disciplinary boundaries, ‘valid’ methods boundaries (inherently an epistemological question). An organizational VUCA ¹⁵ world, such that we find ourselves in, surely negates a ‘business as usual’ approach; nor should it condone a ‘business research as usual’ attitude.

The Content of the Special Issue

This Special Issue offers an eclectic mix of the issues and approaches discussed above, and is a product of much deliberation. Many excellent articles on different aspects of religiosity and spirituality, symbolism and storytelling are not included in this collection. We had to choose from among 100 articles submitted. The first criterion for choosing an article for review was how it addressed any of the three topics in the context of organization studies scholarship; hence we excluded many excellent articles in spirituality or religiosity on the basis of their limited relevance to debates in organizations. Our preference was for articles that successfully integrated spirituality (religion), symbolism and storytelling or ethnography. The second criterion was how important is the topic for scholars outside our field of organization studies and how persuasively was it presented. Finally, we wanted to include topics that were novel and/or intriguing. The first round of selection led to a decision to review less than one third of all submissions, with five articles making it to the final round.

The article on symbolic construction of contemporary cultural heroes by Antonio Blanco-Gracia examines the role of archetypes in leadership by comparing and contrasting two prominent public personas that have captured the public imagination: Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg. Both have been in the limelight since their founding and running of WikiLeaks and Facebook respectively, over the past fifteen years; and by all signs they will continue to feature prominently in the public eye for some time yet. Assange and Zuckerberg, Janus-like, on the face of it antagonistic figures, in reality complementary heroes/villains. Theirs is an ongoing contemporary saga.

This is followed by the article on ‘the magical world of Santa’ by Teea Palo, Katy Mason and Philip Roscoe, who explore the myth of Santa Claus, and how the performative power of this myth sustains and organizes a market in which tourists travel to visit Santa at his ‘home’ in Finland for a single day. They consider how, as a model of reality, myth becomes materialized, organized and preformed into markets. Their contributions lie in empirically linking a myth (conceptualized as a locution created through a second-order semiological system) to a market, and offer ‘translocution’ as a new analytic category to account for the laborious organizational process of talking myth into a series of ‘magical’ performatives. Doing so, they reveal how accounts of performativity may shed critical light on late capitalism’s capacity to create value out of the most ephemeral of resources, myth. Their paper is an excellent example of how myths are translated and integrated into the stories and ‘worlds’ of others, that is, how myth becomes performative.

Staying in the magical realm, in the next article, Max Ganzin, Gazi Islam and Roy Suddaby develop the idea of ‘magical realist thinking’ to better understand how entrepreneurs navigate risk and uncertainty in their daily experiences. This magical realism is a form of spiritually charged sensemaking that describes an orientation to future decisions that combines realism with moments of spiritual resilience in the face of risk. The study is based on life-story research conducted among Canadian entrepreneurs and presents three cognitive orientations that collectively combine to capture a magical-realist worldview as they each integrate somewhat paradoxical themes of belief in fatalism and agency, past and future, and science and magic. Magical realism in the context of entrepreneurial cognition, as argued by the authors, involves a category of sensemaking in which scientific and magical cosmologies usefully coexist; the conclusion is that spirituality plays a critical but largely unrecognized role in entrepreneurial cognition. The paper raises some important questions as to how cosmological views of one’s actions may sideline conventional accounts of time in current debates on retrospective and prospective sensemaking.

The penultimate article by Boris Brummans, Jennie Hwang and Pauline Cheong report on the findings of their ethnographic investigation of a Buddhist NGO organization in Taiwan, examining how a terse retelling of an inspirational story encapsulated in a mantra contributes to materializing and reproducing of its ethos and worldview. This is achieved by encapsulating an inspirational story in a relatable, appropriable way, by developing a model explaining the processes by which this occurs. The study indicates how even the most faithful recitation of a mantra always implies a form of appropriation by organizational leaders, employees and volunteers, as well as non-members. They are all shown to choose to creatively weave the specific mantra phrase into their accounts to accomplish their specific goals in a given situation. As such it provides guidance for future studies to investigate more deeply to what extent mantras help promote the circulation of an organizational culture in which dissent and conflict are often suppressed or avoided.

The final article, by Ghislain Deslandes, offers a theoretical contribution to developing the contours of weak management through the study of theological oikonomia in the work of postmodern theologists Gianni Vattimo and John Caputo. The essay provocatively argues that stripping oikonomos of its cognitive omnipotence will ultimately curtail its power. Mobilizing this lesser power, which is also a principle of self-limitation, will then open a new different interpretative path to the notion of management, by taking it out of the realm of strategy, control, and so on – basically, that of power – and by adding an element of doubt and unease. The study makes a contribution to addressing the hegemonic claims by management; but whether this is the only way for organizational scholars to make a positive impact on society is open to debate.

Combined, these articles exemplify new ways in which both researchers and the researched imagine or re-imagine the task of organizations, the pathways to organizing and ways of managing in this brave new world of ours. We hope that having read our exposition, readers will feel empowered to engage with the themes and the methods presented here, which we believe open promising routes to a richer, more nuanced understanding of the challenges our societies face. We invite you to join the narrative of this Special Issue, that will take you from the lives of heroes/villains Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg to the performative myth of Santa Claus in Finland, through the magical realism of Canadian entrepreneurs to a Buddhist NGO in Taiwan and a contemplation on the future of power and management. Have a safe journey!