Abstract
‘Organisational soul’ has been used in popular management texts to celebrate corporations that are governed through the values and beliefs of their leaders. Apart from Bell, Taylor and Driscoll in this journal, organisational soul has received little critical scrutiny or conceptual exploration. This article examines the concept through significant texts and traditions in the West’s long religio-philosophical engagement with soul – including poststructuralist and Nietzschean thought, Classical Greek philosophy, Aurelius Augustine’s first hermeneutics of the subject and key constitutive moral practices of Late Antiquity and Early Christianity. Through such sources, I argue that we can understand neoliberal corporations to have souls, that this soul can be regarded as imperialist, that it is constituted through ethical-moral discourse and that it is subject to being disciplined – as we have come to understand human souls to be – through processes of governmentality. As such, this article posits that it may yet be possible to redeem organisational soul.
Introduction
In an earlier article in this journal, Bell, Taylor and Driscoll (2012) document the traction that the concept of organisational soul has achieved in management writings. They observe how, since the 1990s, a confluence of managerial writings has conceptualised organisations in ways that seek to ‘demonstrate the spiritual nature of organizations by introducing transcendent notions of authenticity, meaning, higher consciousness and purpose’ (Bell et al., 2012: 426); how these have been ‘further strengthened by the emergence of the workplace spirituality movement’ (see Ashmos and Duchon, 2000; Bell and Taylor, 2003, 2004; Giacalone and Jurkiewicz, 2003; Mitroff and Denton, 1999; Neal and Biberman, 2003); and how populist writers have come to use the term soul ‘to signify corporations that promote belief through culture, values and the actions of leaders’ (Bell et al., 2012: 426; see Benefiel, 2008; Bolman and Deal, 1995; Canfield et al., 1996; Chappell, 1996; Cox and Liesse, 1996; Gallagher, 2002; Mirvis, 1997; Peppers and Briskin, 2000). As Bell, Taylor and Driscoll suggest, the concept of organisational soul in such works performs a normative ‘cheerleading’ (Giacalone, 2010) function, legitimising the ethics of organisation. It is an approach that seems to have particular traction for a North American context defined as it is by a highly religious, principally monotheistic and dominantly Christian population (Pew Forum, 2008) and a culturally embedded norm of positivity and healthy-mindedness (Bell et al., 2012). It is also an approach to the concept of organisational soul which would seem to have little to offer critical scholars – especially when one considers that companies such as Walmart are ensouled within this literature.
Contrasting with this cheerleading function, the concept of soul has a long history as the basis of a critique of the ethics and effects of capitalist organisation. Bell et al. (2012) note the accusations of soullessness applied to corporations in late 19th-century US society. To this, we can add a plethora of both older and more recent critiques of the soullessness of senior management, capitalistic business, the corporation or bureaucracy (e.g. Bakan, 2004; Bookstaber, 2007; Flanagan, 2003; Lizardo, 2009; McDonald and Robinson, 2009; McLean and Elkind, 2003; Parker, 2002; Shaviro, 2002; Wray-Bliss, 2012; Zimbardo, 2008 – plus of course Blake’s dark satanic mills, Marlowe’s Faustian pact, Marx’s monstrous gothic capital and Milton’s industrious, modern, Satan).
Powerful as such critiques have been in decrying the soullessness of capitalism, its organisations and agents, there has been little work to date that seeks to explore the concept of organisational soul in what we may regard as a critical yet productive way – that is, to consider what purchase the concept of soul might have as a resource not just for critical disavowal or uncritical celebration but for developing our thinking about the constitution and potential reconstitution of organisation. Bell et al.’s (2012) important contribution to this project has been to introduce William James’ conceptualisation of the sick soul, as the beginnings of a critical corrective to celebratory organisational soul discourse. The sick soul, rather than proclaiming its own goodness and moral worth, demonstrates a more melancholic disposition, one attentive to the failings, evils, harms and shortfalls of its actions in the world. Bell, Taylor and Driscoll argue that a conceptualisation of sick organisational soul offers far greater possibility for belief-led business to consider their harms, rather than bask in the certainty of moral rectitude. The importance of the consideration of harms caused for the constitution of the soul of the corporation will be a theme which emerges too in this work.
Broadening from the specifics of organisational soul, soul has been engaged with European critical scholarship for some time. Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s writings on governmentality, for example, consider the issue of the constitution and disciplining of souls directly. The use of the term ‘soul’ in such work should not be understood simply as poetical or rhetorical flourish. As Foucault (1975 [1995]) insisted, soul is real: It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is a product permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of power that is exercised on those punished – and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. (p. 29)
In making this point, Foucault shows his central indebtedness to Nietzsche (1886 [2006]) who, in his own genealogical work, strongly argued against jettisoning the historically significant concept of soul: … we do not need to get ‘rid of the soul’ itself nor do without one of our oldest, most venerable hypotheses … the way is clear for new and refined versions of the hypothesis about the soul; in future, concepts such as the ‘mortal soul’ and the ‘soul as the multiplicity of the subject’ and the ‘soul as the social construct of drives and emotions’ will claim their rightful place in science’. (p. 317)
Rose’s (1990) Governing the Soul extended the empirical scope of these ideas to consider the shaping of the working, fighting and familial subject in a UK context, and a substantial body of further work has been added to the organisation studies cannon which considers the governmentality of organised subjects (e.g. Bardon and Josserand, 2011; Collinson, 1994; Grey, 1994; Kelly et al., 2007; Knights, 1990; Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994; Knights and Willmott, 1989; McCabe, 2000; Miller and O’Leary, 1987; Roberts et al., 2006; Rose, 1991; Skinner, 2013; Spence and Rinaldi, 2014; Walker, 2010). And, while much of the above work has tended to substitute the theologically sanitised term ‘subject’ for the original ‘soul’, it should be noted that both Foucault and Nietzsche (1887 [2007]) considered the terms interchangeable (e.g. ‘the subject [or, as we more colloquially say, the soul]’ (p. 27)).
In this article, I draw upon ideas of governmentality alongside significant Western religious, historical and philosophical writings on soul. I do this not to consider disciplinary effects for individual organisational members – the focus of existing organisational writings engaging with governmentality. Rather, my concern is to consider whether a critical theological/ philosophical understanding of soul may allow us to consider the possibility of disciplining the soul of the organisation itself. I organise the article as follows. In ‘On human and non-human souls’, I consider religious and philosophical writings on soul and explore the conceptual possibility of non-, pan- or supra-human understandings of soul – reasoning that we will require such if we are to talk intelligibly of ‘organisational soul’. In ‘The nature of corporate soul’, I consider the soulful status of the contemporary business corporation. I note how the moral subject-status of corporations has been a concern across several bodies of writing; argue for a different, theologically informed, understanding of the subject or soul of the corporation; and offer Early Christian scholar Aurelius Augustine’s depiction of the Imperialist Roman subject of Late Antiquity as an alternative characterisation of corporate soul. Late Roman and Early Christian subjects straddled a period marked by a profound transformation of subjectivity, subjectivity which was constituted through different technologies of governmentality. In ‘Writing on the soul’, I consider two central technologies, the Christian confession and the Roman hypomnemata. In ‘Rewriting corporate soul’, I reflect upon what these two technologies of governmentality might enable us to say about the ethico-politics of the modern corporation and, ultimately, the possibility of disciplining corporate soul. I conclude with some final reflections on the contributions and implications of this work, both for the literature on organisational soul and for our understandings of the ethico-politics of organisation more generally.
On human and non-human souls
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While popular management texts may ascribe, and certain corporations assert, a soulful status for organisations, to those brought up in a Western cultural context filtered through a dominant legacy of Christianity, such an idea might be thought of as anathema. Surely, organisations simply cannot be understood to possess the perquisites of soul which – whether or not one believes in the soul’s actual existence – even as a discursive concept can only be applied to human individuals.
However, diverse concepts of soul surface within all religious and historical periods. Even limiting ourselves to Western traditions, there is great variety, with several accounts receptive to supra- or non-human manifestations of soul. As Santora et al. (2009) observe in their review of the anatomic location of soul, published in the journal Neurosurgery, the soul has been described as being localized in a specific organ or anatomic structure, or as being nonlocalized in any organ or structure and, in some instances, as being trans-human and even pan-cosmological. (p. 634)
Christian conceptualisations of soul have Neoplatonic roots, particularly with respect to the immortality of soul and the importance of reason regulating the body. However, Plato’s own ideas on soul were complex and varied. The soul was a prisoner of the body, to be set free (Phaedo). It was a hierarchy of levels and functions which, like the republic itself, must be ordered and harmonised for it to aspire to justice (Republic; see Foucault, 2005: 55). It was a multiply-natured essence – rational, spirited/ impulsive and desiring/ appetitive – located in the brain, thorax and abdomen, respectively (Santoro et al., 2009). Continuing long-held Greek ideas, soul was also that which animated life, with the implication (somewhat tacit in Socrates, though explicit later in Aristotle) that all things that are alive, not just humans, had souls. Indeed, the earlier Greek scholar Thales mused upon whether even magnets may have souls, given that magnets can move iron, and it is the distinctive characteristic of living things to be able to initiate movement (Lorenz, 2009). Perhaps most poetically of Plato’s characterisations, the human soul was a pair of winged horses, one dark and recalcitrant, one light and obedient, pulling a chariot steered by a charioteer (Phaedo). It was the task of the charioteer (reason) to harness the (desiring) dark and (spirited) light aspects of soul so as to achieve harmony. Here, as Santoro et al. (2009) observe, Plato’s tripartite theory of the soul finds a structural-functional similarity with Freud’s tripartite theory of the ego, id, and superego, with the ego representing the rational principle that seeks to harmonize the primitive demands of the id, representing the instinctual or spirited impulses of the body, and that of the superego, representing the internalized moral-social demands of society’. (p. 636)
Such resonance between a modernist, psychological understanding of the subject and a classical conceptualisation of the soul is not coincidental. The Greek soul, psuchē, is the etymological root of ‘psyche’, the basis of all our present psy-terms, and the pre-eminence of Plato’s rational soul as the orchestrating force was carried forward through Christianity, the Enlightenment, and into the still-dominant Cartesian conceptualisation of mind as defining human self and action (Matthews, 1992). However, even in Plato’s encephalocentric (brain-centred) conceptualisations, soul was always more than rational ‘mind’ alone (Lorenz, 2009), having, for instance, the qualities of immortality, the association with justice and ethics, and being the animating basis of life itself.
While Neoplatonic understandings of the immortality of the soul were carried into the Christian religion, Plato’s ideas on soul were far from the last word in Classical Greek culture. In his The Soul of the Greeks, Davis (2011), argues that from ‘the very first sentence of their first and most famous poem’ (p. 2), Homer’s Illiad, the importance of soul for the Greeks is apparent: Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage, Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks, Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls, Of heroes into Hades’ dark, And left their bodies to rot as feasts, For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
Concern with the soul was carried through the works of other major Greek scholars – including Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, Parmenides and Democritus (Davis, 2011; Lorenz, 2009; Santoro et al., 2009). It was, however, Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, who produced the most ‘direct and nonancillary’ discussion of soul among the Greeks (Davis, 2011: 9). Aristotle’s De Animus (Latin for ‘On Soul’ or, more literally, ‘that which animates’, translated from the Greek title Peri Psuchēs, ‘about soul’) was a work which both continued and departed from Plato’s conceptualisation of soul in important respects. For Aristotle, soul is that which animates life – all life. Aristotle differentiated nutritive soul, from sensing soul, from cognitive or thinking soul, with the primary activity of a living thing being that which constitutes its soul. Where plant life was nutritive soul and animal life consisted of both nutritive and sensing soul, humans alone were animated by nutritive, sensing and thinking soul. Inseparable as it was from the life of the organism itself, soul was material and mortal and did not survive or function after the death of the body. With his privileging of soul as embodied, mortal and animating life, Aristotle’s conceptualisation would come to inform a cadiocentric theory of the soul, one where the heart is understood as animating the body (Santoro et al., 2009), as distinct from Plato’s encephalocentric views. Together, these two different understandings of soul – Plato’s immortal, immaterial and Aristotle’s mortal, material, soul – would largely define most subsequent understandings in the West (Santoro et al., 2009; Sutton, 2013).
Notwithstanding their differences, both Plato and Aristotle held to a trichotomic view of soul (Plato’s two, desiring and spirited, winged horses and the, reasoning, charioteer, as we have seen above, and Aristotle’s nutritive, sensing and rational soul). Legacies of a trichotomic view can be found in Christian writings – for example, the person understood as constituting rational soul (psyche), body (soma) and spirit (pneuma), and in the idea of the Holy Trinity, comprising God, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Finer distinctions between two elements of this tripartite – rational soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma) – collapsed somewhat within the new testament, such that Homeric terms normally translated as spirit or ‘breath of life’ (Davis, 2011: 9) morphed into an interchangeable use of spirit/soul in the Christian text. This foreshadowed a subsequent marginalisation of the soul-as-spirit in favour of a dominant conceptualisation of rational, human-centric, soul, modelled upon a bipartite view of the person as consisting of body and soul (Mendelson, 2012).
If, however, we draw back for a moment from this later domination of rational soul and consider the long-held connection of soul/spirit, we see further possibilities for conceptualising soul in supra-human ways. Pneuma, translated as ‘spirit’ (and ‘breath’ – hence pneumatic and other terms associated with the force of air), may be thought of as the inspiration, or the muse, that blows into use from outside. It is ‘irredeemably exterior’ and is ‘not related … to a free will or to a subject that controls its life in an independent way’ although it may ‘fill the interior’ (Kaulingfreks and ten Bos, 2001: 4, 5). The products of human creativity and inspiration can carry soul-as-spirit onwards. Even our published writing become(s) almost human … it goes about finding its readers, kindles life, pleases, horrifies, fathers new works, becomes the soul of others’ resolutions and behaviour. In short, it lives like a being fitted out with a mind and soul – yet it is nevertheless not human. (Nietzsche, 1878 [2006]: 179)
This spirit may be more collective too in its effects, representing ‘a profound aspect of human togetherness’ (Kaulingfreks and ten Bos, 2001: 4). The German translation of spirit – ‘geist’ – is a term well used in social science and philosophy to refer to the defining and animating quality of supra-human collectives. Weber’s (1905 [2001]) use of geist in his Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus to conceptualise the animating and defining life-force of capitalist society is well established and emulated (Blanchard, 2010; Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999 [2005]; Campbell, 2005; Greenfeld, 2001; Novak, 1982, 1993; Stiegler, 2006 [2014]). This in turn draws upon a longer history of examining the Zeitgeist, flowing back most notably to Hegel who in his Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807 [1977]) and Philosophie des Geistes (1806) sought to identify the spirits of different historic-cultural periods and their contributions to the ever-advancing development of World-Spirit.
Even from the above brief review of a small number of sources in the Western tradition, we can say that there are significant religious, historical and philosophical works that do not, by fiat, exclude conceptualisations of soul as applicable to non-human or supra-human entities. We have encountered plant soul, animal soul, immortal soul, soul as separate from the body, soul as spirit, spirit existing outside the person and spirit defining a time, a collective, an economic system, even the flow of world-history. Perhaps most tellingly, however, for the possibility of intelligibly applying a theological conceptualisation of soul to a supra-human collective such as an organisation might be the pronouncement of a modern Christian authority: His Holiness John Paul II. In his General Audience of July 1988 (Paul, 1998), entitled ‘The Holy Spirit: Soul of the Church’, John Paul II was most explicit that the organisation we call the Church has a soul. ‘The Holy Spirit dwells in the Church not as a guest who still remains an outsider, but as the soul that transforms the community into “God’s holy temple”’ (1 Cor 3:17; cf. 6:19; Eph 2:21). John Paul II cites numerous other Christian authorities in support of his view, including his predecessor Leo XIII (‘If Christ is the Head of the Church, the Holy Spirit is her soul’), Aurelius Augustine (‘What our spirit, i.e., our soul, is for our members, the Holy Spirit is for Christ’s members, for the Body of Christ which is the Church’, Serm. 267, 4), the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (Christ ‘has shared with us his Spirit who, being one and the same in head and members, gives life to, unifies and moves the whole body. Consequently, his work could be compared by the Fathers to the function that the principle of life, the soul, fulfils in the human body’, Lumen gentium, n. 7) and St Gregory of Nyssa (‘surrounded by the unity of the Holy Spirit as the bond of peace, all will be one Body and one Spirit’, Hom. 15 in Cant.).
Finally, even if we cleave to the more prosaic translation of soul as ‘subject’, we can see opportunities here too for potential inclusion of non-human entities as possessing a subject-status. Judith Butler, for example, argues that the subject is not the innate, originating source from which something like morality stems – a construction criticised by Nietzsche (1886 [2006]) as the atomistic Christian conceptualisation of innate and immortal soul. Rather, the subject is ‘the effect of power in recoil’ (Butler, 1997: 6). That is, the ethical or moral subject is not a precondition of morality. On the contrary, it is moralising and disciplinary practices which bring into existence the subject. The subject is a political effect; it is that which is subjected to moral, disciplinary, practices. As Butler (1997) writes, ‘(t)he subject’ is sometimes bandied about as if it were interchangeable with ‘the person’ or ‘the individual’. The genealogy of the subject as a critical category, however, suggests that the subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a place holder, a structure in formation. (p. 10)
By differentiating the ‘subject’ (an outcome of the operation of power that becomes constituted through those relations of power) from the category ‘the individual’, we can begin to conceptualise other ‘structures in formation’ – such, even, as organisations – occupying a subject-status. Once we do so, we may also consider the possibility of seeking to exercise ‘power in recoil’ (Butler, 1997: 6), to turn what we already understand of the subject’s/soul’s formation and subjectification – of governmentality – back upon itself to discipline the subject or soul of the corporation.
The nature of corporate soul
Thinking of business corporations as occupying a soulful or subject-status has history. For example, following public decrying of the soullessness of giant merged US corporations in the late 19th century, business leaders and their allies embarked on explicit attempts to imbue the corporation with soul (Marchand, 1998). Articles and images with titles such as ‘The Heart of a “Soulless Corporation”’ (1908), ‘Corporations and Souls’ (1912), ‘United States Steel: A Corporation with Soul’ (1921), ‘Puts Flesh and Blood into “Soulless Corporation”’ (1921), ‘Refuting the Old Idea of the Soulless Corporation’ (1926) and ‘Humanizing a “Soulless Corporation”’ (1937) appeared in news and magazine publications (Marchand, 1998: 7). Attempts were made to import Henri Fayol’s vaunted esprit de corps through a plethora of employee welfare policies, to enlighten and improve the corporation’s consumers and employees through the beautification of commercial and manufacturing premises, and to imbue corporations with personality through a stream of corporate advertising that asserted ‘a man talking – a man who takes pride in his accomplishments – not a soulless corporation’, as early advertising expert Claude Hopkins expressed it (Marchand, 1998: 28). Corporate headquarters were remodelled and refashioned with ‘architectural allusions to the sublime’ (Marchand, 1998: 39), ‘utilising ecclesiastical associations of gothic style’, incorporating ‘conspicuously wasted space’ for symbolic towers, bells, beacons and ‘grand, ennobling entrances’ (Bluestone 1991, in Marchand, 1998: 41). Such ‘honorific styling’ (Milne, 1981, in Marchand, 1998: 41) of corporate premises was intended to create a ‘cathedral-like quality’ (Gibbs, 1984, in Marchand, 1998: 38) – and was successful in doing so, as awed reference in the media and even by the clergy to these cathedrals of commerce attested. The upsurge of concern with corporate soul in the early years of 20th-century corporate America waned, however, around the 1940s, with corporate ‘neighbourliness’ replacing discourses of soul – a discourse which was coming to seem archaic in the modernising post-war era of the 1940s (Marchand, 1998) – before surfacing strongly again, as Bell et al. (2012) observed, in US management texts from the 1990s.
These, however, are far from the only discussions of the subject-status of the corporation. Concepts of corporate ‘moral agency’ (Arnold, 2006; Moore, 1999; Soares, 2003) and ‘moral personhood’ (French, 1979, 2014; Goodpaster and Matthews, 1982; Phillips, 1992), for example, can be understood to have provided key normative/ philosophical foundations for the voluntarism of Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) (Lampert, 2016). Notwithstanding differences in the positions of their respective authors, such works considered the positions that corporations are, or should be treated as if they were, moral subjects. That is, the corporation has an existence which is more than the collective sum of the persons who work within it; that it comes to decisions that extend beyond the conscious intentions of its members; that it engages in behaviour with moral consequences; that it, therefore, has moral responsibilities; and that it is capable of being called upon to acknowledge and exercise those responsibilities. As some of the main proponents of such positions expressed it, ‘(c)orporations are … intentional actors, capable of being motivated to respond to ethical considerations. They should therefore be treated in ethics as full-fledged moral persons …’ (French, 2014: 3), and ‘(a) corporation can and should have a conscience … corporations should be no more and no less morally responsible (rational, self-interested, altruistic) than ordinary persons’ (Goodpaster and Matthews, 1982: 2). Having conceptualised the corporation as a moral subject, an appeal can then be made to these subjects to exercise responsibility – as it is assumed that human subjects do – through voluntary acts of ethical agency.
Critical Management scholars have in general been unconvinced by the voluntarism and appeal to corporate conscience which developments such as CSR would seem to entail (e.g. Banerjee, 2007; Bevan and Corvellec, 2007; Jones, 2003; Jones et al., 2005; Parker, 2002; Roberts, 2001, 2003). Lampert (2016), for example, considers such constructions as an attempt ‘to address morally problems which are better addressed politically’ (p. 99). And he traces this mistake directly back to the ideas of corporate moral agency at their core: ‘… it is a mistake to think of (or treat) corporations as moral agents, and that CSR’s impotency is a direct result of this mistake’ (Lampert, 2016: 79).
Some explicit critical works, though, have sought to articulate a strong critique of corporations while framing this critique within a conceptualisation of corporate subject-hood. Bakan’s (2004) The Corporation is perhaps the most well-known of these and takes us through the steps through which ‘by the end of the nineteenth century … the courts had fully transformed the corporation into a “person”’ (p. 16). For Bakan, these are persons that demonstrate a particular pathology. They are subjects that relentlessly pursue their own selfish interests and lack the constraining voice of moral conscience. They are for Bakan, in other words, psychopaths. As psychopaths, however, these corporate subjects can seem beyond help or redemption, lost to a pathology which has no cure. However, the story may not have to end there. Although unexplored by Bakan, the term psychopath itself originates in the longer history of soul, derived as it is from psyche (soul) and pathos (suffering/sickness). To deploy the term ‘psychopath’ to characterise the subject-hood of the corporation is thus already to evoke the older theological concept. What is more, exploring a theologically informed conceptualisation of corporate soul may help us out of the impression of irredeemable corporate pathology that the corporation-as-psychopath risks leaving us with.
To better conceptualise the soulful status of these dominant corporate entities, it may be fruitful then to turn from a modern, medically contested, concept of pathological exception to a religio-historical conceptualisation – particularly if we can find one written at a time when character traits similar to those exhibited by neoliberal corporations constituted not the exception but rather the dominant subjectivity of their time. We find such a characterisation in the description of Late Roman Imperial soul by Early Christian scholar and Bishop of Northern African province, Hippo, Aurelius Augustine (also known as ‘St Augustine of Hippo’). Augustine is one of the most significant figures in the development of Christian thought and Western subjectivity. Augustine’s oeuvre and influence were vast. His writing was a major force responsible for the merging of the Greek philosophical tradition – particularly that of Neoplatonism – with early Judeo-Christian religion (Mendelson, 2012). His Confessions (400 [1961]) has been considered as the first hermeneutics of the subject (Coles, 1992), ushering in the West’s radical break from an imperial Roman to a Christian subjectivity. While Augustine’s texts were foundational in the transformation of Western subjectivity, it is his depiction of the Imperial Roman subject of Late Antiquity in The City of God (written between 413 and 427
For Augustine (427 [1972]), the Imperial Roman subject, like our modern corporation, was defined by a ‘lust’ for domination (p. 104), power (p. 42) and the valorisation of Imperial conquest, resulting in a ‘seemingly endless tale of subjugation’ (Coles, 1992: 17). Augustine’s Roman subject was rapacious. It was not one in search of a modest existence, a comfortable, sustainable, materiality from which a morality of self-restraint could be exercised. Rather, like the profit-seeking corporation, it was a subject whose prosperity only ‘depraved’ it further (Augustine, 427 [1972]: 45) such that it sought ever more extreme ways to exercise its insatiable lust for glory, sensation and domination. Liberty when achieved by these subjects, as too under neoliberal policy today, resulted not in respect of interdependence and coexistence. Rather, it manifested itself in the desire for sovereignty (p. 42), understood as the desire to reduce relations with others to those of domination and subjugation. ‘For when can the lust for power in arrogant hearts come to rest until after passing from one office to another, it arrives at sovereignty?’ (p. 42). Augustine’s Roman subject commits the core, ontological sin of pride – of believing itself to be its own self-originating light and living only by the ‘rule of self’ (p. 552) – and thereby seeks to renounce its relations of reciprocity, responsibility and reliance upon others, the world and, for Augustine, God the creator (Coles, 1992: 16). We have then the depiction of a subject to whom liberty is the domination and subjugation of others and prosperity engenders further depravity. ‘But when liberty had been won, “such a passion for glory took hold of them” that liberty alone did not satisfy – they had to acquire dominion’ (Augustine, 427 [1972]: 198, quoting Roman historian and critic of Roman morality, Sallust). Such a subject, as Augustine depicted it, had no regard for the intrinsic value of others or the world. For while ‘it is the nature of things considered in itself, without regard to our convenience or inconvenience, that gives glory to the Creator’ (p. 476), the lustful self values only such things which bring it glory.
At times, such subjects, as with our neoliberal corporations, could display a semblance of public morality. But such public morality was not produced by virtue of virtue. Rather – and here we might see resonance with the emergence of CSR and the like at those points in history where corporations have faced the effects of a wider legitimation crisis – it was a restraint born of fear. Referencing Sallust again, Augustine (427 [1972]) observes that He records the high standards of morality and the degree of concord which marked the history of Rome between the Second Punic War and the last, but he ascribes as the reason for the desirable state of things not the love of justice, but the fear that peace was unreliable while Carthage still stood; and that was why Nasica resisted the annihilation of Carthage, so that wickedness should be restrained by fear, immorality checked, and the high standards of conduct preserved. (p. 68)
Without the constraining hand of fear, when opposition was vanquished, the ‘height of excellence’ soon descends again to the ‘depth of depravity’ (p. 69). Thus, in a passage which evokes contemporary critiques of global business practices – such as Arundhati Roy’s (2014) powerful descriptions of land-clearing and village-razing in India – when the corporation is beyond the constraining juridical eye of ‘developed’ countries or concerned consumers, the patricians reduced the plebeians to the condition of slavery; they disposed of the lives and the persons of the plebs in the manner of kings; they drove men from their lands; and with the rest of the people disenfranchises, they alone wielded supreme power. (Sallust in Augustine, 427 [1972]: 68)
Paralleling perhaps the Global Financial Crisis, where corporations threaten each other’s very existence in orgies of deregulated market behaviour, Augustine notes how in the absence of counter-veiling and limiting fear the degradation of traditional morality ceased to be a gradual decline and became a torrential downhill rush. The young were so corrupted by luxury and greed that it was justly observed that a generation had arisen which could neither keep its own property or allow others to keep theirs. (Sallust in Augustine, 427 [1972]: 69)
Not even the prospect of ‘their countries overthrow’ (read the sacking of Rome or, indeed, a US – even global – financial crisis) could correct their vices (p. 44).
Writing on the Soul
And every one of them words rang true And glowed like burning coal Pouring off of every page Like it was written in my soul from me to you (Bob Dylan Tangled Up in Blue © Bob Dylan Music co)
I have suggested that Augustine’s depiction of the Imperial Roman subject of Late Antiquity may be understood as analogous to the (imperialist) soul of the business corporation. What this characterisation offers us – in contrast, for example, to Bakan’s irredeemable corporate psychopathy or the long-standing critique of business organisations as soulless leviathans – is not only a theologically informed conceptualisation of corporate soul. What it also offers is a tantalising possibility of such a soul’s redemption. Augustine’s writings punctuated a profound transformation of moral subjectivity – from that of the Classical Roman soul to the emergence and eventual dominance in the West of the confessing, self-interrogating, soul of Christianity (Foucault, 2005). Where the Christian subject was to be preoccupied with a continual and permanent hermeneutics of the self, an inward-looking questioning of the self as something to be ‘renounced’, ‘deciphered’ and ‘constantly examined because in this self were lodged concupiscence and desires of the flesh’ (Foucault, 1984: 366), the Roman subject was concerned with quite a different telos or end, organised around the mastery and management of the self: One must manage oneself as a governor manages the governed, as a head of an enterprise manages his enterprise, a head of household manages his household … virtue consists essentially in perfectly governing oneself, that is, in exercising upon oneself as exact a mastery as that of a sovereign against whom there would no longer be revolts. (p. 363)
These two different soulful positions – that of the self-renouncing, self-interrogating Christian and the self-mastering Roman – were constituted through a variety of disciplinary practices, from fasting, meditation, prayer, the keeping of diaries, withdrawal from the world, sacrifices, disciplined remembering, exercise, abstinence, practices of purification, listening to truth and truth-telling. 1 Of all the technologies of the self available to and required of early Christian people, however, confession was arguably most defining – and most central too to the constitution of subsequent wider Western subjectivity (Foucault, 1978). In this section, I consider Aurelius Augustine’s foundational articulation of the Christian confession, before contrasting this with the Roman practice of hypomnemata. In the section following this one, I apply these two soul-constituting technologies to corporate soul.
Augustine (400 [1961]) considered confessing to be the fundamental ethical practice through which a being – by a disciplined and continuous practice of remembering – faces themselves and the harms they have produced and thus begins to become an ethical subject. Augustine’s reflections on the ‘awe-inspiring’, ‘profound’ and ‘incalculable complexity’ (p. 223) of memory are well evidenced in Book 10 of Confessions. However, it is the meticulous articulation of personal memory in the preceding chapters of that text which represents one of the most intricate and earliest embodiments of the constitutive moral practice of the confessional in Western culture.
For Augustine, a non-confessing subject is one that exists ‘behind’ its ‘own back’ and that refuses to see itself (p. 169). It is a subject that has ‘turned a blind eye’ and ‘forgotten’ itself (Augustine, 400 [1961]). Augustine regards the Roman subject as just such a figure, a flat subject, so mired in its own desires that others and the world itself are also flattened to the singular dimension of lust as it strives to conquer a world that invites … that the self subjugate it. And at the same time the subject is flattened, it is crushed and dispersed into as many objects as it desires. (Coles, 1992: 21)
Remembering the harms or sins one has occasioned and, crucially, publicly declaring these brings the subject ‘face to face’ with itself (Augustine, 400 [1961]), such that it stands ‘naked before my own eyes, while my conscience upbraided me’ (p. 169). The disciplined act of remembering and confessing creates a moral and hermeneutic depth which is in sharp distinction to the flatness of a self-regarding, imperialist subject (p. 207). ‘Oh Lord, I am working hard in this field, and the field of my labours is my own self. I have become a problem to myself … I am investigating myself, my memory, my mind’ (p. 223). This work, this moral work, while concerned with the subject and its memories is also a public practice. That is, while his God knows in advance everything and does not profit from the telling, the confession of Augustine’s text and the practice which this text models for others take the form of a public declaration. It does so precisely so as to connect the soul – which through remembering sees that it was never a unified, coherent or sovereign subject – further still with others. In Augustine’s Confessions, for example, he writes of a profound realisation that he is a dependent being: dependent first, to an incalculable degree, upon his mother who gave life to him and raised him; dependent later upon so many others, both those who guided him and befriended him, but dependent and responsible too to those he wronged, stole from, hurt and abandoned; and dependent always on his God, who he understands to be the ground and origin of all being (Coles, 1992). For Augustine, in seeking to answer the self-asked question ‘Who are you?’ (p. 212) through the disciplined act of remembering and confessing, one becomes a self-questioning and self-problematising subject – a subject that does not consider itself sovereign; that comes to know itself as dependent, beholden and responsible; that questions and requestions itself in the light of its deepening awareness of wrongs it has occasioned; that becomes ultimately a moral subject, with a Christian soul.
The fundamental importance of the confession in the development of the Christian (and subsequently more general Western) soul is underlined in Foucault’s writings. Despite the protestant Reformation and the ‘great rejection of the Catholic confessional practices’ (Foucault, 1984: 368) in the 16th century, the confessional remained ‘quite decisive for the genealogy of the modern self’ (Foucault, 1993: 210), ‘an absolutely crucial moment in the history of subjectivity in the West’ (Foucault, 1984: 364), so much so that the West became and remains a ‘singularly confessing society’: The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about …. Western man has become a confessing animal. (Foucault, 1978: 59)
If confession was the defining technology through which the early Christian and subsequently generalised Western soul was inscribed, a parallel technology for writing the Roman soul of Late Antiquity was the hypomnemata. The hypomnemata (in Greek, hupomnēnata) were collections of notes that subjects made from their readings, conversations, lessons from their masters and the lectures they attended. They functioned as aide-memoire, enabling the subject to memorise important things that had been said (Foucault, 2005). The purpose of such notes was to enable the management and consolidation of the self – to affix to the self the remembered words and logos of authority, so as to manage the soul in the light of the already said. ‘The ancients carried on this politics of themselves with these notebooks just as governments and those who manage enterprises administered by keeping registers’ (Foucault, 1984: 363–364). The function of these self-constituting written practices was quite different to the later, inward-focused, Christian confessional. The Christian subject’s ‘obligation to tell the truth about himself … did not exist at all in Greek, Hellenistic, or Roman Antiquity’ (Foucault, 1984: 364). The function of the hypomnemata is not to bring the arcana conscientiae to light, the confession of which – be it oral or written – has a purifying value. The movement that they seek to effect is the inverse of this last one. The point is not to pursue the indescribable, not to reveal the hidden, not to say the non-said, but, on the contrary, to collect the already-said. (Foucault, 1984: 365)
Through documentation of words of authority, the Roman subject would seek to perfect self by an outward-focused process, not an inward-focused gaze. The Roman telos is to become a subject of veridiction (Foucault, 2005: 362), that is a subject which is oriented to an already written truth.
Having argued the modern corporation to have a soulful status analogous to Augustine’s Imperialist Roman and introduced two important technologies for writing souls into being – the Roman hypomnemata and the Christian confession – I turn now to consider what these ideas might have to say to the ethico-political practices and, ultimately, the soul of the modern corporation. At the suggestion of reviewers and editor, I do so through reflecting upon a case of corporate confessing in the public domain. I do not intend to claim an empirical warrant for what follows – this article’s contribution is clearly conceptual – rather I use this case as a way to think through some of the implications of my arguments.
Rewriting corporate soul
As part of their agreement with US federal prosecutors to plead guilty to 11 counts of felony manslaughter and 1 count of obstruction of justice for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, transnational petro-chemical company BP was fined US$4 billion, had a 5-year probation term imposed and American Vice President issued the following statement of the company’s culpability: ‘We – and by that I mean the men and women of the management of BP, its Board of Directors, and its many employees – are deeply sorry for the tragic loss of the 11 men who died and the others who were injured that day’, he said. ‘Our guilty plea makes clear, BP understands and acknowledges its role in that tragedy, and we apologize – BP apologizes – to all those injured and especially to the families of the lost loved ones. BP is also sorry for the harm to the environment that resulted from the spill, and we apologize to the individuals and communities who were injured’. (Cited in Smith, 2016: 89)
How might we understand such a corporate confession of harm in the context of what I have been arguing in this article?
Given the constitutive and defining place of the confession in the history of Western society, a public remembering of harms occasioned by a powerful corporate subject can be understood as an utterance surrounded by a myriad of power-effects. The US judicial system itself, for instance, is historically derived from and still heavily influenced by its Christian roots (Zimmerman, 2014). In this judicial model, the confession still holds a significant place in determining both the guilt of the subject and the extent of punishment. In the case of BP, the corporation’s public confession to culpability closed federal prosecution of the felony manslaughter and obstruction of justice case against BP. In the Christian tradition, particularly in Catholicism, confession of sins has a redemptive quality. BP’s confession of guilt ended the possibility of the State seeking to enact further punishment of the corporate subject for these crimes. Did this confession represent further redemptive potential for the subject or soul of BP? Or did, perhaps, the manner that this confession was extracted or the corporation’s previous denials of culpability render this potential null? In the long history of the confession, many, if not most, are preceded by denials – giving rise to myriad ways to coax, compel or coerce confessions from subjects. Nevertheless, the confession is still held to be a defining disciplinary device in the West (Foucault, 1984). For Butler (2005), even a denial of responsibility opens up an ethical space. In responding to the accusations levelled by others, even when these accusations are denied, a subject begins to constitute itself as accountable to the other. That is, the subject begins to deconstruct the claim to an imperious (and imperial) sovereignty: I have been addressed, even perhaps had an act attributed to me, and a certain threat of punishment backs up this interrogation … [and] I begin my story of myself only in the face of a ‘you’ who asks me to give an account. (p. 11)
In not remaining silent, where silence ‘attempts to circumscribe a domain of autonomy that cannot or should not be intruded upon by the questioner’ (p. 12), a response ‘must, from the outset, accept the possibility that the self has causal agency, even if, in a given instance, the self may not have been the cause of the suffering in question’ (p. 12).
In BP’s case of course, denials were overtaken by the acceptance of causal agency and the confession of guilt. What, though, of the fact that BP’s confession was forced upon the corporation by the judicial system and behind this the pressure exerted by public outrage and government censure? Do corporate admissions of guilt resulting from the threat or violence of the other’s critique, rather than a spontaneous outpouring of contrition, undermine analogy to the soul-constituting practice of the confession? It might if we regarded confession and the formation of morality more generally as necessarily voluntary and other to violence. However, this understanding is hard to sustain. Augustine himself, as Coles (1992) notes, speaks of becoming a confessing subject as ‘the most traumatic experience of his life’ (p. 31). The long history of confessions – their intimate association with the violence of torture, threat, fear and death – including, if not especially, in Judeo-Christian cultures, shows the idea of the purely voluntary confession to be rather a quaint notion. More broadly, for Nietzsche (in On the Genealogy of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil and Freud (in On the Mechanism of Paranoia, Totem and Taboo, On Narcissism and Civilization and its Discontents), violence is not the other to morality. It is its constitutive basis. Morality or conscience represents the subject turning back upon itself the violence of a prohibition or the excising of a desire: When man decided he had to make a memory for himself, it never happened without blood, torments and sacrifices … all this has its origin in that particular instinct which discovered that pain was the most powerful aid to mnemonics … with the aid of such images and procedures, man was eventually able to retain five or six ‘I-don’t-want-to’s’ in his memory … what a price had to be paid for them! how much blood and horror lies at the basis of ‘all good things’! (Nietzsche, 1887 [2007]: 38–39])
Foucault carried the conceptualisation of violence-constituted morality into Madness and Civilisation (1965[1988]), Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1975 [1995]) and The History of Sexuality (1978), demonstrating how ‘(w)hen it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body’ (Foucault, 1978: 59): whether this is by blasting the mentally ill with cold water until they confess to delusions (Foucault, 1963 [1994]) or underlining regicidal confessions through the use of hanging, drawing and quartering (Foucault, 1975 [1995]). Even the work of that most compassionate of ethicists, Levinas, is replete with images of ethics as the violent destabilising of a sovereign self. Ethics is understood as the unbidden persecution and invasion of the self by the other; it is depicted as being ‘commanded’, ‘held hostage’, ‘stripped naked’, ‘compelled’, exposed to ‘traumas’ and ‘wounding’; it is ‘pain’ (Levinas, 1998). Taking the above together, not only is ‘morality predicated on a certain kind of violence’ but ‘such violence founds the subject’ (Butler, 1997:64). A power ‘exerted on a subject’ is nevertheless also ‘a power assumed by the subject, an assumption that constitutes the instrument of that subject’s becoming’ (Butler, 1997: 11).
Does BP’s confession and accompanying punishments then suggest a model for transforming corporate soul? By drawing billions of dollars of fines, years of probationary oversight and a clear confession of guilt from BP’s body-corporate, Federal prosecutors have achieved a significant event in the history of responses to corporate malfeasance. As a one-off event, however, imperial corporate soul can likely resist a more profound disciplinary transformation. For while singular moments of confession can lead to profound transformations – think confessions leading to death penalties, religious conversions, significant life-changing psychological shifts, or in the corporate realm confessions of guilt leading to bankruptcy inducing fines, sequestration or the dissolving of a company – the disciplinary effects of subjectivising practices, including that of the confession (Foucault, 1978), are more normally compounded through continual repetition.
As repetitive or continual practices go, judicial prosecutions and formal admissions of guilt by a company such as BP are overshadowed as yet by the sheer volume of corporate self-presentation in terms of a generalised and aspirational good: corporate branding; claims to excellence; inspirational mission statements; the declaration of laudable moral, environmental and fiduciary standards; high-minded ethics policies; and claims to be embodying CSR. These kinds of articulations constitute, in the normal run of things, the major volume of a corporation such as BP’s self-generated representation of an ethical subject-status to its varied stakeholders. Such articulations do not map onto the internally problematising, self-berating introspection redolent of the disciplinary act of the Christian confessional. They do not voice a continual and ongoing self-examination of corporate behaviour – a live account which changes and responds to the ‘temptations, struggles, falls, and victories’ (Foucault, 1984: 365) that befall the corporation. The mission statement, the ethical policy and the like are, to borrow Levinas’ (1998) terms, not the ‘saying’ of an inter-subjective relationship with other subjects, a relationship that functions to undermine the corporation’s claim to sovereignty. There is no other subject here to which the corporation is responding – no subject rather than the corporation’s own idealised, aspirational self. Roberts (2001: 123) has argued that such claims to CSR may be understood, thus, as acts of narcissism, managed almost exclusively at the level of appearances – through making more of what is already being done. The problem is conceived as being purely presentational, and what ensues are publications that advertise the work of the corporation in relation to the environment and associated social projects.
At best, such articulations would seem to represent a collection of idealised aspirations of what the corporation might wish to be. Like hypomnemata, these are the ‘already-said’ of collected together aphorisms and well-crafted statements rather than the anxiety of inward introspection and self-critique. And like hypomnemata, such practices may be understood to reinforce rather than undermine imperialist corporate soul.
Bringing this section to a close, nothing that I have said makes BP’s prosecution and confession, or other cases like this, insignificant. On the contrary, prosecution, activism and protest – calling corporations to account in ways that respond to the harms they have caused – represent not just the possibility of local justice but also the potential to contribute to a more profound disciplining of corporate soul. To achieve the latter, the pressures brought to bear would need to have sufficient purchase, however, to compel the corporation into responses and confessions of a magnitude and regularity which overshadow or otherwise render absurd its generalised messages of neoliberal beneficence, social responsibility and magnanimity.
Conclusion
My intent in this work was to contribute to the concept of organisational soul, a concept which almost exclusively to date has been under-theorised and used to celebrate the ethics of the neoliberal corporation (Bell et al., 2012). My intent was to treat soul seriously, to undertake a scholarly examination of its religious and philosophical roots, and thereby to see what this most potent of religio-philosophical concepts might actually offer for a critical rereading of organisation. Soul, as Nietzsche (1886 [2006]) observed, is ‘one of our oldest, most venerable hypotheses’ (p. 317). My engagement with its long history has drawn on Foucault’s, Butler’s and Nietzsche’s writing on governmentality; the formative Christian texts of Aurelius Augustine; Classical Greek philosophical conceptualisations of soul; and two constitutive moral practices of Late Antiquity and Early Christianity. I have done so to argue that corporations can be understood to have souls, that these souls may be characterised as imperialist, that they are an outcome of and constituted through ethico-political practices and that continually forcing corporations to respond to accusations of harm holds the potential for disciplining these souls.
Through the religio-philosophical examination of soul, this work has been a response too to calls to ‘take religion seriously’ in the study of organisations (Tracey et al., 2014), calls for a ‘theology of organisation’ (Sørensen et al., 2012) and calls for social science to better engage with the postsecular (McLennan, 2007). I have sought, for example, to show how religio-historical and religio-philosophical texts may be engaged with by organisational scholars not as historical curiosity but rather as live resources for understanding how we are constructed and how we have constructed our society and its institutions. In a context of high religious belief worldwide (Tracey et al., 2014), and the particular rise of the influential Christian neoconservative movement in post-9/11 United States (Bockman, 2013), finding ways to productively engage with religious and religio-philosophical texts and ideas will be increasingly necessary if critics of organisation are to develop a vocabulary that allows us to successfully respond to non-secular legitimations of neoliberal society.
While the principle contribution of this work is on the topic of organisational soul, the arguments that I have advanced may have implications also for critical organisational scholars’ engagement with what we might characterise as the anthro-status, as well as the ethics, of the corporation. ‘Corporation’, from the Latin corporare, means to form into a body. I have argued that this body has a soul. Treating this body as ensouled is not a semantic trick. From the reading presented in this article of early and more recent Christian theology, Classical Greek philosophy, and social scientific and philosophical work concerned with spirit or giest, the term ‘soul’ may quite correctly be applied to corporations. Arguing this is not to imply that popular management’s ‘cheerleading’ pronouncements of soul-filled organisations should now replace critics’ long-favoured denouncing of corporations as soulless leviathans. Nor still does it seek to replicate the kind of conceptualisations of corporate moral personhood and corporate moral agency that have been charged with providing philosophical foundations for a voluntarist CSR (Lampert, 2016).
Instead, the exploration of corporate soul that I have presented here reminds us that soul is by no means reducible to the modernist ideal of an autonomous, sovereign subject: whether this subject is corporeal or corporate. The soul, or if we prefer the ethical subject, is conditioned, constructed and disciplined. It is as much or more a product from without – a product of forced confession, punishment or threat of such, of suffering, compulsion, force or violence (Levinas, 1998; Foucault, 1963 [1994], 1975 [1995]; Nietzsche, 1887 [2007]) – as it ever was one of calm and quiet self-directed introspection. Much as the ‘turn to ethics’ in literary studies, philosophy and political theory over the last twenty years was engendered by a radical decentring of the (human) subject – a decentring that enabled critical scholars to engage with the ethical without having to reproduce problematic discourses of autonomy and sovereignty (Garber et al., 2000; see, for example, the collection by Cadava et al., 1991) – the examination of corporate soul that I have presented here enables us to work with ideas of corporate subject-status while decentring the corporation as the author of its own ethics. Ascribing to corporations a soulful subject-status does not necessitate waiting around for their voluntary contrition or spontaneous outpourings of conscience, social responsibility and philanthropy – a position which has been characterised as an ethics devoid of politics (Parker, 2002), a naïve and mistaken attempt ‘to address morally problems which are better addressed politically’ (Lampert, 2016: 99). Rather, the understanding that I have proffered here opens up possibilities of seeking to discipline these souls so that they may be wrenched from a state of neoliberal and imperial sovereignty, a place almost ‘beyond good and evil’, and instead, to paraphrase Nietzsche (1887 [1994]: 63), frightened back into themselves and given an inner life, incarcerated in the state to be tamed and discover bad conscience so that they can hurt themselves, after the more natural outlet of this wish to hurt had been blocked.