Varieties of organizational soul: The ethics of belief in organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that the expression of religious beliefs within organizations, often made manifest through the notion of soul, provides insight into the ethics of organization in postsecular society. Using examples to illustrate the discursive representation of organizational soul in three US-based multinational companies, we argue that religious organizational beliefs must be located within cultural and material contexts of practice in order to fully appreciate their ethical implications. We show how the use of soul is a contemporary reiteration of the 19th century religious attitude that William James termed ‘healthy-mindedness’. We suggest that this variety of religious experience is limiting through its neglect of the social and political contexts of ethical thought and action and the definition of evil or harm as external to the believer and the organization. Drawing on a pragmatist perspective, we critique this approach to belief-led business and propose that the Jamesian notion of a ‘sick soul’ constitutes a more robust ethical framework for belief-led businesses by encouraging ethical skepticism concerning the nature of organizational activities. We conclude by exploring what our analysis means for the development of postsecular critical organization theory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".