Finding meaning in the everyday: religious prespectives on professional practice (original) (raw)
Related papers
Quaker professionals or professional Quakers: articulations of faith identity in the contemporary workplace This paper is based upon research into individual, ‘soi disant’ Quakers and their particular faith beliefs. Data from semi-structured interviews has been used to contextualise the Quaker faith within the contemporary world of work. In order to understand fully Quakers’ experience at work, the research also identifies trends in contemporary working culture. The research analyses how individual Quakers locate themselves within particular work environments and how far they connect this experience at work with their faith beliefs. This research explores specific contemporary trends within a Quaker’s experience of the modern work environment: attitudinal trends towards work, trends in religious belief and trends in particular behaviours in the workplace. It depicts, therefore, how far individuated aspects of religious belief, and the workplace, form distinctive characteristics of a Quaker’s subjective identity. Following on from this depiction of individual Quaker identity, the study also examines how the religious belief is realised within contemporary working culture: i.e. it examines the priority of religious faith, from a Quaker’s point of view, especially with regard to the discursively expressed aims and practices of the secular and rational workplace. This paper also describes some of the features and trends of British working culture which make the workplace contemporary. It identifies some of the current academic ideas about how individuals form meaning and identity through work. Within this context, it tries to depict, through an analysis of interview data, a Quaker sense of self. It suggests that, by viewing the interview data through a critically analytical lens, Quaker faith is realised discursively and non-discursively at work. The paper concludes that a subjective Quaker identity does exist in the contemporary workplace. The data indicates that this subjective identity can be located within different professional fields. Quaker identity also takes a recognisable form at an individual level. As Parker (2000), has pointed out: ‘Organisational culture is a continually contested process of making claims of difference within and between groups of people.’(2000, 233) It is argued that Quakers consciously engage in an articulation of identity and meaning-making within the contemporary workplace. They locate themselves as Quakers within the workplace. As simultaneously Quakers and organisational members, they locate themselves in two distinctive ways: as ‘Quaker professionals’, through a subjective identification with the aims of the organisation, and as ‘professional Quakers’, contesting from within the identity of the workplace.
‘Doing Belief’: British Quakers in the Twenty-First-Century Workplace
Quaker Studies, 2019
This article draws on data acquired for doctoral research into how Quakers live out their religious claims in the twenty-first-century workplace. It depicts Quaker everyday practice in the work setting based on the accounts of 20 interviewees. These Quakers tended to be drawn to the movement in adulthood, attracted by its heterodox, post-Christian (Dandelion 1996) claims of religious engagement with the everyday. The research participants also espoused an impulse to improve the world through their workaday participation and, in these ambitious terms, Quakers in the work organisation are framed as 'doing belief ' (Day 2011: 191). 'Doing belief ' in the everyday, however, was depicted by the research participants as more than a simple process of engagement co-equivalent to their claims. Indeed, 'doing belief ' in the workaday was not viewed by the cohort in 'dichotomous' religious or secular terms (Collins 2008b: 143). Quakers saw their aspirations to improve the world as harmonious with the espoused intentions of their work organisations. The work organisation, however, set out and policed the terms upon which the research participants' ambitions were pursued, shaping how the contemporary Quaker tradition was expedited in the workaday setting.
2019
This article draws on data acquired for doctoral research into how Quakers live out their religious claims in the twenty-first-century workplace. It depicts Quaker everyday practice in the work setting based on the accounts of 20 interviewees. These Quakers tended to be drawn to the movement in adulthood, attracted by its heterodox, post-Christian (Dandelion 1996) claims of religious engagement with the everyday. The research participants also espoused an impulse to improve the world through their workaday participation and, in these ambitious terms, Quakers in the work organisation are framed as 'doing belief ' (Day 2011: 191). 'Doing belief ' in the everyday, however, was depicted by the research participants as more than a simple process of engagement co-equivalent to their claims. Indeed, 'doing belief ' in the workaday was not viewed by the cohort in 'dichotomous' religious or secular terms (Collins 2008b: 143). Quakers saw their aspirations to improve the world as harmonious with the espoused intentions of their work organisations. The work organisation, however, set out and policed the terms upon which the research participants' ambitions were pursued, shaping how the contemporary Quaker tradition was expedited in the workaday setting.
This paper is based upon an interim analysis of a PhD study into the contemporary workplace as seen through the eyes of twenty Quaker interviewees. It questions whether ‘religion’ or ‘nonreligion’ descriptors can be meaningfully applied to modern work organisations. This analysis of the research data is based upon viewing organisations as processual, rather than fixed and structured, entities. Organisations are understood as a confluence of individual, subjective, meaning-making and processes of identity accommodation. (Parker, 2008) Taking the view that subjective identities are fundamentally grounded beyond the organisational form, and articulated at the point of multi-various decision-making within the job role, analysis of the data suggests that the interviewees’ complex motivations remain largely invisible in organisational terms. The interviewees can be regarded as engaging in private articulations of multi-faceted personal beliefs within a locus of public discourse. Within this discourse, Quaker belief is a singular, variously significant aspect of the interviewees’ subjective identity. However, engagement with the requirements of the work role, and contestation of organisational norms in the particular, reveal a more complex articulation of the subjective self that undermines a religious/non-religious binary definition. The paper concludes that individuals in modern, technical-rational organisations (Bauman, 1989) bring a multi-faceted subjectivity to their work which cannot be recognised readily within formal organisational discourses. It suggests finally that subjective identities are organisationally significant, and through their religious/non-religious invisibility, have the potential to shape, unrecognised and fundamentally, the identity of the collective whole.
Journal of Comparative Social Work
This article explores the role of faith in congregational social work. It investigates The Salvation Army (TSA), an international Christian church that provides social services in local communities. TSA’s congregational social work represents a specific case, in which spiritual values dictated by faith and social work principles are explicitly intertwined. In this article, a community of practice (CoP) perspective is used to analyse empirical data from a multiple-case study of TSA congregations. The article concludes that faith can be part of a professional ethos, by adding important values to a holistic understanding of social work
Contesting the organisational ideal: a reading of workplace discourses by the invisibly religious
This paper is based upon PhD research into the contemporary workplace as seen through the eyes of twenty Quakers. The study views organisations in Martin Parker’s terms, as human processes where multi-faceted and complex subjective identities are negotiated as part of an ongoing, negotiation and re-negotiation of individual subjectivities. In this sense, organisations are regarded not as fixed or even fixable, but as processual and fluid entities, a confluence of human inter-relationships. Although the Quaker faith of the research participants was central to how they self-identified, oppositional practice within the work environment did not tend to be subjectively viewed as singularly religious. Rather religious belief remained backgrounded (Goffman) within the job role, hidden from the organisational gaze (Foucault), a largely undeclared aspect of the interviewees’ subjectivities. Borrowing from the theory of ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ readers in semiotics (Chandler), it is contended that the interviewees were adept at recognising the ideal organisational member as framed and naturalised (Fairclough) by workplace discourses. Whilst contestation of these organisational discourses was largely undeclared in faith terms, the interviewees as ‘real’ organisational members engaged subjectively in complex and silent oppositional practices. So, in one example, overt oppositional practice in religious terms was disempowered by being organisationally positioned and marginalised within mental health discourse. However, the paper concludes that contestation by the interviewees as ‘real’ organisational members was more typically subversive, an invisible and significant aspect of opposition within the fluid and processual organisation."
The religious gift in the contemporary workplace of more than 'being with'
The innate goodness of human beings and the valuing of inherently meaningful social relationships are often central to religious belief and its customary practices. Yet these are not exclusively religious categories. This is especially so in work-life where many organisational cultures are founded upon human relationships of purposeful reciprocity and care. Caring dispositions are also instrumentalised through powerful careers discourses (Fournier) and embedded within organisations as attributes of an ideal worker (Hochschild). This paper focuses on recent PhD research into contemporary Quaker views of their work life. Affiliates of the group seek to “better the world” (Johns) through work, often within ‘caring’ occupations. Their religious designs are often constrained, however, as the affiliates variously strive to avoid marginalisation in the secular environment. Ultimately, Quakers concede the religious grounds on which their soi disant caring is based to economic necessity and the goal-oriented ends of temporal authorities. Quakers are not simply technical-rational instruments, however, as “being with” (Heidegger) others is an essentially human process (Thomas). This paper draws upon Loren Mosher’s inclusive “being with” treatment model for extreme mental distress. It highlights how the secular “being with” of work constitutes a technical-rational ideal and it depicts how a religious care-full utopianism can be differentiated from it. The paper concludes that the detail of difference, between Quaker utopianism and organisational ideals, divines the Quaker work-life. So, whilst Quaker work-life adroitly avoids the fate of the madman, “entirely excluded from being” (Foucault), affiliates are able to ‘blend whilst they mend’. And their engagement transcends, a ‘more than’ occupationally-defined “being with”. Thus, Quaker work-life forms a cherished part of their shifting utopian horizon, a spiritual gift to the world, often invisible and unrequited, which is proffered within their mundane lives.
Stuck in a meeting and losing hope: faith re-materialised in the contemporary workplace
This paper, based on PhD research into Quaker faith in the workplace, questions whether traditional and visible sites of religious worship – churches, chapels, meeting houses, for example – truly reflect the post-Christian vision. It draws on the idea of the ‘private life’ (Dandelion), as a worldly place to which Quakers retreat outside meeting for worship and argues that the a-religious workplace should be viewed in contradistinction to the physical ‘church’ as a singularly significant site of faith-inspired utopianism. In Dandelion’s terms, meeting houses and their activities largely define ‘Quaker Time’. However, articulation of the religious ideal is necessarily sustained within the everyday, and located more specifically in the central feature of the modernity (Blass), ‘organisational life’. Whilst ‘the warm fuzzies’ of the Quaker membership document and therefore bureaucratise (Weber) and centralise members ‘concerns’ within the formal church space, research evidence points to a different, contemporary manifestation of religious heterodoxy. A more critical ‘movement of hope’ (Fournier) can be seen as articulated beyond the Quaker space and instead manifested within the physical/temporal site of work. The workplace is seen by many research participants as a place of ideals. It is a place where their experience, which often precedes and transcends involvement with the Religious Society of Friends, can become re-materialised as spiritual. Between organisational definitions of ‘what counts as Quaker’ and the shifting career and professional discourses of work, interviewees can be seen as acting to create their own, personally-defined utopias. The paper concludes by suggesting that Quakers’ ‘impetus to better the world’ (Johns) is derivative and blunted in the formal religious setting. Instead, it is at its most authentic and ‘dangerous’ (Parker) when occupying the heterotopic spaces (Pilgrim) of the contemporary, rational workplace, the modern-day ‘steeplehouses’. "
Critics and Crusaders 30 years on: Is Workplace Spirituality inherently ‘good’?
2020
This paper presents a systematic review of the workplace spirituality literature as characterised by two factions which we have called the Crusaders and the Critics. The Crusaders are seen as authors whose work is clearly aimed at promoting the notion of workplace spirituality academically and in practice. The Critics are those who are, at the least, more reticent and calling for caution. The literature suggests very clear lines of demarcation between these two factions over about a 30 year period beginning in the 1990’s and identifies three themes in the bulk of the ‘crusader’ contributions which we have labelled as follows: functional and managerial, dualistic and reified. By way of comparison, these three themes were then compared with the results of an ethnographic study of self-sustaining spirituality communities (Buddhist and Benedictine) (Brown, 2009), and it was noted how these three themes are the antithesis of organisations with a spiritual raison d’etre to aspire too. The...