Consumption and Spirituality

Diego Rinallo, Linda Scott, Pauline Maclaran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136257056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

This book sheds light on the consumption of spiritual products, services, experiences, and places through state-of-the-art studies by leading and emerging scholars in interpretive consumer research, marketing, sociology, anthropology, cultural, and religious studies. The collection brings together fresh views and scholarship on a cultural tension that is at the centre of the lives of countless individuals living in postmodern societies: the relationship between the material and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane.

The book examines how a variety of agents – religious institutions, spiritual leaders, marketers and consumers – interact and co-create spiritual meanings in a post-disenchanted society that has been defined as a 'supermarket of the soul.' Consumption and Spirituality examines not only religious organizations, but also brands and marketers and the way they infuse their products, services and experiences with spiritual meanings that flow freely in the circuit of culture and can be appropriated by consumers even without purchase acts. From a consumer perspective, the book investigates how spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences are now embedded into a global consumer culture. Rather than condemning consumption, the chapters in this book highlight consumers' agency and the creative processes through which authentic spiritual meanings are co-created from a variety of sources, local and global, and sacred and profane alike.

1 Introduction

Unravelling Complexities at the Commercial/Spiritual Interface

Diego Rinallo, , Linda Scott, and and Pauline Maclaran

Spirituality and consumption? Really? This book brings together two topics that in the eyes of many go uneasily together. Spirituality is sublime. It smells of incense and everything that is good in humans. Consumption is instead mundane, materialistic, and ultimately soulless. The idea of spiritual consumption may thus be considered an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. For sure, it triggered negative reactions from some of our informants (not to mention colleagues). Why would business school professors be interested in studying spirituality? Shouldn’t this topic be left to more respected disciplines? Do we really need to frame humanity’s spiritual search as consumption? Is there something to gain from calling spiritual seekers consumers? These were some of the questions we were asked. We believe that these reactions arise from a cultural tension that is at the centre of both age-old speculation in philosophy, theology, and social science, and the life of countless individuals in postmodern societies: the difficult relationship between matter and spirit, sacred and profane. And yes, we also believe that, as marketing and consumer researchers, we may add something to the debate that would be missed by sociological, cultural, or anthropological analyses of spirituality. Before defending this assertion, which might be easily dismissed as disciplinary colonialism, let us introduce briefly what we mean by spirituality and the way the concept is treated in the disciplines that have it as a subject of study.

SPIRITUALITY VS. RELIGION

Spirituality is not the same as religion. This affirmation would have sounded odd a few decades ago. Experiences that would now be considered spiritual were labelled as religious in influential work such as William James’ (1902/1982) The Varieties of Religious Experiences and Rudolf Otto’s (1917) The Idea of The Holy. With the counterculture of the 1960s, this began to change. Already in 1964, Abraham Maslow suggested that spirituality can be found outside of institutionalised churches. According to the founder of humanistic psychology, experiences such as “the holy;... humility; gratitude and oblation; thanksgiving; awe before the mysterium tremendum; the sense of the divine, the ineffable; the sense of littleness before mystery; the quality of exaltedness and sublimity; the awareness of limits and even of powerlessness; the impulse to surrender and to kneel; a sense of the external and of fusion with the whole of the universe; even the experience of heaven and hell” (Maslow, 1964, p. 54) can be felt by the religious and the non-religious alike. In the decades that followed, many observed that “religion is giving way to spirituality” (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005). The divorce of spirituality from religion can be ascribed to two distinct but related phenomena: the secularisation of society and the postmodern behaviour of spiritual seekers, who mix and match from different sources to customise their spiritual beliefs and practices.

According to theories of secularisation (Hammond, 1985; Wilson, 1969), modernisation of society would inexorably lead to the demise of religion. One can easily trace an antecedent of this body of work in Max Weber’s (1922/1978) disenchantment thesis, according to which the scientific revolution and the Protestant Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries resulted in a rationalisation and intellectualisation of individual and social life and in a corresponding decline in religious beliefs and practices. After enjoying decades of unchallenged supremacy, the more extreme versions of the secularisation thesis were empirically disconfirmed. Studies show that some European countries are indeed becoming more secular, whereas in the United States religion is on the rise (Berger, Davie, and Fokas, 2008). The American religious market is a competitive arena where different institutions and groups invest to maintain and develop their membership, resulting in greater overall demand for religious services. Europe is instead still characterised by quasi-monopolistic religious markets as in many countries the once state religions still enjoy a dominant position. As a consequence, institutionalised religions have reduced incentives to market themselves, resulting in reduced participation rates (Finke, 1997; Finke and Stark, 1988; Iannaccone, 1991; Stark, 1997; Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Stark and Finke, 2000; Warner, 1993). Studies from other regions of the world suggest that religion is as alive today as it ever was (Berger, 1999). This is true also for countries where state atheism was enforced and organised religions had to go underground, including former Eastern Bloc countries and China.

Clearly, the secularisation of Europe is the exception rather than the rule. A much more defensible aspect of secularisation theory highlights the loss of authority of religious institutions on various spheres of public and private life. Social functions that used to be ascribed to religion are now dealt with by specialised institutions (Luckmann 1967; Wilson 1982), which are governed according to their own specific logic. Over the centuries, with its institutional separation from the state, science, medicine, education, art, economy, etc., religion has thus lost its ability to morally overarch all of society in a sort of “sacred canopy” (Berger, 1967).

Starting from the 1960s, the reduced authority of institutionalised religions has led to an increased individual freedom to create beliefs based on a variety of competing (but from an individual point of view complementary, at least to a certain extent) spiritual resources (Roof, 1999). Such degree of freedom is unprecedented, as in most periods of human history spiritual innovators, unless successful in creating new religions, have been marginalised and sometimes physically suppressed. Globalisation has been a trigger of this spiritual mix and match at least from the early nineteenth century, where the British Empire was instrumental to the first contacts between Westerners and ‘exotic’ spiritualities (Owen, 2004). Today these trends continue, as multicultural societies are increasingly tolerant of alternative, emerging, and foreign religions and spiritualities. Creativity in the spiritual domain is however often seen as intrinsically incoherent (e.g., do-it-yourself religion, Baerveldt, 1996; pick-and-mix religion, Hamilton, 2000) and often denigrated as it is largely based on the exchange of goods (books, DVDs, crystals, divinatory tools) and services (courses, workshops, retreats, therapy and counselling sessions) for money (e.g., spiritual supermarket/marketplace, Lyon, 2000; Roof, 1999; religious consumption à la carte, Possamai 2003; religious consumerism, York, 1995).

Secularisation and the spiritual bricolage of consumers (we do not of course share the negative connotations that critics ascribe to the phenomenon) have thus contributed to disconnecting spirituality from institutionalised churches. Not only has religion a much-decreased impact on the various social and cultural domains it once dominated; it has also lost its monopoly on religious beliefs and practices as consumers create their own spirituality and new religious movements, which often lack a priestly caste and avoid institutionalisation. Moreover, as consumer researchers have occasionally noted, even mundane brands such as Harley Davidson or Star Trek may assume sacred qualities and stimulate spiritual breakthrough (more on this below).

Based on these theoretical developments, social scientists have attempted to obtain operational definitions of religion vs. spirituality (Emmons and Paloutzian, 2003; Gorsuch, 1984; Hill, 2005; Hill et al., 2000; Moberg, 2002; Pargament, 1999; Turner et al., 1995; Zinnbauer and Pargament, 2005; Zinnbauer et al., 1997, 1999). Despite extensive theoretical and empirical work, there is not widely accepted operationalisation of the two terms (Moore, Kloos, and Rasmussen, 2001). Religion is often seen as community-oriented, formalised, organised, and consisting of an organised system of beliefs, practices, and rituals designed to facilitate closeness to God. Spirituality is instead more individualistic, less formal, and institutionalised to a reduced degree, and it is considered a subjective, personal quest to understand the ultimate questions about life, meaning, and the sacred. Interestingly, religion (e.g., Zinnbauer et al., 1999) is often associated with “negative” qualities (e.g., it is dogmatic and may lead to fundamentalist behaviours), whereas spirituality is more positively connoted (e.g., it may lead to expanded self-awareness).

SPIRITUALITY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

As hinted above, over the last few decades spirituality emerged as a topic of study in a variety of disciplines (see Holmes, 2007, for a brief review). Psychology has recently moved beyond its initial negative views on religion and spirituality. According to Freud (1927/1961), religion was an expression of individual neuroses. The father of psychology dismissed mystical experiences as regression to primary narcissism (Freud, 1930/1989). Following his lead, spiritual experiences were usually considered pathological, even psychotic (Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1976; Horton, 1974), forcing the discipline to find criteria to distinguish spiritual experiences from psychopathology (Caird, 1987; Hood, 1976; Jackson and Fulford, 1997). Many schools of psychology, including humanistic, Jungian, and transpersonal, now recognize that spirituality is an important aspect of psychological development and wellbeing. Beyond psychology, in the health sciences , interest in spirituality has skyrocketed (Gorsuch, 2002; Prasinos, 1992; Young-Eisendrath and Miller, 2000). Moreover, there is growing empirical research on the impact of spirituality and religiosity on various measures of mental and physical health (Koenig, 2001; Koenig et al., 2001; Mueller et al., 2001). Other studies also focus on the effect of specific practices, such as prayer (e.g., Masters and Spielmans, 2007) or meditation (e.g., Ospina et al., 2007).

Anthropology has a long tradition of studying and providing thick descriptions of “other” spiritualities (for a general introduction, see Morris, 2006). However, the insider-outsider boundary and fear of “going native” often led to situations where “extraordinary” experiences observed or even personally experienced by the fieldworker would be explained away or even subjected to self-censorship (Turner, 1994; Young and Goulet, 1994; see also Favret-Saada, 1980; Stoller, 1987, for significant exceptions). Critiques of the imperialistic past of the discipline together with ethical considerations have led to the acceptance of methods and representation styles more respectful of the legitimacy of other cultures’ spiritual practices and belief systems (Arweck and Stringer, 2002).

In Sociology debates on spirituality are usually situated within broader analyses of religions, with key subjects being secularisation and related themes (fundamentalism, religious revivalism), globalisation, and the deinstitutionalised (or post-institutionalised) nature of new religious movements, like the New Age or Neo-Paganism. Spirituality per se, given its ‘subjective’ nature, has received more limited attention (see, however, Flanagan and Jupp, 2007), even though several key thinkers in sociology are arguably relevant to make sense of spirituality under the conditions of postmodernity (think of Giddens [1991] on the substitution of traditional authority with self-authority, or Foucault’s [1988] technologies of the self as a framework for interpreting spiritual practices).

Getting closer to the topic of this book, management and organisation studies are also devoting some attention to organisational spirituality (Benefiel, 2003; Biberman and Tischler, 2008) and spirituality in the workplace (Biberman and Whitty, 2000; Giacalone and Jurkiewiez, 2002; Mitroff and Denton, 1999), and to the related issue of including spirituality into management education (Barnett et al., 2000; Bento, 2000; Delbecq, 2000, 2005; Epstein, 2002; Harlos, 2000; Neal, 1997). Similarly to research in psychology and health sciences, this stream of research has attempted to measure the impact of various measures of spirituality on organisational performance. The question typically asked is: “Would organisations be more productive and innovative, and individuals be able to live more satisfying lives, if they felt inwardly connected to their work, fellow workers, and workplace?” (Sheep, 2006, p. 357). Also, business leadership is said to benefit from spiritual values and practices (Benefiel, 2005; Miller, 2000; Reave, 2005; Vaill, 2000). Despite criticism based on instrumentality and negative consequences of workplace spirituality (Boje, 2008; Lips-Wiersma et al., 2009), enthusiasts propose that organisation studies are experiencing a “spiritual turn,” which is saluted as a response to the crisis of meaning in organisations (Drive, 2007).

To sum up, in social science, there is growing interest on the subject of spirituality and its impact on culture, society, and individuals. Let us now turn to examine relevant debates in consumer research, which have been influenced by these developments in social science and have, in turn, influ- enced marketing theory and practice.

SPIRITUALITY AND CONSUMER RESEARCH

In consumer research, spirituality per se has attracted limited explicit attention. Notable exceptions are Hirschman (1985), on the spiritual significance of consumption objects; Holbrook (1999), on spirituality as a typology of consumer value; Gould (1991), on spiritual self-...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Unravelling Complexities at the Commercial/Spiritual Interface
• PART I Marketers’ Sacralisation of the Mundane
• PART II Consumers’ Search for Spiritual Meanings in Consumption of the Mundane
• PART III The Commodification of the Spiritual
• PART IV The Consumption of Spiritual Goods
• PART V Issues of Method and Representation
• List of Contributors
• Index