Teologia e organizações
Categorias: academia, administracao, religiao
Faz algum tempo que trabalho com a hipótese de que muitos conceitos usados na Administração são conceitos teológicos/religiosos secularizados. Por exemplo, a idéia de eficácia organizacional tem sua origem na ética protestante, como nos ensina Max Weber. Essa hipótese era muito particular, fruto de minha experiência no campo com organizações religiosas.
Para a minha surpresa (nem tanto, porque brincamos na academia que quando achamos que uma idéia é original é porque não fizemos uma pesquisa bibliográfica decente) recebi a chamada de trabalhos para um workshop intitulado “Teologia e Organizações” (veja logo abaixo), da Critical Management Studies, divisão da Academy of Management, a principal associação acadêmica em Administração do mundo.
No texto chamam a atenção para o tema do encontro da Academy of Management de 2010, ‘Dare to Care: Passion and Compassion in Management Practice and Research’, que possui um forte cunho teológico.
Enquanto isso, no Brasil, religião e administração juntos podemparecer tão exóticos quanto um koala.
Call for abstracts (deadline January 15) CMS Division Academy of Management, Montreal:
THEOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION
Conveners:
Bent M. Sørensen (bem.lpf@cbs.dk)
Sverre Spoelstra (sverre.spoelstra@fek.lu.se)
The CMS Division of the AOM will conduct a research workshop immediately prior to the 2010 Academy of Management meetings in Montreal in August 2010. The workshop will begin mid-morning of Wednesday Aug 4 and run till the evening of Thursday Aug 5. We are coordinating a stream called Theology and Organization in this workshop, and seek submissions from interested researchers.
‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state’, Carl Schmitt once wrote, ‘are secularized theological concepts’. The same might also be said about concepts of the modern theory of management and organization. Leadership theory, for example, revolves around theological concepts such as charisma, spirit, inspiration, sacrifice, and humility.
A less obvious example concerns our concept of work. Theologically understood, work was, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the burden imposed upon man after he had been expelled from Paradise: playfulness now became strictly separated from what was done under the sweat of his brow. One of today’s organizational utopias is an attempt to put work and play together again.
The theological roots of other organizational concepts – such as hierarchy, authority, corporation, community, representation, and vision – appear even less self-evident, which only shows how naturalized theological concepts have become in organization studies and, indeed, in common parlance. The European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) colloquium choose for the 2009 conference an overtly theological theme, ‘Passion for creativity and innovation’, without feeling obliged to acknowledge that both passion and creativity are in fact theological concepts. The AOM theme for 2010, ‘Dare to Care: Passion and Compassion in Management Practice and Research’, goes one step further with this explicit theological footnote to its (theological) theme:
‘Compassion means caring for others as much as caring for oneself, as in the golden rule of “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself” or “love your neighbor as yourself.” All major religions consider compassion to be among the greatest of all virtues.’
This workshop stream encourages thinking through organizations by means of theological concepts (could be ‘compassion’, as in this year’s AOM theme). That is to say, we invite contributions that draw upon theological concepts in making sense of organizational issues, beyond the level of metaphorical analogy or sociological description.
Rather than listing a number of possible topics, we will provide a list of theological concepts that, we think, could shed a new and critical light upon organizational issues and on which we would like to invite papers intended for this stream. This list is naturally by no means complete, and the concepts come in no particular order:
- Miracles, wonders
- Prophets, saints, messiahs, angels, missionaries, pastors
- Creation, fall
- Salvation, grace
- Community, corporation, solidarity
- Paradise, apocalypse, utopia
- Belief, faith, guilt, confession
- Charisma, the gift
- The sacred, the profane, holiness
- God, gold, mammon
- Ghost, spirit, soul
- The haunted, the possessed
- Enchantment, disenchantment
- Light and darkness, brilliance, vision
- Revelation, saturation
- Hierarchy, authority
- Resurrection, transubstantiation
- Idol, icon
- Good, evil, sin
- Passion, compassion, piety
- Fear, terror, trembling, fascination, judgement
In light of the above, this stream attempts to ask the following research questions:
· What is the relation between theology and management studies?
· How can theological discussions help us in critically exploring organizational issues?
· How do theological concepts function within managerial discourse?
· How did, historically, management detach itself from its theological roots, and what are the benefits for re-connecting these two practices?
· How is theology’s metaphysical paradigm transformed when transferred into an apparently secular practice of management? What would a ‘metaphysics of management’ look like?
The motivation for the workshop is simple: neither the PDW nor the main program events at the AOM give us enough opportunity to engage in in-depth discussion of papers in critical management studies. Therefore this workshop will be organized as a series of parallel streams (working groups), with each stream comprising of people who have contributed papers on a well-defined topic (perhaps with some invited discussants), working together over the course of the day-and-a-half, discussing the papers in depth. In order to maximize discussion, authors will not present their own papers, but rather participants will be asked to present and discuss each other’s papers. We will also arrange a couple of plenary sessions and some social time where all the participants come together.
We are yet to finalize the cost of the workshop, but we hope to be able to offer low-cost accommodation during the event, and dovetail it with the AOM meetings, especially those events involving the CMS Division. We will finalize the details quickly on the expenses of the workshop.
If you wish to be part of this stream, please submit a 250 word abstract to bem.lpf@cbs.dk and sverre.spoelstra@fek.lu.se by January 15th, 2010. Please note that submissions can be concurrently on review at the regular AOM 2010 conference as well. The submission of an abstract constitutes a good-faith agreement to submit a full paper for the stream by June 1, 2010 if the paper is accepted. The final paper should be less than 8000 words in length.
Teologia e organizações http://ff.im/-dfJRm
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