Shape Shifting Capital: New Management and the Bodily Metaphors of Spiritual Capitalism

What is it about?

Through a content analysis of contemporary organizational management y, this paper argues that neoliberal capitalism is plasmic and cybernetic and very much invested in marshaling the perfomative power of 'spirituality', 'mysticism', and the 'poetic' to its own ends. Whereas as the shape of Max Weber's famous metaphor of the 'iron cage' for industrial capitalism speaks to the anathemization of religion by a prior instantiation of the economic, the 'network' of contemporary capitalism speaks to the fusion of the economic and the religious.

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Why is it important?

New scholarship is emerging which suggests that countercultural practices and ideas have helped shape the contemporary form of neoliberal capitalism. This project is one of the first to explore the place and role of 'spirituality' in contemporary organizational management within the specifically American context.

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