Forging Identity: Spiritual Labor as an Organizational Practice

This paper takes McGuire's (2010) concept of spiritual labor in a new theoretical direction that departs from her tripartite framework of regulation, commodification, and codification. We begin with a review of the sparse literature on spiritual labor. Next, we describe a new theoretical framework of spiritual labor beginning with a nonessentialist definition of spirituality and then elaborating processes of discourse, organizational identification strategies, and individual identity work. We show how both organizational identification strategies and individual identity work, when infused by discourses of spirituality, mutually construct spiritual labor. Our theoretical framework is illustrated with an example. Lastly, we suggest a reflexive ethnographic method for studying spiritual labor as an organizational practice. Our reformulation of spiritual labor offers organizational scholars a way of understanding spirituality as one of many emergent properties of the organizing process. In particular, critical scholars may find the lens of spiritual labor useful for understanding how organizations enlist spirituality to induce a sense of shared purpose among organizational members.