Spiritualreligiosity in the Workplace between Media and Organizational Logics: A French Perspective

Scholarly article by Mihaela TUDOR on a highly topical subject: 𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐎𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐋𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐬: 𝐀 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐡 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞.In 𝐾𝑂𝑀𝐸−𝐴𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝐽𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝑃ure 𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑟𝑦: https://komejournal.com/issues/onlinefirst.html

The relationships between religion and work are not new. The idea of labor was rejected by religion and was considered a punishment inflicted on the individual by the divinity, imposed upon to atone for sin; this was later re-instated by the Protestant Reformation who opposed the value of the contemplative life and thus, eventually, work has become gradually a sign of human dignity and a value given to the human being by the divine. Max Weber’s (2017) The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, which seeks to show the Protestant origins of the capitalist labor ethic, is a salient illustration of the reconsideration of the historical relationship between labor and religion. Today, these relationships are studied through a set of disciplines at the crossroads of the fields that have invested the various objects of study associated with religion and work. It is an accumulation of research resulting in a solid state of the art (new/public/ management, sociology of religions, public economics, religious studies, organizational studies, etc).  In this context, the present exploratory research focuses on a les discussed aspect which falls within the field of mediated communication: the mediatization of subjects related to  religion and spirituality in the workplace. More specifically, it is a question of determining how the logics of secular and religious media shape and mediate communication about religion in the workplace in the specific French organizational and cultural framing. We examine how the media deals with religion at work during the media coverage of the French Observatory of Religious Phenomenon in Organization’s Annual Survey (OFRE, in French), published in September 2018 about management and religion in the workplace. The main question is to show how the media logic is different from the organizational logic concerning the survey results and the report findings at the time when the media was covering the public release of the OFRE report. This research is anchored in the theory of mediatization, the institutionalist tradition. The institutionalist lineage of mediatization (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Schulz, 2004; Hjarvard, 2008; Strömbäck 2008) has its sources in the studies on journalism and political communication (Bratosin, 2016). It approaches mediatization as a multidimensional concept that relies on the domination of the media logic. This perspective is based on the presupposition that media dominates the other logics of the society such as organizational, political, economic logics, etc.