Toward a Theology of the Professional-Managerial Class: Spiritual Taylorism and the Spiritual Consultant

Using the revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, a 2018 survey recently released in January of this year saw a 13 percent rise in feelings of loneliness and isolation among adult workers. The study showed that the workplace is the greatest contributing factor. A 2019 Gallup Global Emotions Report “worry, stress, and anger” among the workforce around the world was at a multi-year high. An astronomical 85% of workers are unhappy in their jobs with only 15% of workers feeling engaged at work. Again, the workplace was cited as the central determining factor. The COVID-19 pandemic has functioned as a force-multiplier in regard to workplace alienation with Harvard Business Review finding that two-thirds of remote employees find themselves “disengaged from their work.” A crop of professionals calling themselves “spiritual consultants” offer to contextualize these findings in a much older narrative than workplace conditions, low-paying wages, or the alienation that comes from working under capitalism’s logic. For these new experts the problem is one of meaning and meaning-making, and they offer their services in order to imbue the office space with “some of the meaning that [people] used to derive from churches, temples, and mosques, and the like.” With the explosive growth of firms like Sacred Design Lab, Ritualist, and Ritual Design Lab, along with a host of independent spiritual consultants, it would seem any conversation regarding the ways religion materializes in the workplace would demand a critical engagement with such an explicit effort to manage workspace by introducing corporate spirituality.

            This essay suggests that Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s work on the “professional-managerial class,” or PMC, can offer a useful foothold for understanding spiritual consultation and its role in the reproduction and maintenance of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. The Ehrenreichs’ offered the term as a way to articulate a new class configuration under a more complex system of capitalism. Rather than continuous police violence, social ordering became the primary responsibility of the professional-managerial class, which was accomplished primarily by reorganizing and reshaping working-class life. The Ehrenreichs develop this point asserting, “the relationship between the PMC and the working class is objectively antagonistic. The function of the two classes are not merely different; they are mutually contradictory.” In this sense, at its most basic level the PMC functions to assuage working class militancy that might upset capitalist class dynamics.

            The professional-managerial class fully developed in the United States by the early 20th century with the massive consolidation of social surplus. While veritably progressive restructurings such as the vast expansion of public education, the institutionalization of charity, and the sponsorship of public health measures, these PMC reforms represented, in the words of the Ehrenreichs, a “politically motivated penetration of working-class community life.” Schools imparted industrial discipline and ‘American’ values; charity agencies and domestic scientists imposed their ideas of ‘right living’; public-health officials literally policed immigrant ghettos, etc. The PMC became the Vanguard for these progressive reforms while simultaneously expanding cultural and technological hegemony over the working class.

            With the arrival of the spiritual consultant and “ancient technologist” (another term of their own choosing), religious formation at one’s workplace is the newest formation of PMC technocratic management, what this essay is calling “Spiritual Taylorism,” after the 19th century industrial-efficiency system pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Nellie Bowles of the New York Times writes that the overarching goal of these new technocrats is to “soften cruel capitalism, making space for the soul, and to encourage employees to ask if what they are doing is good in a higher sense.” While the strategy of softening “cruel capitalism” points to the dictate of pacification that the PMC is known for, this takes on a new arena by directing attention to the workers’ souls. For the purposes of workflow and management efficiency in the workplace, the working-class soul is now an object of managerial refinement. Indeed, the soul of the worker has always been affected negatively under capitalism. However, now the direct and targeted involvement of the PMC is looking to expertly style the spiritual formation of work spaces in such a way as to not only maintain the capitalist order but to increase profits as well.

            To be clear, the role of the spiritual consultant is not to, in the words of Finley Peter Dunne, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Instead the spiritual consultant makes use of ancient practices in order to “design” workers so that they feel less alienated. As a point of illustration, because a key feature of the capitalist mode of production is alienation, one of the major roles of the PMC is to draw connections for workers in order to offer the illusion of meaning. The spiritual consultant articulates these connections on a greater level than other PMC technocrats by employing time-tested approaches for meaning-making. In fact, Sacred Design Lab put together a spread sheet of different religious rituals and practices categorized by emotional state as the fulfillment of a commission by the co-founder of Pinterest. This is not merely another secularization of religion into new forms, but the corporatization of religious practice. As another example, Sue Phillips, one of the founders of Sacred Design Lab, suggests using “repetitive meeting structures” as a means of calming employees, which could take the form of all the employees speaking the same words as a “sort of corporate incantation.”

            This essay hopes to take seriously the theological and religious work of these “spiritual entrepreneurs” (yet another term of their own choosing) by outlining some of the basic dimensions of PMC spirituality. With the explosion of such a fast-growing market, it is crucial to understand the spiritual landscape being formed in workplaces by PMC theology.