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Moved by the Spirit

The authors begin by showing the close links between the discourse of workplace empowerment and spirituality. They then identify these spiritual influences historically in Puritan and evangelical Christianity, utopianism, and New Age thinking. From Puritanism and evangelical Christianity, they locate the ideas that all work is God’s work, that charismatic evangelism (with Jesus as role model) is the prototype for leadership in business, and that Christian ideals can serve as a basis for organizing the factory system. From utopianism, the authors locate the influence of ideals such as perfectibility, new order, brotherhood, and radical experimentation on empowerment discourse. In New Age thinking, they see a context that permitted the emergence of empowerment as an ideological discourse that makes reference to earlier Christian and utopian ideas. They conclude by discussing spirituality as ideology—the mystifying aspects and potential costs to workers of this approach to empowerment.