The marketing and consumption of spirituality and religion

Abstract

Since its inception, the Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion (JMSR) has published cutting-edge research on management, leadership, business ethics, human resources, and organizational behavior to become a point of reference for researchers interested in the religious and spiritual aspects of managing and organizing. JMSR has already published work grounded in marketing and consumer behavior, albeit not in a systematic manner. Yet, once workers, entrepreneurs, managers, and leaders leave the workplace, they become consumers. At the same time, more often than not, the organizations where they work need to sell products and services in the marketplace to survive and thrive. With this special issue, our goal is to put the journal more firmly on the radar of marketing and consumer researchers and, ultimately, to stimulate crossdisciplinary conversations in this field of enquiry. The understanding of the religious aspects and spiritual expressions of managing and organizing can only be enriched by gaining deeper insight into spiritual, religious, and mundane marketplaces and consumption practices. Additionally, marketing and consumption studies can shed light on a variety of little-understood phenomena that are prevalent in secularized societies where: both religious organizations and new spiritual movements operate in a competitive marketplace; postmodern consumers mix and match values, philosophies, and ideas from different religious and spiritual traditions; and globalization, the internet and social media, tourism, and immigration provide access to spiritual and religious resources and communities at an unprecedented scale. In their mapping of literature in the field, Rinallo, Scott, and Maclaran (2013) highlight four areas of research (see Figure 1). Their quadripartite classification builds on the seminal work by Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry (1989) on the sacred and the profane in consumer research. By suggesting that the sacred can be empirically investigated and by putting the sacred aspect of consumption at the core of what is now known as consumer culture theory, Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry (1989) paved the way for and shaped the subsequent exploration of consumers’ and marketers’ sacralization of the mundane. Figure 1 differentiates the marketing and consumption of religion and spirituality in the narrow sense from the sacred elements of profane consumer behavior and further distinguishes between contributions on the basis of whether the key agents investigated are consumers or marketers, which provides a useful representational tool to map the field.