Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations. - Review - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Sept, 1999  by Jean M. Bartunek

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N.J. Demerath III, Peter D. Hall, Terry Schmitt, and Rhys H. Williams, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 410 pp. $55.00.

Discussions of relationships between spirituality and organizations are prominent in the late 1990s. In Academy of Management meetings during this decade there have been numerous symposia and papers dealing with spirituality in relation to business settings. There are seminars and meetings held, frequently with titles such as "Expressing your soul in the workplace" and "International symposium on spirituality and business." The Business Spirit Journal has begun to be published. There is a working group called the Theology of Institutions. In addition, several controversial events have made various religions newsworthy as organizations. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention recently declared that wives should be submissive to their husbands, and this declaration has led some Baptist churches to break with the Convention (e.g., Bragg, 1998). Pope John Paul II stipulated in a recent apostolic letter that Catholic theologians who disagree publicly with certain church teachings can be subjected to "just punishment." Several denominations have had well-publicized disputes about the personal characteristics necessary for ordination.

While there has been heightened attention to the spirituality of business, and while organizational initiatives taken in formal religious bodies affect hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of people, little attention has been paid in the organizational literature to formal religious organizations as sources for scholarship. Nelson's 1993 paper is the only one in this decade in ASQ to address formal religious organization, and there is relatively little, although some, attention in other organizational journals as well (e.g., Dyck, 1997). In contrast, Sacred Companies presents formal religious structures as worthy of study by organizational and other social science scholars, especially those with a more sociological bent. According to the editors, the idea behind the book was "not to launch a single, seamless study, but rather to bring together a multidisciplinary group of scholars who . . . might be challenged, cajoled, or coerced into considering and then applying new perspectives from an interdisciplinary cross-fire" to religious organizations (p. x). The result of the editors' efforts is a readable and wide-ranging book that comprises five sections and 22 chapters, including both conceptual frameworks and empirical investigations. The book's title and subtitle are misleading, if engaging. Most chapters focus on Western religious organizations in the United States, although a few chapters also consider other nonprofit and quasi-religious organizations.

A religious person might wonder how much a book like this can contribute to meaningful understanding of religious organizations. After all, religious organizations, in one form or another, have been present much longer than organizational or sociological analyses and will likely outlast any currently popular approach to organizational analysis. But issues that scholars now define as organizational have been present in religious settings since their beginnings. A bureaucratic organizational structure was described in the book of Exodus. According to the Letters of Paul, struggles and conflicts were present in many of the early Christian communities, such as Corinth. In addition, the organizational forms of religious institutions have changed dramatically over time. Christianity, for example, has evolved from charismatic disorganized groups to patriarchal household units to locally centralized patriarchal authority in the figure of a bishop, to a gradual wider centralization in a Roman bureaucracy, to "protests" against this authority and its tenets, to a present situation of considerable diversity in theology and polity. Further, Demerath and Schmitt note in the epilogue of the book that religious organizations have often informed the development of other types of organizational settings, and conceptual frameworks deriving from religious organizations have often informed broader social science research, whether social scientists know it or not.

The book's chapters suggest multiple possible learnings from religious organizations. Some chapters suggest category schemes scholars might use to analyze religious organizations (DiMaggio; Zech). Several chapters offer distinguishing characteristics of religion and religious organizations (Dane; Jeavons; Chaves; Harris; Demerath and Schmitt). Some describe how organizational models developed in religious organizations have influenced the development of other organizations and social movements (Zald and McCarthy; Hall; Cormode). Some chapters deal with relationships between religious organizations and nonprofit organizations (Cormode; Davidson and Koch; Harris; Swartz; Chang et al.) and a quasi-religious organization, Amway (Bromley). Some others focus on issues associated with growth and decline in religious practice and identity in various denominations (Cormode; Blau, Redding, and Land; Demerath; Iannaccone). Several chapters deal with conflict within local churches and denominations (Chaves; Templeton and Demerath; Williams; Becker). Some chapters deal with culture (Stout and Cormode; Demerath; Williams and Demerath; Becker). The epilogue (Demerath and Schmitt) contains a strong call to scholars to understand how much social science is indebted to religion and to advocate that religion be incorporated more fully in other study.