| Summary: | <p>This thesis brings the fields of Business Studies and Religious Studies into dialogue to examine the contemporary corporate practice of the manufacturing and management of ‘meaning.’ In particular, it explores how the practitioners, academics, and consultants who make up the business community conceptualize companies’ meaning-making activity. What do they consider corporate ‘meaning’ to be, how do they understand the work to construct it, and what ends do they believe it can support?</p>
<p>This thesis studies the language and practice of the business community across three distinct contexts in which the corporate business is perceived to participate in meaning-making activity. First, in the marketplace arena, where corporations can create meaning for consumers through the construction of a resonant commercial brand. Second, in the workplace arena, where a corporation’s intentionally cultivated employee culture can stabilize, energize, or mobilize the employee community to support strategic goals. And finally, in the societal arena, where crafted corporate morals can guide a business’ activities in a way that can positively impact the world.</p>
<p>The primary contribution of this thesis is its identification, across these discrete contexts, of consistent and coherent internal formulations about corporate meaning. I show that in each arena, the business community understands companies to construct what they perceive to be a system of symbols that promotes a particular worldview and inscribes certain patterns of behavior. While this formulation is resonant of anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s theory of religion as a ‘cultural system’, the distinction is that the Corporate Cultural System, as I call it, is professionally crafted compared to the self-sustaining cultural system of Geertz.</p>
<p>In addition to enabling the identification of this theoretical construct for the first time, throughout, ideas from Religious Studies allow us to parse a more dimensional and critical understanding of the myths, meanings, motivations, and morals crafted within corporate contexts.</p>
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