Management Gurus and Religion: From American Evangelicals to Indian Business Professionals

Over the course of the long twentieth century, developments in academic and popular managerial knowledge transformed the task of managing organizations from a set of skills learned on the job to a “science.” Paramount to this science was the notion that the manager should convert the objectives of the organization into the personal goals of each worker, making the workplace a site of self-actualization. This roundtable brings together scholars from religious studies, history, and theater to highlight the unexpected circulations of management knowledge and religious ethos between the U.S. and India. It aims to address the questions: How did religious ideas and practices inform the development of management theory? How did this reciprocal influence converge with self-help genres to produce new formulations of both business and church? What happens as management theory and the religious forms it has influenced circulate outside American and predominantly Christian contexts and back again?