Working Paper

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Ethic of Sensitivity

- Towards a new work ethic

Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg

October 2007

Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg

Ethic of Sensitivity - towards a new work ethic Author: Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg Associate Professor, Ph.D. Department of Educational Anthropology Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus Tuborgvej 164 2400 Copenhagen NV Denmark Tel.: +45 8888 9871 Email: author´s email Homepage: http://www.dpu.dk/site.aspx?p=6604&init=kibo&msnr=1&lang=eng Homepage of the Danish School of Education: www.dpu.dk © Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg 2007 To be published in: “Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital” Edited by Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman Forthcoming 2008 Netherlands

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Contents INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................................1 THE OTHER IN OURSELVES................................................................................................................2 TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND PERSONAL GROWTH..................................................3 NEUROLINQUISTIC PROGRAMMING – A TRANSPERSONAL METHOD ................................6 NLP ON WORK.........................................................................................................................................9 A NEW WORK ETHIC...........................................................................................................................14 FROM A PROTESTANT ETHIC TO ETHICS OF SENSITIVITY ..................................................16 REFERENCES .........................................................................................................................................18

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Introduction

Shamans have more in common with business leaders than anyone might expect. Within the indigenous traditions is a vast and deep knowledge waiting to be tapped by the businessperson who is ready to undertake the next step in developing personal power. http://www.bizspirit.com/bsj/current/fea1.html, from a presentation of “The Five Values of Shamans. How to Apply Them to Personal Power in Business”, by José Luis Stevens (11.05.2006) Courses in personal development and staff recruitment have become the setting of a remarkable alliance between modern working life and new religious practice as the quotation above illustrates. In Denmark, managers talk about their spiritual thoughts in public and how they use spirituality in their professional life. It’s well known that managers from big companies in Denmark seek inspiration from the Silva-method, Sai Baba and shamanism among others (Nielsen, 2005; Nielsen, 2006, Salamon, 2002, Bovbjerg, 2001). Leaders see the purpose of leadership from a new angle as John Seely, Director of Xerox puts it “The job of leadership today is not just to make money; it’s to make meaning” (Nielsen, 2006). Apart from meaning, the leader also sees spirituality as a way to increase productivity. In the 1980s and 1990s, we saw the gradual integration of New Age themes in the daily operations of the business world. A variety of techniques rooted in New Age philosophy have been applied in private and public organizations, either in order to identify the right employee for the right position through various kinds of testing, or as personal development and teambuilding efforts (Bovbjerg, 1995; Bovbjerg, 2001). The work of Max Weber seems to be an obvious starting point for analysis of these questions on religious practice in modern business life. In his famous work on the rise of the protestant ethic in the early phase of modern capitalism as we know it in the West, Weber points out that the new protestant ethic and the protestant idea of salvation have an important influence on the development of a new economic behaviour and a new attitude towards work.

This provides the most favourable foundation for the conception of labour as an end in itself, as a calling which is necessary to capitalism: the chances of overcoming traditionalism are greatest on account of a religious upbringing. This observation of present-day capitalism in itself suggests that it is worth while to ask how this connection of adaptability to capitalism with religious factors may have come about in the days of the early development of capitalism.(Weber, 1958, p. 63)

Are we witnessing the emergence of a new work ethic today? Could New Age philosophy be of crucial importance for a modern work ethic, in the same sense as

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Weber considers the protestant ethics as central to early capitalism as it developed in Western society?1

The other in ourselves

Personal development can involve various forms of supplementary training, but it can also take the form of courses in personal development, such as leadership skills, changing a person’s attitude toward his job, his leader or his colleagues. The premises for personal development are the notion of a mental ‘self’ that can be explored, and the idea of personal transformation by transpersonal techniques such as therapy or mentally training. The primarily aim with my research is to determine how and why the development of the ‘inner life’ of employees is relevant for their work. By exploring the role of the unconscious – ‘the other in our selves’ – in contemporary culture I will provide an explanatory framework for the emphasis on developing the personalities of employees. Modern religious practices are in this approach bound to the believers’ ‘inner life’ (Gauchet, 1997). Religious practice can be aimed at a transcendent ‘other’: at a God that is characteristically absent from the daily lives of human beings as in monotheistic religions. The religious orientation of contemporary societies is rather directed toward immanence. People understand themselves as something other, both to themselves and to what differ from them. The other is transformed into “the other in ourselves”. We cannot hope to understand the origins of psychology nor of New Age theories unless we understand the fact that the modern interpretation and explanation of the human is oriented towards the unconscious. The individual’s inner life becomes the intangible focus of religious practices and the subconscious becomes a constituent part of modern individuals’ understanding of the Self. Within this analytical approach I suggest an understanding of personal development courses within that are framed in modern religiosity. The primary concern in modern religiosity is the individual’s potential, based on the notion that the individual has hidden subconscious resources waiting to be accessed through the development of the Self.

“Consciousness and unconsciousness were actually two sides of selfadequation, two symmetrically opposite instances of conforming to the self by dividing it from the self.” (Marcel Gauchet, 1997:171)

The cultural changes imply that the concept of personality has also changed. As a consequence religious practice is also transformed and now addresses this inward nature. For the modern individual there is an inner core, which is not immediately visible to the individual, and of which the individual is not immediately conscious, but which is considered to be of importance for the individualisation of the subject (Gauchet, 1998). It is in the unconscious or in working with the unconscious, that the 1 . This article draws on my dissertation and later book: Bovbjerg, Kirsten Marie, 2001: Følsomhedens etik, Tilpasning af personligheden i New Age og moderne management. (Lit.: Ethics of sensitivity. Disciplining the self in New Age and modern management.) Forlaget Hovedland

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individual constructs his/her identity and gets to know her/himself and perhaps one day experience her/his own individual religiosity (Gauchet, 1997).

As an analytical tool for studies in modern religiosity I draw on two ideal types of ethical and mythical religiosity: The first, ethical religiosity is based on the idea of conversion to a coherent system of faith as we know it from the big monotheistic religions. The second ideal type, mythical religiosity, consists of religious and therapeutic techniques, denoted a ‘psycho-religious practice’ centred on the conscious and unconscious self (Champion and Hervieu-Léger, 1990). ‘New Age’ can be used as a common denominator for a variety of branches that offer ‘alternative’ explanations of very different phenomena; health, philosophy, management, and personal development among others. In New Age movement, there is no conversion to a coherent faith as in a large number of traditional religious groups; instead the believer shops around in a loose network of attitudes and interests. The idea of authenticity frames the spiritual experience within the individual’s narrative of his own being, and knowledge of the self is attained through personal emotional experiences (Hervieu-Léger, 1990). The historically and culturally specific content of the unconscious are crucial to the interpretation of the psycho-religious ideal type (Champion & Hervieu-Léger, 1990; Gauchet, 1997). Through a certain practice, the psycho-religious practitioner expects to achieve self-perfection in a never-ending transformation of the self. The participant is thought to explore unconscious parts of his personal life and to liberate her/himself from external domination through therapeutic or meditative methods. Emotional problems are, in psycho-religious practice, associated with inauthenticity and a failure to live in accordance with one’s ‘true self’ - in other words, one does not realise one’s potential or one’s inner convictions and opportunities, and one must therefore liberate oneself from the dominating influences of the environment. The psycho-religious practice encourages the individual to learn from experience both on a bodily and a mental level. Therapeutic techniques are applied in psycho-religious practices, but it is emphasised in these practices that the human being has a fundamental ‘spiritual’ or ‘divine’ substance. A certain habitus of sensitivity evolves through transpersonal methods in this psycho-religious practice (Champion, 1990).

Transpersonal psychology and personal growth

Courses in personal development closely resemble therapeutic practice, but in business life, this is not understood as the ‘malfunction’ of certain staff members. Rather, optimising performance is essential for the idea of the healthy and mature employees’ capacity for change and self-realization – exactly as it is understood and developed by Maslow, Senge and other theorists in modern management and religious movements. The desire for self-realization and optimizing of human potential illustrates the relation to what we, in religious studies, call Human Potential Movements (Heelas, 1996, Hammer, 1997). The field of humanistic psychology, and Abraham Maslow in particular, have been important sources of inspiration for modern management as well as for modern religious movements that strive to bring all the various human assets and

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capabilities into play – not only in private life, but also through courses in personal development in professional life (Bovbjerg, 2001).

The British sociologist Nikolas Rose has pointed out that organisations changed dramatically in the 1960s. Since then the aim has been to create an environment within the organization that attempts to deliberate the autonomous individual in the employee. By these means the employee should adapt himself to the aims of the company, which in turn is constructed in terms of being innovative, flexible and competitive. Modern management must, in Rose’s words, “work on the ego of the worker itself” (Rose, 1989:112). Modern management has set a new agenda for employees. There is an interesting connection between prominent management theories, e.g., the American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s (1908-1970) humanistic psychology, and New Age milieus such as the Esalen Institute in California. Maslow often serves as an important reference for New Age groups (Hammer, 1997, Champion, 1990). Maslow has become a central figure in modern management theory known as Human Resources Management based on the idea of personal growth and self actualisation through work. Maslow worked out a theory of the self-actualising human being in the form of a transpersonal psychology in which the individual is encouraged to exceed his personal bounds. This theory comprises an understanding of the self, an ethic and a lifestyle that encourages self-sufficiency, authenticity, and consciousness of the body, self-realisation and continuous personal improvement (Savard, 1986). In the late 1950s, Maslow developed a theory of motivation, understood as a pyramid of needs divided into five levels. Basic needs include physiological needs, the need for physical safety, the need to belong and the need for status. The fifth and most significant human need is that of self-actualisation, which is construed as the driving force in the growth of every individual and the development of our personality. Ethically ‘good’ characteristics are associated with self-actualising individuals – they have accomplished ‘personal mastery’. The pinnacle of experience, as it is known in the context of humanistic psychology, consists of unique mystical personal experiences. These are characteristic of people who live at the level of self-actualisation or of the level of ‘being’ (Maslow 1998). References to Buddhism, gestalt-therapy, intuition, and meditation frequently occur in different branches of management literature, and this is also the case in Maslow’s work. The Swedish researcher Bärmark suggested that Maslow’s interest in Eastern philosophy should not just be seen as pure mysticism, but rather as a search for inspiration to gain an understanding of the ‘whole person’. Eastern philosophy such as Taoism and Zen-Buddhism is incorporated in Maslow’s ‘scientific’ approach, which according to Bärmark is mysticism (Bärmark, 1985). The application of spiritual methods in business life is often presented as a humane and committed attitude towards employees. Transcendental Meditation (TM) has the slogan: “When heart and bottom-line aren’t opposites” (From the flyer, “Success without stress”, about the use of TM in companies). Director Peter Ilsøe practices the meditation technique provided by NATHA, Nordic Center of Spiritual Development. He describes his benefit this way:

It’s a cool system: millennia of experience communicated the Western way. And the results are wonderful. Your mind becomes sharper, concentration, memory and ability to learn has improved. By intensifying the senses and

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strengthening the will, ideas and decisions come about in a magical way like physical manifestations. The time I use practising yoga I win back by improved efficiency in all aspects of daily life. (Flyer from Nordic Centre of Spiritual Development, my translation)

Spirituality in business life is, just like other management strategies, seen as a tool for managers to initiate organisational change, and improve performance at all levels – a strategy to improve the bottom line! Another example of management theory drawing inspiration from eastern philosophy is the Learning Organisation (LO). From the 1990s onwards, the idea of the learning organisation has been very popular in Denmark, and been implemented both in private and public organisations. Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline has been very important for leaders who wanted to change the way modern organisations operate. Peter Senge finds inspiration in system theory and Buddhism (Senge, 1990). LO and humanistic psychology resemble each other on many levels. Normally LO is thought of as an idea developed from system theory in particular, but LO is an eclectic method based on a variety of theories and techniques (Bovbjerg, 2001). Like humanistic psychology LO is concerned with the human capacity to ‘grow’ and the opportunity to access untapped resources in the individual. Humanistic psychology is academically marginalized – at least in Denmark – but its cultural influence seems to be strong (Brinkmann, 2005). The idea of ‘hidden potentials’ and ‘personal growth’ is widely accepted. At an international conference on business and consciousness it was put this way:

When business is done from a place of fullness, we don't so much work as play to connect, to create, to manifest our potential, to actualize. You go to work to share your creativity, and you are full and incidentally, you get a pay check. http://www.bizspirit.com/bsj/current/fea4.html, Bringing the Soul Into the Workplace. A Report on the International Conference on Business and Consciousness, By Naomi Rose (Date, 11.05.2006)

Personal development is a widespread idea in schools, organizations, sports, in childcare, at work etc. It would be difficult to argue that personal development could be problematic or not desirable in all situations or for everybody. It is a popular notion and a common practice among the middle- and upper-classes, where self-realization has become more and more popular since the1970s (Davie & Hervieu-Leger, 1996, Bourdieu, 1984). It is popular among people who are well-educated, well-off and with good prospects professionally and economically. This would indicate why personal development in business life and in companies and organizations is widely accepted and appreciated among large groups of employees. The therapeutic practice is mainly aimed at mentally healthy employees who are considered worth the investment of courses in personal development. It’s not about curing the unhealthy, but as Maslow puts it in his theory of an ‘eupsychology’, it is based on studies in mature self realised people using their full potential (Bämark, 1985; Maslow, 1976). 2

2 Critics of the new trends in medical research talk about ‘medicated normality’ in the sense that development of medical products is increasingly aimed at conditions that fall outside traditional

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The ideal employee is in a permanent state of reflection, learning and experience, and is continuously occupied with self-control. Such employees see themselves in a state of growth. The subconscious is central for both New Age theories and modern management. The prospect of higher productivity is the motivation for investing in the employees’ personal development - on the other hand it is expected by the company that the employee has vested interest in personal development and personal transformation. According to the organisation theorist Peter Senge, there ought to be a closer connection between personal development - “life’s higher virtues” and what it means to be economically successful (Senge, 1990: 143). The employee’s relation to his/her company is no longer based on a contract between two partners negotiating remuneration for a task. This kind of contract was between two parties who had a potential conflict of interest. The ideal modern working relation is now a ‘compact’ between the company and the employee, which is partly a formal agreement on work and payment, but is also partly an implicit agreement that they have a common interest in providing for self realisation through work. Peter Senge, has put it this way:

The essence of this compact is the organization’s commitment to support the full development of each employee, and the person’s reciprocal commitment to the organisation. (Senge, 1990: 311)

The ideal employee no longer sees his work from a perspective of duty, but as work done con amore – as a way to self-realization. The well-developed employee is self-managing; he derives his devotion to his job from an inner necessity.

Neurolinquistic Programming – a transpersonal method

The case study for my research was the transpersonal method Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP). I have examined the use of personal development courses in business in recent decades and the increasing interest in the cultivation of the Self and how this trend has found expression in New Age theories as well as in Modern management - using the transpersonal method Neuro-Linguistic Programming as the main case study. Transpersonal means that training and therapeutic practice is seen as the road to personal change. By adopting a perspective of change as the main goal, personal development is understood as a way to obtain personal and professional success (Bovbjerg, 2001, Bovbjerg, 2007). NLP emerged from a collaboration between its originators Richard Bandler, a psychologist and computer programmer, and John pathological definitions (Møldrup, 1999). ‘Healthy people’ are medicated as never seen before in history and they have become the target for promotion of new medical products. The drug Ritalin is used to optimise school pupils’ and students’ performance and lower their examination anxiety. In elite sports EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs are frequently. Preventive medicine is another side of medicated normality aimed at healthy people (Møldrup, 1999). I would claim that courses in personal development with its therapeutic aspect can be viewed as ‘therapeutic normality’. These courses are help to optimize employees’ performance - not just for those who underperforms, but as an opportunity for everyone to realize their potentials.

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Grinder, a professor of linguistics, both from California. NLP is based on the notion that neurological processes are significant for our conduct. We store experiences through our senses. This can happen both consciously and unconsciously, but the majority of our neurological processes occur below the threshold of our consciousness (Dilts, 1983: Part I). The relation between consciousness and the subconscious can be transformed by changing the way we perceive the world. We can do this through language, which, on the one hand, is the means by which we bring order to our thoughts and, on the other hand, is the way we communicate with others. If we acquire knowledge and control of our language, the NLP trainers claim, we can ensure that our communication functions optimally and thereby attains the desired effect. The use of the term ‘programming’ indicates a mechanistic view of the brain and to some extent the consciousness, which is often given expression through metaphors drawn from the world of computers. Just as computers must be continually improved in order to keep up with the times, NLP trainers believe that the human brain must be upgraded again and again throughout our lives (Bovbjerg, 2001; Bovbjerg, 2007). An NLP-trainer describes her understanding of the brain in a Danish newspaper Politiken:

What you can teach people is how their “biocomputer” works. . . . Very few people understand how the mind works. So it is difficult to function optimally when you don’t know what buttons to push. Most of what we have on our internal hard drive consists of programmes that have been stored there during childhood. But you wouldn’t dream of working with ten-year old software in a real computer. And you can actually learn to install new programmes that work better for you as an adult. It is possible to learn how to use yourself more productively with the potential you have. It is a matter of changing the situation from one in which others are in charge to one in which it is I who am in charge of my life! The directions come from the inside, not the outside. (Hellman, in Politiken, 9.4.2000)

NLP displays traits from different branches of psychology, behaviourism, psychodynamic thinking, hypnotherapy and gestalt therapy. To this can be added the inclusion, by some NLP trainers, of shamanism and clairvoyance, which is a part of the set of tools they employ as business consultants and therapists (Bovbjerg, 2001). One cannot say that the method is a synthesis of these different approaches and tendencies; rather, it is an eclectic practice. Bandler and Grinder’s invention of NLP came as a counter reaction to traditional psychology, which, according to Bandler and Grinder, had been developed in order to treat deviant and sick people. Bandler and Grinder were concerned with what it meant to be ‘a whole person’, ‘actualised’ or ‘integrated’ as a human being (Bandler, 1985). The therapeutic approach is aimed at changing a person’s perception of his negative experiences, his memories and his relations to others through mental techniques. The NLP-trainers teach a number of tools for changing the students/participants’ way of thinking about their life and their behaviour. Students use a transforming practice to work with inner mental images of emotions or specific experiences and the aim is to change the emotional framework of these images or past

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experiences. It is assumed that one can thereby change the student’s feelings about these past events from negative to positive. The notion of a divided consciousness is integral to several of the techniques taught in NLP, one example of this is the use of trance and hypnosis in NLP. The student is expected to gain access to his/her subconscious wisdom through trance and self-hypnosis; self-hypnosis is supposed to put the practitioner in a state where (s)he can learn from her or his subconscious through ‘inner guidance’. One of my informants put it this way3:

”Then you have all that stuff about calibration and all. It’s a bit like, you can go in and look at people and see what sensory systems, how is your posture, and then you can go in and create a rapport by aligning them. It is something about meta-models, meta-programs. And the meta-model – that has to do with how to ask questions. How exactly you go in and generalise, what words you say, and how you ask questions to go in and uncover some of that. It is meta-programs, quite simply something about what you are, are you a procedural person or an opportunity person. Are you into large chunks, or into small?” (Kathrine Johansen, NLP student)

The pragmatic dimension is emphasised in regard to these techniques, and the most important source of legitimacy for the method, according to the NLP consultant, is, indeed, that ‘it works’. The individual’s understanding of the world and of personal events is described as mental map that serves as a perception filter (O’Connor & Seymour, 1990). In NLP, the focus is not on limitations but on opportunities based on the belief that every human being possesses the capacities and talents that are necessary for any act of transformation (Dilts, 1983). NLP is described here as one example of this type of personal development course firmly rooted in the field of New Age theories as well as in modern management. NLP was in vogue in the 1990s and seems to be so still. The method has often been applied in conjunction with the introduction of the Learning Organization (LO) in Danish workplaces. NLP is thus one of many management courses aimed at consultants and companies. In this sense business counselling, NLP and other alternative methods such as fire walking, meditation and Landmark, compete in a market, where they offer services to companies and organisations such as leadership-training and courses in personal development (Bovbjerg, 2007). As part of my research I have conducted fieldwork studies from 1997 to1999. My fieldwork has mainly been observational studies and interviews. I have made observational studies of courses in personal development at a NLP institute and on a public institution in Copenhagen and interviewed NLP-trainers from two institutes and two consultant-bureaus, where they used NLP in their consultant practice. I have interviewed employees and managers from companies and institutions where NLP was used as supplementary training for employees. My informants were from three different

3 This interview stems from field work among Danish NLP consultants and in companies that apply NLP. All names are pseudonyms for informants who was interviewed during the field work in 1998-1999 that served as the background for my dissertation Følsomhedens Etik [The Ethics of Sensitivity] (Bovbjerg, 2001).

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categories: 1. Teachers/trainers in NLP – from both NLP-institutions and consultant companies. 2. Employees or middle-managers who were responsible for implementing the company’s human resources strategy for personal development and education. 3. Employees at different levels who had participated in NLP-courses. In total I have collected 30 formal interviews. The employees come from 9 public and private organisations: Heath-care, ministries, municipalities, telecommunication, computer-companies, banks and insurance-companies. All informants were between 25-60 years old, a little more than half were women. Names of informants and companies are pseudonyms. My informants have not been chosen representatively, but rather as examples of people who mostly find NLP meaningful primarily for their working lives and secondly privately. I have also interviewed some employees, who had attended NLP courses, who were critical about the method or have had bad experiences with the method. In my research, I have not examined whether participants in courses on personal development achieved the personal qualifications that they expected. I have instead explored the attendees’ expectations and their notions about personal development. How do the different parties understand the relevance of personal development in working life?

NLP on work

In practising personal development in working life there are three important parties: consultants, managers, and employees. Personal development in working life, based on religious thoughts, challenges the notion of a separation between public and private, personal and professional life and finally religious and secular spheres. How do the different parties in working life understand personal development: the consultants who train managers and employees, and the managers and employees who follow the courses in personal development provided by the company? What sense do they make of the methods provided by their companies or organisations for personal development? Consultants Consultants argue that courses in personal development are effective ways to train people to become better managers and to train staff to become self-managed by giving them knowledge of their patterns of reaction and more insight in their own selves. Secondly consultants claim that the courses are aimed to make employees capable of developing new competences and to unveil hidden resources. One of my informants, a NLP-trainer and consultant, called NLP ‘The psychology of the people’.

“’Joe Ordinary’ needs to know his limits in order to create opportunities. An ‘ordinary’ person often ends up in conflicts where only a few changes are required for him to move on in his life. This is about convictions about your self; it’s about respect for others and about the faith in our own resources. In reality I have the required potentials! Right from the beginning the focus of NLP was on ‘functionality’ or on ‘the healthy’ in the extreme sense. What works? In NLP we don’t care about theories which brought us in conflict with

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the academic world. Bandler and Grinder newer missed a chance to scoff at and tear to pieces the academic world, but on the other hand in reality they where aware of the fact they were deeply indebted to it. When I talk of the ‘psychology of the people’ it’s not a protest against the established psychology. It’s an attempt to pass on the established psychology to the people or ‘the man on the street’.” (Flemming Vind, my translation)

Flemming Vind is concerned with how ‘Joe Ordinary’ is able to deal with his life. The pragmatic aspect – the method works – is important to his approach to NLP. On the one hand the methods should improve the student’s quality of life rather than cure him of malfunctions. On the other hand, NLP encourage an anti-authoritarian attitude toward NLP. The NLP- students are supposed to become experts on how to manoeuvre in daily life. Flemming Vind wants to convey his life-model where humans are free to make their choices in life. He believes his students should only respond according to their own needs and never submit to systems or to other people’s power. Another informant also takes a critical stance towards science. Peter Soerensen is working to connect Eastern religion with Western science. He develops his spirituality while he attends on NLP-mega session in the USA. To aid his spiritual development Peter Soerensen has chosen personal masters/guides to open his mind to the insight he needs. His religious attitude is quite characteristic of New Age adherents:

I don’t identify myself with Christianity. I would say Christ is a good role model. Take some of the other dead figures, whether its Buddha, Krishna or Jesus, they are all the same. In my opinion it’s the same things they are talking about. They just use different words or different expressions according to the cultures they lived in. (Peter Soerensen, my translation)

While Peter Soerensen sees Christ as his own spiritual role model, similarly he sees himself, his own spiritual practice and his work as a role model for those who attend his NLP courses in Danish companies:

You [as a consultant] have some clear attitudes, a clear understanding of people that you communicate and that you are a good example of, right? You have the ability to take the initiative, and you are more or less self-motivated, right? This means that suddenly there’s no need [for the firm] to spend a lot of energy on me [as an employee] because I more or less run things myself. That is, obviously, someone has to get me started on something, and I obviously have to ask the questions that have to be asked, but I think there’s plenty of work to do if you’ve got that drive and you don’t just expect things to happen for you. Because that’s what missing out there: people who are really self-motivated and competent.” (Peter Soerensen, my translation)

At the time of the interview, Peter Soerensen was employed in a large consultancy firm where he held courses for both public and private organisations. He was very much into spiritual training and he was continuously in therapy. He emphasised that this was not owing to pressing personal problems, but rather a desire to be on the cutting edge of

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developments in the field and to get to know himself better. He notes in passing that development is a personal matter but at the same time he says that professional development is synonymous with personal development. Ideal employees are those who take initiatives in order to get the job done according to Peter Soerensen. If they follow the right path of personal development, then their impulses toward work will come from within themselves – they will be self-motivated. The goal with the courses that Peter Soerensen and others design is to create an environment in which change becomes a permanent state of affairs. The catalyst of such change is a particular kind of behaviour. Peter Soerensen believes that this state of affairs will create inspiring and innovative workplaces that will foster joy, enthusiasm and creativity. Consultants and managers are supposed to demonstrate that progress is possible. Managers have to ‘walk the talk’. The manager’s most important task is to inspire the employees, and one of the ways to do this is to offer courses in personal development.

It is really about purity in the sense that you are shaping a conscious culture. . . . In the old days, you sought to control people’s behaviour. “Do this” and “do that”, and rules and guidelines and all that. Now management means giving people new qualifications, new learning, and new knowledge. And when they have new knowledge, then they can also do some other things. What is becoming much more common now and will continue to grow in importance is that you manage by way of values. The foundation is the fact that we have the same attitudes, the same values, which bind us together. (Peter Soerensen, my translation)

To Peter Soerensen personal development is not just about raising the consciousness of the employees. It is just as much about encouraging a particular kind of conduct and ensuring that employees think of themselves in relation to their company in specific ways. It seems that the relevant adjustments must occur within the employee himself, who in turn will align his or her own interests with those of the company Managers Managers and boards of directors are usually the ones to decide which methods and consultants they prefer when they provide courses in personal development for all or some employees. They can choose different strategies; they can train key-employees within the company, who then become responsible for training and educating employees or they can hire external consultants to facilitate a training process within the organization or in NLP training-centres. In my material is an example of a company that has chosen to educate some of their staff as NLP-trainers, who then are supposed to propagate the NLP-way to the rest of the staff. Developing the employees’ personal competences is not just to please them and improve staff-relations and cooperation within the company, but also to improve vitally important client relations. As middle manager Karl Christiansen put it:

I don’t pay them [the employees] to like their job. I pay them to do a job. But the work we do is based on human relations, so I have to give them some flexibility and insight in how these things are. This is what they get their salary

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for.(…) It will become a required qualification that you possess personal flexibility and readiness to change. Basically, what it comes down to is this: if an employee does not have it – its goodbye and we hire someone else with those competences, right? (Karl Christiansen, my translation)

Karl Christiansen stresses the importance of keeping a distance between work and employees’ personal lives as an ethical demand, but at the same time he was responsible for introducing first gestalt therapy and later NLP into the organisation. As he sees it, the company’s needs for new qualifications are related to the personalities of the employees. Becoming flexible and ready for change means that the employees have to work with their personality. My other example is a public organisation, where NLP and LO were implemented. It was initiated by politicians and had two goals: to give staff members new competencies and to change the organisational structure. It was expected that the employees would develop a capability to work in self-managing teams. It was expected that the organizational change would solve a range of problems: reduction of staff, reduction of absence due to illness and furthermore they expected that the psychological work environment would the improved by this restructuring of the organisation. The rationale described by my informants was that the directional board in this particular public organization believed that each and every human possesses capacities and resources that we fail to use in daily life. By ameliorating the psychological work environments they expected to tap into to these hidden and unexploited resources and benefit from a better performance from the employees. It has been pointed out by several of my informants that Sue Knights book NLP at work: The difference that makes a difference in business has inspired organisations to implement NLP as a strategy to develop employees. She writes about the benefits of NLP:

For many people the result of applying these techniques is the achievement of personal congruence, a sense of being true to yourself in a way that enables you to achieve your full potential. NLP has the power to help you continually to develop that potential to keep on developing and learning in ways that efficiently harness your energy. (Knight, 1995: 81)

There is no doubt that increased effectiveness and optimizing performance among employees is an important motivation for providing NLP-courses for employees in both public and private organisations. Employees In many workplaces courses in personal development are suggested by the employer, but at the same time they are also often asked for by the employees. Personal and professional developments are considered two faces of the same coin among consultants, managers and many employees. As mentioned above, New Age theories is usually adopted by the middle- and upper-classes which means that lots of employees find it natural and preferable to combine their interest in personal development with their professional life and interests. From this follows that many modern employees with a high level of education or middle-range training seek out organisations that

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provide personal development and supplementary training.4 Some employees consider personal development a way to change their life. One of my informants considers insights about her unconscious and liberation the ket reason to seek out personal development:

If you are told by others what you are, and people do that all the time, you have limitations imposed on you, limitations that can be overcome. Again, I think you can learn, if you really want to. What I mean is, you can overcome your own conviction that - if I’m not very good at something, then I can at least learn it if I want to and if I can learn it. So, every time I experience something and this is of course different from person to person. When you have no sense of inner balance - like when you are very stressed, you say “Hey, why am I stressed at this point? What is it I am doing now?” Listen to yourself; listen to your body, to your thoughts. Listen to what feels right, and that is of course an individual question. (Hanne Mikkelsen, my translation)

The informant Hanne Mikkelsen believes her NLP-training is a way to get in touch with her ‘authentic’ self; where she expects to find the right hidden resources to use at work, and she expects that this personal development and liberation of hidden resources will make her an attractive employee. Hanne Mikkelsen has developed her interest in psychology through work. Others also develop their interest in alternative thinking through work. This is a good example of how the above mentioned psycho-religious ideal type, where religious thoughts, therapeutic techniques and interest in psychology are part of the same practice, is relevant for understanding courses in personal development in work life. In my material most of the informants who were employees were very happy that their organisation gave them the opportunity to take courses in personal development. Only a few critical voices have appeared in my material. Some question the qualifications of the consultants, how the methods are presented, and the relevance of the method from a professional point of view. Those are people who are critical towards New Age theories. Others are positive towards New Age theories, but find that their personal integrity has been questioned. One of my informants describes a nervous breakdown during a course:

There was an incident where I was very surprised about what happened to me personally. I couldn’t stop crying – I was in misery – it was really terrible, right. It continued, and they do have assistants, but no one came to help. Then I turned to those two [the instructors] – they were taking a break – all he says to me is to look up to the right and break contact with my feelings and then go to therapy.5 I will never forget him for that. It’s irresponsible to leave a person in

4 My fieldwork has shown that personal development and supplementary training are often considered the same among employees, managers and consultants. 5 Moving the eyes in a particular direction refers to a number of typical NLP exercises. With reference to neurological research NLP-theorist tell the attendees that the way we store information in our mind is mirrored in the way we move our eyes when we remember things from our past (O’Connor & Seymour,

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this state. On a course he is supposed to be responsible, right? I will never forget this. There is something that attracts me to NLP something very interesting, but I have become very careful because I was hurt – right? (Karen Petersen, my translation)

The techniques presented on the courses are often described as neutral tools that are made available to the participants. But these tools are often therapeutic, which means that it requires a certain professionalism and ethic among the consultants. Furthermore it challenges the private integrity of the participants which some employees find offensive (Bovbjerg, 2001). Employees are most likely to see courses in personal development as part of their supplementary training, and they accept the fact that the courses involve personal experiences and maybe painful incidents from their childhood; even Karen Petersen does not object to the personal development and its relevance for her professional life. Employees see themselves as very active in the process, they feel that they are in charge of their personal development and they make no distinction between their personal and professional development.

A new work ethic

NLP thus communicates an ethics and an idea of the good life, which is in accordance with ideas associated with the psycho-religious ideal type where the practitioner through a certain practice expects to achieve self-perfection through a never-ending transformation of the self (Champion & Hervieu-Léger, 1990). The good life is a life under continuous development and undergoes constant change. “Change is the only constant,” is the way it is described by central figures in the NLP literature (O’Connor & Seymour, 1990: 6). My investigation shows that both managers and NLP trainers emphasise the importance of the employees’ taking responsibility for their own work, and they expect the employees to develop a positive attitude to their jobs rather than seeing them as a chore: “It’s about everyday things. How do I choose to think of my workplace? Do I decide to go to work thinking, ‘Bloody hell, another day’?” (A Danish NLP trainer in a municipal district, my translation). For this NLP-trainer, a good work ethic is all about attitude adjustment, about a change in the way employees approach their workplace and their colleagues. The work must be driven by passion rather than duty. She and her colleagues talk a lot about making the employees “owners of their own transformation”, both privately and in the company.

There is an increasing intensity of work in modern society and new norms under which it is carried out. The new work ethic seems to be a result of a transition from a production society to a consumption society. In the production society, the work ethic was related to the ability to produce, whereas in the consumer society, work has become imbued with an aesthetic dimension that emphasises the sublime. Work is increasingly judged according to its ability to create experiences. The aesthetic aims of 1990). When the instructor asks Karen Petersen to look to the right he assumes that moving her eyes in a certain direction will break the contact to her feeling, and then bring her out of her crisis.

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work no longer seek to limit the time spent on the job as much as possible in order to create free time; on the contrary, the goal now is to remove the boundary between calling and occupation, job and hobby, work and play. ‘Workaholics’ have no fixed hours, but see work as the highest and most satisfying form of entertainment (Bauman, 1998). The modern employee is supposed to invest his/her whole self in their work in the sense that work must be a passion and the self must be a resource in relation to seizing the opportunities for development that the job has to offer. The American sociologist Emily Martin, who suggests that employees in modern companies must establish a positive attitude toward change and must take an active stance in regard to it, has supported this. This implies, according to Martin, that the individual consists of capacities and potentials that can be realized or can fail to be realized. Martin describes this belief in change as a myth that has been imprinted in the organisation: one that frames the social relations, in terms of which we conduct ourselves, and that forms the basis of the opportunities that are given to each of us for development and self-realisation (Martin, 1997). Based on my fieldwork, I believe that the emergence of this trend is caused by the fact that employees in companies have taken another approach to their work. Not only is their attitude towards the company in which they happen to be employed expressed in terms of commitment, flexibility and readiness for change. Modern employees should also consider themselves as units that must constantly be brought up to date, not just professionally, but also in a personal sense. Just as the company has to keep up with current trends in order to be competitive, the employee cannot just let her/himself go with the flow in the company. He/she must actively seek out opportunities to develop himself to retain an attractive working capacity. Martin describes this as follows:

People with resources to do so are increasingly speaking of themselves as mini-corporations, collections of assets that must be continually invested in, nurtured, managed, and developed. (Martin, 2000: 583)

The individual sees him- or herself as a mini-corporation, one that is primarily oriented towards its own interests in the global flow of capital. This is why people feel a need to invest in their own resources and ‘hidden potentials’, just as if they themselves were a firm (Martin, 2002). Employees consider their personal development an individual project in which they experience the optimisation of their opportunities for self-expression and their human attributes. In the business community, personal development courses are aimed to nurture a particular attitude towards work: through personal development courses, the employee should ideally take pleasure in their work, which ideally should be experienced as a vocation. The flexibility in the modern work ethic has importance for the impatience of the modern market always searching for change. Flexibility can be seen as a force that destroys tradition by reinventing the organization or the company. The idea of flexibility liberates capitalism from its suppressing connotations by giving employees the impression that they are in charge of their own life – private and professionally. In the same process, flexibility gives rise to new forms of control that have great importance for the personality of employees and the building of their character (Sennett, 1998).

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Courses in personal development would make no sense without an unconscious that contains hidden resources and hidden knowledge of the self. The courses communicate an ethics and an idea of the good life which accords with ideas associated with the psycho-religious ideal type. The unconscious becomes an essential element in ideas surrounding human potential and resources. This is why the theory of a bifurcated consciousness is central to an understanding of the modern work culture, where personal development is high on the agenda in many organisations. Courses in personal development include several elements that make them sensible investments in their entirety for the company or the organisation. The prospect of personal development has a motivating effect on the employee. This motivation can be part of the company’s strategy to make itself an attractive place to work which indicates that work has assumed a new significance in modern society.

From a protestant ethic to ethics of sensitivity

The primary objective of transpersonal practice is, in the psycho-religious ideal type, the cultivation of a habitus of sensitivity where we learn from our experience both on a bodily and mental level and try to live in accordance to our ‘true self’ (Champion, 1990). The concept of habitus should be understood in the sense proposed and used by Weber (1968): a specific methodical way of life and endeavour. I have therefore chosen to use the term ethics of sensitivity to denote this way of life.6 The term ‘ethic of sensitivity’ is inspired by Weber and is intended to express a particular attitude to work, which I will suggest has developed through a methodical way of life staged through the various programmes for personal development in working life. Employees see their personal development as an individual project in which they experience the optimisation of their opportunities of self-expression and their human attributes by unveiling hidden resources. The cultivation of the individual’s inner emotional life is a practice whereby modern management and New Age theories give way to the establishment of the ethics of sensitivity. Methods like NLP, Landmark, firewalking, gestalt therapy etc. are thought by many consultants and employees to be steps in a process of personal development, a process they adopt as a life project both privately and professionally. I would suggest that there is a very particular ethic implicit in this line of thought. As one of my interviewees put it:

“Well, I am allowed to develop, so I become a better human being; I acquire increased insight” (Hanne Mikkelsen, attendee of a NLP-course, my translation).

The relation between employees and their workplace has changed in recent decades – punctuality, sense of duty and loyalty are no longer the only characteristics an employee should possess to be attractive for modern firms. Employees have adopted a new attitude to their work, where work is viewed as an opportunity to develop one’s human

6 This aspect was central in my book (Bovbjerg, 2001).

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potential and progress toward self-actualisation. Personal development courses serve not just as paths to knowledge of the self and to self-realisation, but also as objects of individual investment, and they are considered a merger between professional and personal interests in the change and improvement of the self. I have described this as the emergence of an ethics of sensitivity. The modern human being must work in order to find the ‘authentic core’, which is precisely the way to liberate the good human being and attain self-discipline, both at work and in one’s private life. It is, by definition, an interminable process, which imbues lifelong learning and eternal change with meaning, but at the same time puts modern employees under increasing pressure at work. Along with other techniques in personal development, NLP supports a work ethic that leaves little room for employees to make a distinction between their personal and professional lives. The person as a whole – conscious as well as unconscious - becomes of interest for organisations under the ethic of sensitivity. The ideal employee is in a permanent state of reflection, learning and experience, he/she sees himself/herself as being in a state of growth. The employee must adopt an ongoing programme of work upon ‘the Self’, but this must be done in such a way as to lead to a particular kind of behaviour and specific understanding of meaningful work.

Max Weber’s classical work on the protestant ethic is an important inspiration for criticism of modern work life. Two important trends appear in new worklife; self-discipline and self creation. According to Weber the protestant becomes responsible for his own destiny through his or her faith and work, which in the beginning of the protestant era turned into discipline and self-denial. Religiously motivated persons in the protestant ethic are determined to prove their moral value through hard work. In Max Weber’s work on the protestant ethic and the capitalist spirit he argues, that in the sixteenth century, a particular work ethic evolved from the protestant ethic, in which the believer experienced a call for work to the glory of God (Weber, 1920). I present a modern reading of Weber’s analysis of the connection between the emergence of a new religious practice, such as those in the New Age theories, and a new way of thinking about work. Work is no more to the glory of God as in the protestant era. Glory of the Self is the ideal concept for modern work.

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