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ID:
138827
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| Summary/Abstract |
Religion and business are often seen as inhabiting separate social spheres, yet megachurches combine them in ways that reflect their context. Operating in a country that combines state control and growth-oriented economic pragmatism, New Creation and City Harvest churches in Singapore manage their church-building projects to fulfil both state regulatory and church organizational objectives. Each church in their own way uses the discourse and techniques of marketing managerialism to promote growth, including through significant building projects justified in terms of their religious mission. As a business discourse, marketing managerialism not only leaves its imprint on church language, but has oriented these churches towards self-perpetuating business practices which target some particular types of churchgoers whilst excluding others. We argue that they also illustrate a recursive relationship between religion and business in which each sphere of discourse legitimizes the other.
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| 2 |
ID:
150561
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| Summary/Abstract |
Against the backdrop of dominant Muslim presence, an aspiring middle class and the modernisation of Indonesia as an emerging market, we explore how a contemporary megachurch in Indonesia constructs a corporate identity and examine how ‘Western’ ideals and modernity influence organisational practices and communication in a religious setting. We deploy discourse analysis as our approach, which includes a critical reading and semiotic analysis of corporate artefacts to understand their underlying structures and discourse in enacting the corporate identity. We examine how discourses of self-empowerment, Westernisation and modernisation, business and nationalism coalesce to construct a marketable corporate identity for the megachurch. From this perspective, we argue that corporate identity is fluid and is shaped by meaningful choices taken to discursively construct a particular image for its intended audience(s).
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