ABSTRACT
Thinking of business corporations as possessing a soulful status has history. R. Marchand documents how, following public decrying of the soullessness of giant merged US corporations in the late nineteenth century, business leaders and their allies embarked on explicit attempts to imbue the corporation with soul. In some of the corporate soul texts, the religious is not drawn upon to a significant extent. In actuality, soul—not of corporations but rather of their individual human members—has been engaged with within critical social science studies for some time. Diverse concepts of soul surface within different religious and historical periods. Christian conceptualisations of soul have Neoplatonic roots, particularly with respect to the immortality of soul and the importance of reason regulating the body. The soul that is being created through corporations’ articulations of their own goodness and, indeed, soulfulness would seem to be the kind of imperialist soul not wished for in the West for its human subjects.
