Pastors of profit: Marketplace Ministries and the rhetorical acquisition of affective allegiance. Issue 3 (3rd July 2017) - Winslow, Luke
ABSTRACT: This essay explores neoliberal capital accumulation by analyzing the workplace chaplaincy service Marketplace Ministries. By extending the value of traditional chaplains to the modern workplace, Marketplace Ministries discourse illuminates a discursive pattern that secular client-companies can employ to acquire the affective allegiance of their front-line employees. For these client-companies, affective allegiance activates a set of internal motivational strategies organized around the secularization of Michel Foucault's pastoral power by penetrating the intimate domestic spheres of the workforce to shape subjectivity and promote new forms of obedience. Implications for our present milieu are considered including possible sites of contestation and resistance.