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Empirical research in spirituality and religion in work (SRW) offers special challenges in construct conceptualization, operationalization, and data analysis. For this special research methods issue, accomplished researcher and SRW champion Ian I. Mitroff shares his thoughts, criticisms, and models for current research as well as his hopes for SRW's empirical future. Mitroff, co‐author of the most prominent empirical SRW study to date (Mitroff, I.I. and Denton, E.A., A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America: A Hard Look at Spirituality, Religion, and Values in the Workplace, Jossey‐Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1999), holds trans‐disciplinarily grounded views of how SRW researchers need to overcome methodological impasses to stay interesting and relevant. This article contains excerpts from three recent interviews with Mitroff about the current and future states of SRW research, and how such research can move forward with integrity and respect for SRW's special subject matter.

Having been trained in both engineering and philosophy, I am extremely sensitive to the use of words. I choose words as a result very carefully. One of the key words in my article was clearly “speculation.” No one was more aware than I that I was offering a bold speculation. Given this recognition, I was well aware of the “evidential support base” of my speculation.

Consider the plight of the contemporary manager: the forces affecting corporate planning today stem from a wide variety of external sources—public interest groups, changing customer demands, foreign nations, government agencies, and many more. Consequently, the problems that managers and planners must solve are increasingly complex. They are, in addition, ill‐structured and have many highly interrelated dimensions, each of which expresses a wide range of differing values, beliefs and knowledge. Compared with well structured problems—proving geometric theorems or solving Sunday supplement puzzles are examples—ill‐structured problems have no sure fire solutions. One can't tell whether the planning methods used and the solutions obtained fit the problem best or not.

A major reason that crisis management is such a heavy burden is that the conceptual “road map of reality” that we all use to make basic sense of the world has broken down. Even more basic, the assumptions underlying this road map have themselves broken down and need to be replaced by newer assumptions. This article examines those basic assumptions and the reasons they need to be replaced.

The very first issue of this journal struck an important and vibrant chord. It contained a series of “statements of concern” by a number of the members of the editorial board. Many, if not nearly all, of the statements expressed concern with the impacts and potential ill effects of technology on people. Among the concerns expressed were: (1) there was worry that the field of office automation was or would be dominated by technologists and vendors with a limited point of view to push; (2) there was worry that current designers are generally insensitive to broader human needs; (3) there was concern that current conceptions of office design and technology embody a naive and simplistic view of the user, and that they contribute to an inflexible and mechanistic concept of work; (4) considerable concern was also expressed that current thinking contributes, whether unconsciously or not, to a further invasion of personal privacy; in general, current conceptions pose a threat to personal freedoms; and finally (5) concern was expressed that we need more systematic and sustained study of a topic that has heretofore just barely risen above the plane of consciousness, i.e., the psychoses of system design; for instance, what drives the designers of large scale computer systems to produce systems such that they are user unfriendly and even user threatening; and strangely enough, why do the users of such systems buy into the psychoses of their designers?

There is no more essential task, no more basic information that one could collect, that is critical to survival than the knowledge of one's underlying assumptions. Here are some assumptions about the steel and auto industries that give insight into the many underlying assumptions responsible for the directions other industries take.

The purpose of this paper is to show that more than ever than ever, businesses need to understand the nature of different concepts of knowledge and methods for producing them.

Utilizing the philosophy of inquiry, the extreme importance and relevance of applied epistemology (theories of knowledge/inquiry) for business is demonstrated. It introduces and briefly explains five archetypal inquiry systems from Western philosophy. Each system defines “truth” and “knowledge” in completely different ways.

The paper shows the strengths and the limitations of each system for “knowledge”, and especially for doing business in the systems age.

The philosophy of inquiry has been greatly underutilized, even ignored, in schools of business. This paper attempts to correct this.

Crisis‐prepared organizations employ a number of distinct and creative strategies to cope with crises: they conduct internal assassin team exercises where they attempt to destroy their organizations given their privileged inside knowledge; they attempt to think like paranoids in order to come up with unpalatable and unthinkable scenarios; they imagine themselves in totally different industries in order to think about how crises that are not endemic to them can happen nonetheless. While no organization can fully prevent major crises, it can recover faster and with substantially less costs by being prepared.

This paper aims to argue that there is a strong imbalance in business education between providing abstract, rational concepts and opportunities for personal growth. Introducing spirituality in business education seems to be desirable if we want to prepare students for the complexities and challenges of the workplace today.

The paper gives an example of how techniques from voice and drama therapy can be used for enabling students to look beyond the rational and the material.

By engaging with their “true self”, students may discover dormant qualities in themselves and start to find their purpose, meaning and spirituality.

The paper shows that by introducing some new approaches in business education, we can provide opportunities for students to connect their rational thoughts with conscience and the “true self”. When students make an integrated use of our mental, emotional and spiritual resources, they are better equipped to make complex decisions and behave ethically in the workplace and in their personal lives.

Previous crisis communication research has primarily examined the external dimension of crisis communication, i.e. the crisis response strategies applied by organizations to protect and/or restore their image or reputation among external stakeholders in a crisis situation. The purpose of this paper is to set up an integrative framework for the study of internal crisis communication in private and public organizations.

The paper takes a theoretical approach reviewing the literature on crisis management and crisis communication and discussing the concept of internal stakeholder and the implications of a staged approach.

An integrative framework for the study of internal crisis communication is developed based on two assumptions: first, that internal crisis communication research must start with a detailed study of the relationship between an organization and its internal stakeholders (in this case: the employees) to clarify to what extent internal crisis communication differs from external crisis communication; and second, that internal crisis communication research can best be systematized applying a staged approach (precrisis stage, crisis event, postcrisis stage) as an heuristic method.

Apart from a few exceptions, the internal dimension of crises, crisis management, and crisis communication has, by and large, been unexplored.