Kanavointi ja jakautunut yrittäjyys – henkisyyden ja yrittäjyyden yhdistämisen rajat ja mahdollisuudet

Authors

• Katriina Hulkkonen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30666/elore.79277

Abstract

This article is concerned with the relationship between entrepreneurship and New Age spirituality. It is an ethnographical enquiry into channels’ (persons who do channelling) entrepreneurship in today’s Finland. Channelling refers to an ability to receive and transmit information from other levels of being, usually from spirits. The purpose of channelling is mainly to help the client or the audience by giving them advice and support. The research materials consist mainly of interviews and New Age literature.

In this article, I concentrate on how the logic of business and the logic of New Age spirituality, on one hand, restrict each other and, on the other hand, enable something. I use the actor-network theory and its idea of network as a tool to explore channels’ entrepreneurship and action. I suggest that the concept of shared entrepreneurship can be used to describe channels’ entrepreneurship and their co-operation with the non-human entities. It denotes the entrepreneurship that is distributed between different actors: especially channels, spirits, customers, and material things. In the life of channels, the spirituality and business are deeply intertwined. Channels opine that helping people is their vocation, yet at the same time their work may expose them to cultural marginalization, which can make their lives more difficult.