Spirituality: An Interdisciplinary Interest or an Emerging Discipline for The Unknown?

The intersection of management, spirituality, and religion (MSR) gives scholars, academicians, and practitioners a distinctive approach to understanding phenomena in management, solving issues around them, and making decisions regarding them from a different or rather transformed perspective. Exploring this intersection, we reflect its influence on management practices and research in MSR. Although not truly interdisciplinarily, spirituality has so far been developed and dealt with under several disciplines. Owing to its weak or lesser-known disciplinarity, spirituality has been colonized by interdisciplinarity leading to digestion of its concepts or methods and eventual distortion to fit the dominant disciplines. This undermined its distinct ontology and epistemology and in turn the promise it holds. This paper highlights the emerging disciplinarity in spirituality to argue for its position as a distinct discipline. After discussing some of the challenges towards this end, we propose spirituality as a field of knowledge that deals with the un-experienceable and unknowable unknown, and its connectedness with the knowable and experienceable realm. We further propose the building blocks for this discipline (ontology, epistemology, axiology and praxeology). Finally we reflect on the road ahead for qualifying to be an academic discipline as a field of study for learning, producing and practicing knowledge.