Examining the Religious Dimension of Managerial Practices and Discourses in Slovakia

Research Area 1. Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices
Research Area 3. Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experince of Spaces

Contact : 53372548@fsv.cuni.cz

Zuzana Bártová is an assistant professor at the University of Pardubice since 2021 and a researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague in Alessandro Testa’s team (until Summer 2022). She also gave lectures at the University of Strasbourg between 2015 and 2017. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from this same university (2019). She has been teaching seminars and lectures on consumer culture, sociology of religion and contemporary religion and has carried out long ethnographical stays in three different European countries: France, Czechia and Slovakia. At the same time, she worked as a librarian in the French second largest library (National and University Library of Strasbourg) until 2020.

As a researcher in Religious Studies, she is specialised in Sociology of Religion. Her research combines these studies with Cultural Studies and Buddhist studies in an innovative way. She focused her PhD research on convert Buddhism in France and Czechia and showed how this Buddhism is shaped by consumer culture into a lifestyle dominated by values consistent with the consumer ethos. It also revealed resemblances between the French and Czech cases. The results were part of her argument regarding Czech society and its engagement with global consumer, neoliberal and religious dynamics. She has also drawn on this research in her new fieldwork on managers and their attitude to personal development at the workplace. She analyzes their engagement as a new form of religion.

CV

Education

•  2019 PhD Religious Studies, University of Strasbourg. Thesis Title: “Buddhism as an Organised Lifestyle for the Middle Class in Consumer Culture: An Analysis of the Religiosity of Buddhist Practitioners in France and the Czech Republic” (in French).
• 2010 Master 2 Religious Studies, specialisation: Sociology of Religion, University of
  Strasbourg.
• 2009 Master 1 Religious Studies, Charles University in Prague.

Articles

• « Between strangeness and an alternative Buddhist lifestyle: an expression of religious non-conformity in consumer culture in France and the Czech Republic », Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe, ca. 29 p. 
• « The Buddhist style in consumer culture: from aesthetics to emotional patterns », Journal of Religion in Europe 14 (2021): 28-54.
• « L’authenticité comme valeur centrale de l’engagement religieux dans la culture de consommation : le cas des pratiquants bouddhistes en France et en République tchèque », Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 50/1 (2020) : 141-162.
• « Diamond Way in the age of globalization: a study of transnational Buddhist community formation », Religio 22/2 (2014): 131-149.