From spiritual refraction to civic wealth maintenance: How indigenous community enterprises read civic threats through a shared religious prism

Indigenous community enterprises (ICEs) face intensifying civic threats, yet how they collectively interpret these threats drawing on religious principles remains theoretically underdeveloped. Drawing on an in-depth ethnographic study of one of the oldest and most traditional apiaries in the world, the UNESCO-recognized Inzerki cooperative in rural Morocco, we empirically show that ICEs do not encounter civic threats as merely material disruptions. Instead, civic threats are collectively read through a shared religious prism. We conceptualize this collective interpretive mechanism as spiritual refraction . Spiritual refraction gives rise to three distinct threat navigation pathways, which differ in the permeability of the boundary between material and spiritual domains: spiritual-civic integration, material deflection, and spiritual withdrawal . Drawing on boundary theory, we theorize that only spiritual-civic integration, in which bidirectional boundary permeability is maintained, enables civic wealth maintenance, while material deflection and spiritual withdrawal each produce civic wealth depletion through opposite forms of boundary collapse. Our findings advance previous discourse at the intersection of religion and entrepreneurship, bridging the civic wealth perspective and boundary theory, and offering reflections on the eschatological dimension of entrepreneurship.