Searching for spiritual research paradigms: A systematic review of methodologies in management, spirituality and religion

This article presents a systematic review of methodologies and paradigms in the field of Management, Spirituality and Religion (MSR), combining bibliometric and methodological analyses of articles published in the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion (JMSR) from 2004 to 2021. It aims to map the field’s methodological landscape, examine its paradigmatic development, and advance spiritual research paradigms. The bibliometric analysis shows that international collaborations are dominated by Anglophone countries and that the most cited articles are either conceptual or quantitative studies. The methodological analysis identifies an ‘empirical turn’ since 2013 and a sustained ‘qualitative gain’, indicating the field’s development alongside increasing methodological pluralism. Yet positivist approaches continue to dominate, while non-positivist studies remain concentrated within interpretivist paradigms, with limited engagement in critical, postmodern, or other related paradigms. This lack of paradigmatic diversity underscores the need for alternative evaluation criteria to support non-positivist, spiritually-grounded research. The major theoretical contribution is articulating a preliminary framework of spiritual research paradigms derived from two emerging spiritual paradigms in JMSR. It also outlines commonly used qualitative methodologies for non-positivist research and suggests directions for fostering creative approaches informed by Eastern, non-Anglophone, and Indigenous traditions.