Peace of Our Mind: Managerial Interventions and the Search for Collective Mindfulness

Mindfulness training programs have been a rapidly emerging form of managerial intervention and have stimulated debate over the individual and collective potentials of "new age" and humanistic management training. Such programs have been critiqued as individualistic, overly performance oriented, or deviating from collective wisdom traditions at their source. Yet we know little empirically about how actors in mindfulness programs experience the collectivity of mindfulness practices. Through a case study of a corporate mindfulness program, we examine how individual and collective elements of mindfulness are socially constructed by trainers, managers, and participants. We describe discourses of individual benefit, relationality, and macro-social aspirations, and how actors have attempted to link these different levels. By repositioning mindfulness as discursive and situated in ongoing practices, we propose a critical yet empirically situated research agenda around mindfulness interventions in organizational settings, with implications for humanistic and new age managerial education more generally.