The Rise of Emotional Economic Culture: How Corporations Embraced Mindfulness as Organizational Practice

• In Event: Culture and Economic Life

Abstract

Mindfulness practices, emotional intelligence coaching, mental-health benefits, and discourses of authenticity, vulnerability, and well-being have become part of everyday corporate life. Seemingly antithetical to rationalization and Weber’s disenchantment of the world, these emotionally-oriented, enchanted practices have become quite widespread, inviting the question of why corporate culture has shifted so decisively toward managing not only workers’ labor, but also their inner emotional lives. How does emotionalization of corporate culture happen? This paper aims to shed light on this question by examining the diffusion of one emotional cultural practice within corporations: mindfulness. We use historical analysis of organizational change and case studies to identify to what extent coercive, normative and mimetic isomorphism pressures help explain the embrace of mindfulness in corporations. We also pay attention to the role of social movements in organizational change as well as poisedness of broader therapeutic culture to promote the emotional economies in late capitalism. In conclusion we invite further research to investigate other cultural practices that emotionalize contemporary corporate culture and examine their consequences for eroding, or solidifying, the iron cage of capitalism.

Authors

• Nina Bandelj, University of California-Irvine

• Annie Wang, University of California, Irvine