Corporate mindfulness and the pathologization of workplace stress

Alex Caring-Lobel

pp. 195-214

in: Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes, Adam Burke (eds), Handbook of mindfulness, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

Over the past decade, two modernist narratives, that of stress and that of management science, have come together in the contemporary office in the form of mindfulness techniques and technologies. The reasons for this are overdetermined and involve both practical and ideological considerations, but we can safely say they spring from the specific needs of capital in central, highly developed labor markets, where the rapid expansion of postindustrial productive forces increasingly marshal the emotional, psychological, and cognitive faculties of workers to the point of strain. The science of mindfulness promises to address the worker discontent that these forms of labor engender without confronting the social and economic causes of this discontent. For this reason, mindfulness interventions have been enthusiastically adopted by managerial elites and embraced by workers, who, through the work of management theorists like Elton Mayo, the forefather of industrial psychology, have come to think of their work as a source of their well-being, a medium for their self-development and the furthering of their own interests. In this paper, I will argue for the repoliticization of the forms of worker stress and discontent that workplace mindfulness rhetoric and praxis obfuscate by framing in purely psychological terms.