Burn out and Bliss – Affective Investments in Workplace Mindfulness
A Danish Perspective
Pre-defense seminar with Marianne Viftrup Hedegaard.
- External examiner: Associate professor Line Dalsgård (Aarhus University)
- Discussant: PhD fellow Katinka Schyberg (IT University of Copenhagen)
Abstract
This is an ethnographic study of the influx of Buddhist-derived body-mind practices of Mindfulness in Danish workplaces.
Mindfulness is proliferating in Denmark as a health technology entering both public and private institutions, therapeutic settings and corporate strategies. One of the important reasons for its emergence in workplaces is the promise mindfulness holds of healing not only the agitated individual body but positively affecting the workplace climate producing healthy work environments.
The dissertation suggests understanding current engagements in mindfulness at work as ‘affective investments’ inspired by work on emotional and affective labour (e.g. Hochschild 1979; Martin 2007; Muehlebach 2012) as well as work on emotions defining emotions as the ‘missing link capable of bridging mind and body, individual, society, and the body politic’ (Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987).
Undertaking mindfulness is not only a personal pursuit but part of remaining professionally valuable as an employee and afloat as a business in an accelerated world. Investment captures the multiple engagements with time in mindfulness practice. Mindfulness meditation is about investing one’s awareness in the moment. At the same time, practitioners’ efforts sitting in meditation here and now is understood to gain an afterlife, spilling over and affecting the rest of the day, week and possibly their way of life. Mindfulness is a lingering state when fully invested in.
The dissertation argues that while mindfulness for some produces a kind of affective safe guard when faced with pressure, for others mindfulness involves a cruel optimism (Berlant 2007) leaving the not-yet-mindful employee the responsibility to keep calm in a disruptive work life.
At the pre-defense we will discuss five chapters from the dissertation focusing on analytical as well as methodological issues.
