Even Kabat-Zinn has admitted that mindfulness cannot be measured accurately using surveys. In addition, numerous scholars have taken issue with existing mindfulness questionnaires as potentially misrepresenting and distorting classical conceptualizations of Buddhist mindfulness. This is somewhat ironic, since the scientization of mindfulness is adopting an attitude more like religion — making faith-based pronouncements that are as yet unsupported by empirical evidence.
The gap between rhetoric and facts has become so wide that fifteen researchers — including some prominent boosters of mindfulness — have sought to make amends by co-authoring an article entitled: “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation.” It outlines problems in defining mindfulness, and thus in delineating suitable studies, as well as flaws in existing research and ways to improve it. The problems are starkly laid out:
As mindfulness has increasingly pervaded every aspect of contemporary society, so have misunderstandings about what it is, whom it helps, and how it affects the mind and brain. At a practical level, the misinformation and propagation of poor research methodology can potentially lead to people being harmed, cheated disappointed, and/or disaffected.30
Scientists “have a considerable amount of work to make meaningful progress,” the authors conclude, hoping “to surmount the prior misunderstandings and past harms caused by pervasive mindfulness hype.” However, none of them notes their own role in this insidious process. One, Sara Lazar, co-authored the Harvard Business Review article cited earlier in this chapter, titled: “Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain.” That proclaimed: “Perhaps you haven’t heard that the hype is backed by hard science.”
chapter eight
Mindful Employees
I am in the grand ballroom among two hundred and fifty people at the Marriott Hotel in downtown San Francisco for the first public workshop offering for Google’s corporate mindfulness training, “Search Inside Yourself” (SIY). Marc Lesser is a short, unassuming and soft-spoken man, who looks a little nervous. The former director of San Francisco Zen Center’s country retreat Tassajara, Lesser is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, a seasoned management consultant with an MBA, and the first CEO of Google’s non-profit Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI). “My deep vow is to make accessible the benefits of mindfulness meditation to people working in companies and organizations, knowing that this is how to have the most impact in the world,” Lesser proclaims. Access to the two-day workshop is only $950 a person.
Google has become the poster child for corporate mindfulness, largely due to the work of Chade-Meng Tan, a software engineer who helped build the first mobile search engine, before starting the work that earned him the job title “Jolly Good Fellow.” As Google employee number 107, he retired in 2015, aged forty-five. “My goal in life is to create the conditions for world peace by making the benefits of mindfulness meditation accessible to humanity,” he vows.
Sporting a traditional gold silk Tai Chi outfit, Meng relishes his role as Silicon Valley’s mindfulness guru. “I came to this goal of world peace nine years ago back when I was still an engineer at Google,” he tells the crowd in San Francisco. “I suddenly realized what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.” As he explains, “we developed Search Inside Yourself, a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence training at Google. Because of this program I became the first engineer at Google to move from engineering to human resources,” he quips. “Imagine an engineer teaching emotional intelligence!”
Google’s program has received a great deal of media attention. The curriculum is touted as “scientifically grounded” in rigorous research. Drawing heavily from Daniel Goleman’s best-selling book Emotional Intelligence — itself embraced as a scientific path to success — the premise is that mindfulness increases emotional intelligence (EI).1
This is valued because empathy, self-control and agreeableness have become the new managerial watchwords, not unlike the message of the immensely popular self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which Dale Carnegie penned in 1936.2
Before the in-house program was developed, Google offered engineers classes in MBSR. Few of them enrolled — stress is seen as a badge of honor among its youthful engineers, who typically work between sixty and eighty hours a week. Dangling the carrot of success would become the new hook. Once mindfulness was linked with emotional intelligence, with greater prospects of promotion and career advancement, engineers started enrolling in SIY courses in droves.
Philippe Goldin, a clinical neuroscientist at Stanford University and co-facilitator of the San Francisco workshop, is a wiry, gray-haired man. He leads our first exercise. “Turn to someone next to you,” he begins. Having taught business students for the last twenty-five years, I know this is a common ice-breaking gimmick. “With your partner, answer this question: What do you love about your work?” I try to keep an open mind. My partner, Ursula, is a Swiss woman in her forties from a large pharmaceutical firm, who looks reciprocally reluctant and skeptical. “This program would never fly at my company,” she says. “Emotional intelligence training is passé. These exercises are so sophomoric and painful.” By midday, we have endured a few more of them, listened to some simplistic lectures on emotional intelligence, and viewed slick PowerPoint slides of colorful fMRI images, emphasizing how meditation can change our brains.
We break for lunch disappointed. Our path is impeded by Chade-Meng Tan, now a celebrity on the mindfulness circuit, who is swarmed by participants wanting to take selfies with him. I ask Ursula, a vice president of human resources, what she makes of the linking of mindfulness to emotional intelligence. “Where is the scientific evidence for these claims?” she asks. It’s a relief to talk someone who hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid. Experts are no more impressed. “Goleman’s work does not represent a systematic scientific program of research,” writes the Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg, in a foreword to Emotional Intelligence: Science and Myth. “There appear to be no refereed published studies where hypotheses are predictively tested against data.”3
A few years after the SIY program, I met up again with Goldin, the co-facilitator. We were at a “Mindfulness in Society” conference, where he was presenting a pilot study he had conducted of SIY graduates in three Bay Area technology companies. His findings surprised him, with little sign of impact on emotional intelligence. In fact, results showed that SIY mindfulness training was associated with increases in both work exhaustion and disengagement. One could speculate that mindfulness helped employees realize just how exhausted they really were; their response was to disengage from work as a form of relief. During the Q&A session, I asked Goldin whether as a scientist — whose duty is to follow the evidence — he would revise the SIY curriculum in light of his findings. He replied: “Well, I have distanced myself from Google’s SIY training and I am no longer involved with it.” Google, however, still sells mindfulness and emotional intelligence.
The Disengagement Problem
It is no accident that Google branded its program “Search Inside Yourself.” As a tool of self-discipline, mindfulness is the latest capitalist spirituality, unifying a quest for productivity and corporate profits with individual peace and self-fulfillment. By directing attention inward, courses such as Google’s deflect wandering minds from questions of power or political economy; external conditions are simply accepted as they are. The solution to our problems is inside us, we are told. As Meng promises: “Mindfulness can increase my happiness without changing anything else.”4
This therapeutic focus on individual wellbeing obscures the real reasons why corporations embrace mindfulness programs. Capitalism faces an unprecedented crisis. Attempts to control, manipulate or coopt labor have historically been resisted in a variety of ways — strikes, industrial sabotage, unionization, and work slowdowns. However, since organization and outright refusal are no longer viable options in most industries, the most common form of post-industrial
resistance is stress, burnout, and apathy. Depression is at epidemic levels, and a broader mental health crisis looms.
The enthusiastic boom in corporate mindfulness coincided with the recession that started with financial meltdown in 2008. With massive lay-offs, the rise of the “precariat” and contingent labor, extension of work hours, stagnation in wages, and other forms of “shock therapy,” employees were admonished to “do more with less.” The growth in worker discontentment is regarded as a threat, both to the state and to corporations. Such disaffection and alienation — manifesting in stress, psychosomatic illnesses, depression, low motivation, absenteeism, and such — has not only fueled the interest in mindfulness but also spurred a burgeoning wellness and happiness industry.
“Employee disengagement” has become a phenomenon, denting corporate profits, productivity and economic output. It is estimated that, in the US alone, $300 billion has been lost to stress-related absences,5 with losses due to a lack of engagement nearer $550 billion.6 The fact that seven out of ten employees report feeling “disengaged” from work has human resources teams alarmed. Even employees who are highly engaged, like the engineers at Google, report high levels of stress. So it is unsurprising that corporations have jumped on the wellness and mindfulness bandwagon.
In some ways, none of this is new. In the 1970s and 1980s, stress management and stress reduction programs were hugely popular in corporations. Even then, critics drew attention to the potential injustices of offering such programs to employees while doing nothing to alter the sources of workplace stress. And in the 1990s, organizational psychologists were promoting the idea of “occupational stress,” using similarly scary (and dubious) statistics. In 1994, the Confederation of British Industry estimated that 360 million workdays were lost at a cost to corporations of £8 billion.7 Again, these accounts linked sickness to stress without supporting evidence.
In Managing Stress, Tim Newton shows how such dramatic estimates demonize stress while enhancing its legitimacy as an explanatory concept. Given that, as we saw earlier, stress as a biomedical concept didn’t enter public discourse until after World War II, Newton looks at examples from the nineteenth century. Without the discursive legitimation of stress by social and behavioral science research, it is unlikely such industrial workers would have reported feeling “stressed,” though they may well have had concerns about conditions. As stress discourse became pervasive, it presented an image of the stressed subject “as someone who is apolitical, individualized, decontextualized,” Newton says.8 Stress is thus naturalized and taken for granted — an unavoidable occupational hazard.
Mentally Fit Employees
Corporate mindfulness interventions are often pitched as ways for employees to develop mental fitness. Our brains are equated to “muscles,” and mindfulness requires regular practice — just like going to the gym. “We are confident that your pursuit will be beneficial, because we know from scientific research that mindfulness is a trainable skill that grows stronger as we exercise it,” says Richard Fernandez, the CEO of Google’s mindfulness spin-off, the SIYLI. The man who created it, Chade-Meng Tan, echoes the parallel. “Just as weight-training makes us physically fit, mindfulness meditation is a way of exercising our brain to achieve mental fitness,” he says.
It is not a coincidence that both of these activities are individualistic. The fitness metaphor suggests to employees that their psychological and physical wellbeing — and thus their efficiency and productivity — hinges on their ability to cope effectively with stress. Corporate mindfulness programs aim to train individual employees to manage and regulate difficult emotions, as well as improving concentration and attention. These are valuable economic resources, put in the service of organizational objectives.
Viewed as free agents, or “entrepreneurs of the self,” employees are exhorted to take full responsibility for their performance, hacking their brains to be more malleable, adaptive, and flexible. Focused non-judgmental attention, emotional self-regulation and pro-social behaviors are subjective capacities that have become instrumentalized — the central target of capitalist social relations. In this sense, corporate mindfulness programs themselves represent a new form of “mental capital,” a programmatic attempt to reshape the subjectivity of the employee as a valuable and essential asset to corporate success.
The bottom-line: mentally fit employees are mindful, effective at coping with stress and keeping their emotions in check. Meanwhile, the mental training provided by mindfulness marginalizes alternative ways of talking about workplace stress, along with challenging questions about power relations, and the ways in which corporations make workers responsible for their responses to working conditions.
Self-Imposed Stress?
David Gelles, a New York Times business reporter and the author of Mindful Work, is a vociferous cheerleader for corporate mindfulness. Gelles makes a bold claim: “Stress isn’t something imposed on us. It’s something we impose on ourselves.”9 Really? Failure to cope is often blamed on a dysfunction in one’s neural pathways or troublesome thoughts and emotions. His colleagues at the New York Times would beg to differ. In an exposé of Amazon’s sociopathic work culture, the newspaper quoted a former employee as saying that he saw nearly everyone he worked with cry at their desks.10 Would Gelles have offered his advice to these Amazon workers, telling them that they were imposing stress on themselves, or that they could have chosen not to cry — and that their lack of emotional self-control could be attributed to being hijacked by their amygdala?
For Gelles, like other mindfulness champions, the causes of stress are located in our heads — and since fMRI images show parts of the brain lighting up due to stress, they confirm that we create our own misery through thoughts and emotions that we fail to let go of. We only have our own mindlessness to blame. This is not to deny that experiences of stress and discomfort are partly to do with habitual behavior, but Gelles goes too far. His victim-blaming philosophy echoes the corporate mindfulness ethos: shift the burden of psychological stress and structural insecurities onto individual employees, frame this as a personal problem, and then offer mindfulness as the panacea.
This masks the social and economic conditions that may have caused the problem. Mindfulness programs pay little attention to the complex dynamics of interacting power relations, networks of interests, and explanatory narratives that shape capitalist culture. Yet as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in The Spirit Level, evidence from social epidemiology shows that stress and psychosomatic illnesses are concentrated in highly unequal societies, with strongly materialist, competitive values.11
Although the focus of corporate mindfulness is on changing behavior at the level of individuals, mere “lifestyle choices” make little difference. A study by researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who analyzed 228 other studies, found the top ten stressors derived from poor management practices and overly demanding corporate cultures. The biggest causes of stress were a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organizational justice, and unrealistic demands.12 Job insecurity accounted for a 50% increase in poor health, and long work hours correlated with a 20% rise in mortality.
But Gelles is undeterred. “Mindfulness can be a source of employer value proposition and may in the long run provide organizations with a valuable tool to manage high burnout levels of employees,” he says.13 In other words, in a corporate context, mindfulness is just another way for managers to maximize extraction of optimal value from human resources. George Mumford, a SIYLI mindfulness teacher, likens mindfulness to a tool for “sharpening the saw” of people’s minds. “If you keep sawing without stopping to sharpen the saw,” he says, “you won’t be as effective.” Like workplace wellness, happiness, resilience, and the positive psychology of flourishing, mindfulness sees the minds and bodies of employees as sources of economic value.
Docile Subjects
It’s ironic that while Google boasts about its mindful quest to “make the world a better place through the ‘technology’ of meditation,” its managers are, as Nicholas Carr puts it in The Shallows, “quite literally in the business of distraction.”14
In some ways, the two are connected. Corporate mindfulness works very subtly to train good employees to serve their employers — and the broader system that supports them. It’s not an industrial form of brainwashing, as defensive mindfulness teachers think critics are saying. What it does is deflect attention from collective organizing, or the pursuit of structural changes in corporate culture, instead refocusing employees on productive self-discipline. It works like a sophisticated form of bio-power, binding people’s inner lives to corporate success.
As Nikolas Rose points out, echoing Foucault, corporate mindfulness programs “work through, and not against, subjectivity.”15 Foucault himself notes the way in which discourses of autonomy, freedom, health, self-fulfillment, prudence, and self-care are the very channels used for “the conduct of conduct” of human beings. And as Rose observes, such approaches “seek actively to produce subjects of a certain form, to mold, shape, and organize the psyche, to fabricate individuals with particular desires and aspirations.”16
No mindfulness program is neutral, not even if promoted as a “mental tool for self-improvement,” writes the Berkeley professor of Buddhism Richard Payne. “All tools are ideologies,” Payne adds. “They exercise the values of their makers and instantiate those values in their users.”17 By appealing to universal values of serving the public, scientific rhetoric is used to mask underlying corporate priorities. The basic message is that employees are responsible for their own wellbeing, but the function is to neutralize dissent. It need not always be this way, but unless corporate cultures can be changed by collective means, providing mindfulness classes is like doling out pharmaceutical drugs in a psychoanalytic setting to avoid having to hear a patient’s concerns.
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