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When Spirituality Becomes Spiritual Labour: Workplace Mindfulness as a Practice of Well-Being and Productivity

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Book cover New Spiritualities and the Cultures of Well-being

Part of the book series: Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach ((RELSPHE,volume 6))

Abstract

Over the last two decades, mindfulness has become popular in Western countries as part of the well-being movement. The corporate world has taken notice and is now hailing the potential of mindfulness as a tool to increase work performance and employee well-being. This view of mindfulness, however, contains an intrinsic contradiction: the core of mindfulness is derived from Buddhist traditions that accept the present moment without judgement, while neoliberal productivity demands constant renewal and a drive for stronger performance. The ethnographic data for this study was collected in an environment emblematic of the neoliberal service economy: a professional service firm with highly skilled employees.

This chapter develops the concept of spiritual labour, which is informed by the ideas of post-secularisation and spirituality in the sociology of religion and the concept of emotional labour in organisational studies. Spiritual labour refers to harnessing the spirituality of the employee and incorporating it into the work of the organisation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Pseudonyms have been used to protect the anonymity of the research participants.

References

The Data

  • Interviews: transcription of tape-recorded interviews (25) and email interviews (7), year 2015; Mindfulness diaries written by research participants (11), year 2015; Field notes, field diary, and correspondence with the company, 2014–2017; Corporate material (advertisements, research contracts, etc.), 2014–2015.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all the anonymous reviewers of this chapter for their productive comments.

Funding Details

This research was funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland under Grant 292883.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Mira Karjalainen

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  1. Mira Karjalainen
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Correspondence to Mira Karjalainen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut d’études religieuses, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Géraldine Mossière

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Karjalainen, M. (2022). When Spirituality Becomes Spiritual Labour: Workplace Mindfulness as a Practice of Well-Being and Productivity. In: Mossière, G. (eds) New Spiritualities and the Cultures of Well-being. Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06263-6_7

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