Mindful Authoring through Invocation

Abstract

This article examines how those who hold leadership positions in an internationally renowned Taiwanese Buddhist humanitarian organization establish themselves as legitimate authors of their organization by invoking a spiritual leader in their daily interactions and use this invocation to author their organization with a shared sense of compassion and wisdom. In so doing, this article extends the literature on mindful organizing and offers practical insights into the cultivation of mindfulness in an organizational setting. In particular, this study underscores the importance of understanding how a spiritual organization is communicatively constituted by voicing a revered figure into everyday situations, illustrating the profound connections between voice, invocation, and vocation.

The Institutionalization of CCO Scholarship: Trends from 2000 to 2015

“…Drawing on Luhmann’s (1995) writings, Luhmannians focus on systems (three publications), often in combination with concepts such as autopoiesis , communicative episodes , decision making , and operational closure . These concepts have, in turn, been used to investigate a number of different topics, such as accounting (Fauré, Brummans, Giroux, & Taylor, 2010; Varey, 2006), authority (Benoit-Barné, & Cooren, 2009), collective mind (Cooren, 2004, 2006; Mcphee, Myers, & Trethewey, 2006), conflict (Güney, 2006), interorganizational collaboration (Arnaud, & Mills, 2012; Koschmann, 2013), mindful organizing (Brummans, Hwang, & Cheong, 2013), organizational identity (Cornelissen, Christensen, & Kinuthia, 2012; Piette, 2013), organizational learning (Bisel, Messersmith, & Kelley, 2012; Browning, Sitkin, Sutcliffe, Obstfeld, & Greene, 2000; Matte & Cooren, 2015), spacing and timing (Cooren & Fairhurst, 2004; Cooren, Fox, Robichaud, & Talih, 2005; Vásquez, & Cooren, 2013), strategy (Fauré, & Rouleau, 2011), and tensions (Cooren, Matte, Benoit-Barné, & Brummans, 2013; Koschmann, 2010).…”

Deific Figures and Human Bodies: Creating Hierarchies of Difference through the Incarnation of Moral Authority

“…Finally, as an exercise, the PraiseMoves product specifically offers an opportunity to highlight the crucial impact of particular human bodies incarnating moral authority. This case study answers Sorsa et al’s (2014) call to theorize “the ways in which people bring objects, sites, and their bodies” into legitimation processes (p. 77), and Brummans et al’s (2013) suggestion to examine how figures with moral authority are given voice in other organizational contexts. PraiseMoves mobilizes a text (the Bible) with an idealized, incorporeal figure behind it (the Evangelical God) to legitimate an embodied practice (PraiseMoves), thus linking the figures of body-text-deity in one case study.…”

Understating South Asia interculturally and communicatively: What the contemporary scholarship tells us

“…For instance, centric meta‐theoretical perspectives (as proposed by Asante & Miike, 2013), de‐westernizing, de‐colonial, de‐linking, and indigenous methodologies (not an exhaustive list) can potentially guide us to envision art‐based, performative, and multisensory (Dutta, 2019a) approaches to reflexively address contextual issues relating to caste, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and power dynamics. For example, in the context of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and interreligious dialog, South Asian scholars have developed meaningful approaches that are grounded in Gandhian, Buddhist (Brummans et al., 2013), Sufi, and Bhakti (Dutta, 2019b) philosophies. Such a reflexive intercultural engagement would aid not only future scholarship to overcome ethnocentric and mono‐cultural tendencies but also encourage other scholars to explore new possibilities and areas of inquiry (e.g., Anthropocene, post‐truth, post‐human, and transhuman paradigms).…”