Abstract
Contemporary emphases on calculating the impact of our scholarship can be deadening if they lead us to refrain from contemplation. Thus, in this essay, I show the importance of contemplation and what contemplative dimensions of our scholarship might include. Based on four lines from the poem “Sometimes” by the poet Mary Oliver, I summarize ways that many activities carried out by organizational scholars embody Oliver’s “Instructions for living a life,” which consist solely of “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” My summary shows some of the range of contemplative activities within our field, as well as integral relationships between contemplation and compassion. I conclude by highlighting the importance of the roles such activities play in our experiences of academic life and in our developmental journeys as scholars.
Contemporary emphases on calculating the impact of our scholarship can easily be deadening to us as organizational scholars if they lead us to ignore contemplation. In this essay, I will describe how important contemplation is for us and what it might entail, including its integral links with compassion.
Given what might seem like the overwhelming contemporary importance of measures of impact (e.g. Adler & Harzing, 2009, Aguinis, Cummings, Ramani, & Cummings, in press), one would think that all that matters about our scholarly work is counting its end products. How we get to those is trivial, as long as we end up with multiple “hits” in “A” journals and high citation counts on the Web of Science, among other indices.
However, the calculated impact of our research represents only a small part of our lives as scholars. Left to its own devices it can foster a cut-throat competition for publications and citations that ignores the full human experiences involved in designing, conducting, and presenting research and the activities and responses these may evoke, on the part of both researchers and research participants. Impact gets enough attention. In this essay, I will focus solely on contemplative dimensions that are core to the conduct of our scholarly lives.
I have long had the sense that my research has contemplative elements, though I have not thought through in depth what that has meant until the occasion arose to write this essay. Conducting research has sometimes given me an enviable opportunity to be with research participants and particular organizational phenomena in depth, to see and recognize patterns that are ordinarily hidden below the surface appearances of organizations, to appreciate the beauty of a good deal of our scholarship, and to attempt to contribute to such scholarship. Occasionally I am overwhelmed with the dignity of the people with whom I interact in the course of conducting research, as well as the elegance of particular scholarly writings.
This is certainly not unique to me. The acclaimed Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin (1959, p. 250) wrote, “There is much less difference than people think between research and adoration” (one form of contemplation). As will be seen below in this essay, other natural scientists have similar experiences.
We are very lucky as academics. We have time and opportunity to ponder and appreciate organizational phenomena built into our schedule. However, this important benefit of our profession is rarely recognized or acknowledged. Thus, it is important to make some contemplative dimensions of our scholarship salient. I will use as the stimulus for my discussion a few lines from a poem called “Sometimes” by Mary Oliver, who was a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, as well as a recipient of many other awards. She passed away in 2018 (About Mary Oliver, 2018).
I have no idea whether the lines I will cite from that poem are “formally” contemplative by some theological criterion. However, they have stirred my reflection on multiple dimensions that contemplation might include in our scholarly experiences. So I will present each line and flesh it out a bit, sometimes by means of Oliver’s other writings and sometimes by means of literary scholarship addressing her work. Then I will present several examples of activities carried out by organizational scholars that correspond with the lines from Oliver’s poem. When I present these examples, I will sometimes include extended quotations. This is not customary in scholarly work, but extended quotations can give us a somewhat more leisurely opportunity to appreciate scholars as whole people.
The Lines from the Poem
Please consider four lines from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes.”
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
If one looks at all four lines from the poem together, as movements within one overarching framework, they immediately suggest that following Oliver’s instructions for living a life will likely involve some slowing down of our usual pace. Each instruction ends with a period, a separation. They do not breathlessly run into each other.
Further, these lines suggest that following Oliver’s instructions is often likely to involve compassion. Though I will return to this issue later, here I simply want to note that Kanov et al. (2004) proposed a tripartite model of compassion processes that includes cognitive (noticing, or “pay attention”), affective (feeling, or “be astonished”), and behavioral (acting, or “tell about it”) components. Moreover, I believe that the most archetypical illustration in organizational scholarship of what Oliver was discussing is Peter Frost’s (1999) paper, “Why compassion counts.” Frost was an organizational scholar who taught at the University of British Columbia until his death in 2004. I will use parts of his 1999 paper and some of how he lived to illustrate each of Oliver’s lines.
Instructions for living a life:
Oliver described in a number of poems what “living a life” meant. In these poems, her emphasis was on the importance of being fully present to the moment. In one poem, “When death comes” (Daniels, 2014) she wrote that
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
In “Sometimes,” Oliver has given us instructions for living, not simply visiting this world, not going to our deaths sighing, frightened or full of argument, but having made of our lives “something particular and real.”
The question for this essay, of course, is what are the instructions for living my life as a scholar? For living our lives as scholars, for making our lives “particular and real”? Though the poem will answer these questions in lines quoted later in this essay, it highlights the importance of them now.
Is a life of organizational scholarship a meaningful way of living? Or is it really not much more than “visiting” others who are actually living their lives, collecting a lot of data about them, some of it quite personal, and making pronouncements about them?
Some types of research might seem to be more “visiting” than living, especially if they involve what might appear to be superficial data gathering (such as through Qualtrics or Mechanical Turk) or data gathering in constrained settings where the only interactions are technological. Qualitative methods may enable more living. However, our relationships with others in our research are much more important than our methods, and how we interact with research participants and the care with which we attend to the information they help to provide can make our encounters more particular, and real.
Pay attention
Oliver often spoke of the importance of attention. She wrote in 1997 (p. 34), “This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” Later she added (Oliver, 2005, p. 151) that “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” In fact, Selig (2010, p. 1) refers to Oliver’s contribution as “extolling an ethic of attention.” Selig commented, “When we pay attention to something, we stretch toward it, lean into it, move nearer, whether with our literal bodies, or our soul’s energetic body.”
Attention is sometimes equated with mindfulness, which Giluk (2009, p. 805) describes as “purposefully and nonjudgmentally paying attention to the present moment.” Attention is also a crucial component of a formal definition of contemplation that has been particularly meaningful for me. A Jesuit theologian named Walter Burghardt (1989) defined contemplation as “a long loving look at the real,” and added that
Each word is crucial: real. .. look . . . long . . . loving. The real, reality, is not reducible to some far-off, abstract, intangible God-in-the-sky. Reality is living, pulsing people. . .. This look at the real is a long look. Not in terms of measured time, but wonderfully unhurried, gloriously unhurried. . . But this long look must be a loving look. It is not a fixed stare, . . . It demands that the real captivate me, . . . For contemplation is not study, not cold examination.
To be captivated by the real is not easy. It requires developing a quality of presence to others that includes a constant reflective attitude of attention. At the very least, accomplishing it on a regular basis likely requires some type(s) of regular and consistent meditative practice. Such practice may take multiple forms, including, among many others, mindfulness exercises, daily prayer, Zen sitting, encounters with nature, and the use of photography and art as ways of seeing beauty.
My own meditative practice often involves contemplative photography (Karr & Wood, 2011; Paintner, 2013; Phillips, 2000). This means wandering around with a digital camera (and, recently, a mobile phone), paying attention to what I see and to what I am drawn, taking photos and working with those that are meaningful to create sets of images on which I later meditate. But this is only one way among many. Bob Hinings (personal communication) described his own meditative practice as follows.
First, there is being open to all and everything, an exercise of “emptying” the mind to be open to whatever thoughts and feelings may come. Second, there is an act of centering on something in a deliberative way that is quite specific, waiting for inspiration and leading. And in both cases there is a next, reflexive step of receiving those thoughts and feelings and acting on them in some way.
In addition, Mike Zundel (2013, p. 119) has discussed how
“Walking around” represents a break from the sphere of reason and the willful, controlling, calculating, and mastering approach of Cartesianism (Sköldberg, 1998). Here, the objects of the world are not merely aspects of our purposes, for instance facilitating or hampering our travels from one point to the next, they are just there; waiting to surprise and bewonder us when we forget our preconceived frames of how things reasonably ought to be (Ingold, 2011).
Meditative and contemplative practices may lead us to what Nancy Adler and Andre Delbecq (2018, p. 120) described as the space and time to be able to experience beauty:
The invitation is to leave behind, at least briefly, the buzzing-worker-bee mode . . . and to enter into inner silence and peacefulness. From that calm, centered place, we invite you to re-encounter the beauty of our collective humanity—the beauty of words, ideas, art, action, and leadership. Allow beauty in all its forms to illuminate and support the humanity that your own and others’ leadership brings into the world.
Attention and compassion
The attention Burghardt describes is certainly not the look of a detached researcher who is careful to keep a distance for fear of interfering with scholarly objectivity. It involves open hands and hearts without attempts to control. As Frost (1999, p. 396) eloquently wrote in “Why compassion counts,”
As organizational researchers, we tend to see organizations and their members with little other than a dispassionate eye and a training that inclines us toward abstractions that do not include consideration of the dignity and humanity of those in our lens. Our hearts, our compassion, are not engaged and we end up being outside of and missing the humanity, the “aliveness” of organizational life. . .. As a result, we miss some pretty fundamental and important aspects of organizational life and functioning, and our theories and practices probably distort more than they illuminate what they purport to explain.
In contrast, long, loving looks consider the dignity and humanity of others; compassion and care are core dimensions of contemplation (Rynes, Bartunek, Dutton, & Margolis, 2012). As Worline and Dutton (2017, p. 33) summarize, “noticing is the portal to awakening compassion at work.” Thus, Jane Dutton and Janet Dukerich (2006, p. 22) illustrated the kind of attention Oliver and Frost discussed in describing what they noticed from the participants in a research project they were conducting regarding how the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey dealt with homeless people. As they recounted, their
first interview was with a seasoned civil engineer who had worked for the Port Authority (PA) for close to a decade. When they asked him about how the PA’s involvement with the homelessness issue affected him, he paused. There was an agonized expression on his face. With anguish in his voice, he told them about the helpless feeling he had experienced a few weeks before when a homeless mother who was sleeping at the Path Train terminal asked him to hold her sleeping child and explained to him that both she and her baby had AIDS. As researchers, Jane and Janet returned to this expression and reaction many times to seek insight into how an organizational issue like homelessness related to the lived experience of Port Authority employees.
The challenge of paying attention
Attention and noticing do not just happen automatically. Adler (2015, p. 482) states:
I along with many others remain strangely blind not only to beauty but to the very existence of the miracles that the world most needs in order to create the future that each of us so fervently desires. . .. As scholars, executives, and leaders, we have become expert at seeing only that which can already be explained, while having allowed our skills at seeing that which is desired, but beyond our current comprehension, to atrophy.
Others have also described challenges with “blindness” within their scholarly experiences. Connie Gersick (1992, p. 54) described how when she was developing her model of time and transition in work teams: “At the time I had completed two observations, my method had enabled me to ‘find’ the basic elements of my theory, but I did not see them.”
Karen Golden-Biddle (2011, p. 79) commented on “how easily as researchers we can overlook the potential generativity embedded in the smallest and most invisible of moments during our (research) interactions. Blink and we (dis)miss them, and it is often quite easy to do so.” She went on to describe how, after a presentation to a group of research participants, she and her coauthors “too quickly explained away nagging feelings about the presentation. This explanation shut down any consideration of our feelings as cues to pay attention, effectively dismissing the nascent opportunity from further exploration.”.
Then she received a phone call from a research participant, an invitation to consider something new. The call “was not only easy to ignore, it was also uncomfortable for me to hear because I had no idea what we might see in further data analyses. . .. Yet, it was precisely in the turning toward this not knowing that we began to cultivate the opportunity to come to see new lines of sight that ultimately enriched our portrait and understanding of life in this organization.”
It may be particularly difficult to “see” if the “long, loving look” reveals something very painful. For example, Katina Sawyer (in press) has been conducting qualitative research on the experience of commercially trafficked women. She commented, “It was very difficult to stay ‘present’ in the moment during interviews as I came to realize the true gravity of the circumstances that had brought the women who I had interacted with on so many occasions.”
Aida Hajro (2017, p. 193) has paid attention to and drawn on her own difficult experiences in the research she has conducted, especially in the research questions she asks about the experiences of highly qualified migrants in new countries. These questions come from her own experience as a child, as
My parents and I made sense of events we faced as migrants pushed from our country of origin due to war, how we decided what actions to take in order to integrate into our new society and what role host-country nationals, who were willing to guide and support us, played in fostering our positive acculturation outcomes.
Attention and research processes
Some scholars have described how making efforts to pay attention to participants in their research leads them to change how they interact with them, both in designing data gathering and in carrying it out. Teresa Amabile and Douglas (Tim) Hall (in press) commented that
As a result of observing, in these practice interviews, that the questions could arouse negative emotions for some participants, we decided to schedule a later research meeting with a psychotherapist/coach who specializes in working with retiring individuals and couples, to get her advice on these issues. As a result, we made some modifications to our interview protocol.
Danna Greenberg, Judith Clair, and Jamie Ladge (in press), who were studying pregnancy and motherhood at work, noted,
Even with a well-designed interview protocol, we had to respond to power shifts that unfolded during the interviews. For instance, multiple participants sheepishly confessed they could not imagine scaling back or staying home full-time with a child. We were attentive to the power shift that occurred as women disclosed the vulnerability they were feeling. We took a supportive stance to help participants see their standpoint as valid.
I had an experience in the 1980s that awakened me to the importance of attention. As I have recounted elsewhere (Bartunek, 2006), I was studying a change initiative at a school, testing a theoretical model I had developed. I was doing a fine academic job. However, I was dismissed from the school and the study, because the change initiative was not going well and the head of the school felt my presence was making the situation worse. Further, when I started to do some writing about the change project, I found that some of the language I used when I was quoting people there, especially slang, was offensive to them. This was a difficult but important realization for me, and led to a change in my research practice that I will detail more below.
Importance of attention for organizational scholars
This discussion highlights both the importance and the difficulty of the ongoing development of attention over our academic careers. We give our doctoral students training in research methods, realizing that we are often just touching the surface of what they will need to know, and that their knowledge will need to continue to develop and mature over time. It’s reasonable to expect that developing the capacity for attention is also not something learned in a very brief period of time, but may require long periods of time developing the capacity to recognize our blind spots and learning from them. This likely requires the kind of personal meditative practice I noted above. (Taylor (2009, ch. 2, presents an elegant description of how to learn to pay attention.) I hope that we are better at paying attention by the end of our careers than we were at their beginnings in part because, as Kathy Kram (personal communication) has indicated, when we are “in the rat race of the tenure track” we may speed our pace and abandon contemplative practices.
Be astonished
Mary Oliver used terms like astonished or its synonyms in multiple poems. For example, in her poem “When Death Comes” (introduced above), she said: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.”
Ullyatt (2011) comments that a bride “married” to amazement suggests a beginner in this kind of very important lifetime relationship. But Oliver wanted to say that this was true of her “all (her) life.” The relationship never grew old or stale. Burrows (2004, p. 174) adds that
The poet. . . reminds us that the life of language moves beyond a construction of reality within the limits of reason alone, and that a disenchanted world emptied of the symbolic and denied the traces of transcendence is finally a difficult if not unbearable dwelling place.
While organizational scholars do not often talk in terms of encountering the transcendent in our work, there are occasional moments when we use terms like astonishment or amazement. For example, Adler (2015, p. 480), said with regard to her art that
Allowing a painting to be born is to stand in awe of one of life’s most beautiful mysteries. I enter the dance; paintings and monotype prints emerge. Creation—whether on a canvas of words, visual images, organizational spaces, or the world’s stage—is about giving birth to the possibilities inherent in mystery.
Sometimes astonishment comes in the course of our theorizing. In her description of the development of her construct of team development, Gersick (1992, p. 61) described how at one point “I pulled my husband’s copy of The structure of scientific revolutions (Kuhn, 1962) from our bookcase and sat down to read it. I was astonished and delighted at the similarities among these theories, Levinson’s and my own.”
Sometimes astonishment comes from the help of a colleague. Alan Meyer (1992, p. 87) wrote of the help he got from Bill Starbuck on a paper on which he was working.
Bill Starbuck, whose office is next door to mine, has sent me a three-page letter. It warns that he will soon be giving me detailed editorial comments on my manuscript. . .and explains that he hopes the letter will keep me from becoming “irate or demoralized when I see what he has to say.” Instead, I’m astonished. Bill has completely reworked the paper’s first 10 pages. . .
Sometimes astonishment comes from the seemingly farcical. In their study of strategy development, MacIntosh and Beech (2011, p. 33) noted that they were astonished by the role of fantasy among organizational members. In their paper, they described ways that “strategy work is composed of both observable behavior and the fantasies and imaginings of the actors involved.” They honored the importance of individuals believing what on the surface is unbelievable.
And sometimes astonishment comes from noticing others’ compassion. Frost (1999, p. 396) described his experience as a patient in the hospital while watching a nurse care for a very sick patient.
I think that she was somehow moved to manifest her practice in ways that far exceeded the prescriptions of a science and administration of nursing care. I, in turn, was moved by what I observed and by what I thought and felt about what I observed. One might also say that the unfolding experience included me – I “moved into” or was moved into the flow by the presence of such palpable compassion. The act of compassion appeared to help the patient heal. Witnessing the act of compassion had an emotional effect on me. I too was lifted, my spirits raised by seeing and then becoming part of this act and the process.
Why do natural scientists find it easier than we do to find their work astonishing?
The examples above are important, discrete experiences of astonishment. However, while we as organizational scholars sometimes describe distinct experiences of awe, we rarely perceive the findings of our studies as awesome. Natural scientists can be models for us in finding the results of their studies awe-inspiring. Here are some examples.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (an award he shared with Professor Felix Bloch), Edward Purcell (1952, p. 219) said:
Professor Bloch has told you how one can detect the precession of the magnetic nuclei in a drop of water. Commonplace as such experiments have become in our laboratories, I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the ordinary things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep – great heaps of protons quietly processing in the earth’s magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.
Carlo Rovelli (2001, pp. 80–81) ended his Seven Lessons in Physics with:
There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns. They are in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes. Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.
Recently, when the first black hole was successfully photographed, Professor Larry Kimura of the University of Hawaii was asked to give a Hawaiian name to it. As Mele (2019) reported, Dr. Jessica Dempsey, deputy director of the Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii
and other researchers described the image to him two weeks ago, and she said she watched his face “just light up." In a moment that she described as “astonishing” and “mind-bending” he came up with one Hawaiian word for the black hole that took scientists six research papers to capture: pōwehi.”
Astonishment as an integral dimension of our work
Although we do not tend to describe our findings this way, some organizational scholars do use the language of astonishment, awe and wonder to describe elements of their work. For example, Cunha, Clegg and Kamoche (2006) distinguished between uncertainty and surprise in organizational settings, and said that
To be surprised, by contrast [with uncertainty], is not to lack surety about the parameters of a phenomenon but to suddenly or unexpectedly encounter a phenomenon not previously considered, it is to be taken unawares, and to feel a sense of wonder, astonishment, or amazement at something unanticipated.
Carlsen and Dutton (2011, p. 19) added that “More important than any singular instance or story of generative moments [in research processes] is the seeding of a sense of wonder about life in research.”
Particularly explicit statements of the importance of this type of experience come from Sandelands and Carlsen (2013, p. 359) with regard to organizational research, and Cooperrider (1996) with regard to organization development. Sandelands and Carlsen asked:
Why study organization? It is a question we students of organization rarely think to ask, even though, or perhaps because, it has everything to do with what we bring to our subject and with what we take from it. We wrote this essay to ask this first question of organization studies. And, we wrote this essay to point to its most fundamental answer – an answer too often ignored or cynically dismissed – namely, that we should study organization for its wonder. . . . Ours is a wonderful world and we are blessed to be its students.
Cooperrider (1996, p. 1) asked:
What is the role of wonder in OD (Organization Development)? What creates a sense of wonder as we inquire into organizational life, and what spoils it? What are the varieties of wonder? What is the connection of wonder to knowledge? To the imagination? To the flowering of relationships? What happens to the storyteller, for example, when the room is filled by people sitting forward, listening, even smiling, with a sense of wonder? Why is uninhibited wonder something we generally restrict to children? If doing good inquiry is at the heart of OD, why then so little talk of things like awe, curiosity, veneration, surprise, delight, amazement, and wonder – in short, everything that serves to infuse what OD has traditionally referred to as the “spirit of inquiry.”
Compassion as an element of astonishment
In Burghardt’s (1989, p. 16) expression of contemplation as the “long loving look at the real,” sometimes what is real is not positive or beautiful. As he noted, “contemplation does not always summon up delight. The real includes sin and war, poverty and race, illness and death. . . . But even here the real I contemplate must end in compassion.”
Thus, it is crucial to recognize that deep feelings such as sorrow, compassion, reverence, concern and sometimes confusion or anger may be equivalent to expressions of awe when the “real” is not beautiful. Sally Maitlis (2011) described the reverence she felt when interviewing musicians and dancers who were forced, through injury, to find new vocations and identities. As she wrote (p. 76), “I feel honored to be trusted with their stories, in which passion and pain are deeply entwined. I care about the work they were called to do, and I feel their anguish in no longer being able to do it.” From this place of awe, Maitlis learned not only about her participants’ (p. 77) “lost hopes, broken dreams, and journeys terminated,” but also about their “previously undiscovered talents and passions” and “realizations about what is most important.”
Gail Whiteman and William Cooper (2016, p. 123), in a study of Whiteman’s experiences of corporate social irresponsibility in a supposedly socially responsible setting in Guyana, note that “our narrative analysis highlights the ambiguity and confusion the first author felt as she collected emotionally disturbing data from her informants in the field.” They later added (p. 128) “We walked home as the Amazonian night fell. Stars filled the sky, and the beauty was captivating. . . . We were all silent. The situation seemed pretty grim. I felt hopeless. What could I do with all these stories (of rape)?”
Sawyer (in press) described how she felt when the participants in her study, commercially trafficked women, shared their stories with her.
Many of the stories I heard while I was conducting interviews were deeply upsetting and disturbing. While these stories would be difficult for anyone to hear, the impact that they had on me was greater because they were coming from the mouths of people I knew.
She added:
It is also worth noting that I experienced extremely joyous emotions throughout my work on this project. While I heard many stories of past lives that were riddled with trauma and mistreatment, I also heard stories of hope, self-love, and personal accomplishment. Whenever a resident graduated from the program, got a job, found housing, or celebrated an anniversary of being clean or sober, I experienced joy along with them.
Similarly, Hajro, Zilinskaite, and Stahl (2017) reflected on their own emotional experience doing research with migrants, and how they empathized with the migrants and refugees they studied, recognizing their pain and suffering. Conducting the interviews was painful for both sides, for Hajro as the interviewer and migrants and refugees as the interviewees, as the stories told re-opened old wounds. They reminded Hajro of what it felt like to flee the violence and bloodshed of war.
Importance of being astonished for organizational scholars
This discussion highlights the importance of the expressions of the feelings, especially astonishment, wonder and compassion that arise in the conduct of our research and its outcomes, as well in our other organizational practice, such as organization development consulting. Like attention, this is not part of our training. Further, like contemplative attention, it will take time and practice for us to develop the capacity to experience it in depth, if we even desire to have this capacity.
Yet, if natural scientists can experience and express awe and wonder in their findings, why can’t we as organizational scholars? And if we experience compassion in our research processes we should be able to acknowledge it as an integral dimension of these processes.
Tell about it
Experiences of attention and astonishment and compassion may profoundly affect us, but that does not necessarily mean that “tell about it” in a way that goes beyond standard academic texts follows straightforwardly. Zona (2011, p. 123) wrote that for Mary Oliver, the act of writing was
at once a means of experiencing most fully her interbeing with the observable world and of rehearsing the provisional distance between self and other upon which this sensation of merging depends. . . . Such writing-as-mindfulness is hard-earned, as it exchanges the individual ego and its attendant parsing of experience into tidy oppositions for a capaciousness of being that forms the bedrock of compassion—one’s ability to “love the world.”
Ullyatt (2011, p. 123) added that “tell about it” “comprises two notions: writing about it, as Oliver has done, or having readers share their newfound mindfulness with others.” There are several ways such sharing may happen. For example, Frost (1999, p. 396) said that after his experience in the hospital,
I entered, perceptually and emotionally, a world of organizational attitude and action that changed what I saw and influenced what I subsequently thought, felt, and did. One outcome was my letter to the hospital [applauding the nurse’s work]. Another is this (1999) paper.
He added (p. 397):
To act with compassion requires a degree of courage – one must often go beyond the technical, the imperative, the rules of organizations and beyond past practice – to invent new practices that have within them empathy and love and a readiness to connect to others. There is a creativity, a spontaneity, and a very special attunement that accompany a desire to act with empathy engendered by a sympathetic consciousness of another’s distress.
Dutton and Workman (2011, pp. 403–404) illustrated how Frost acted with compassion in many ways, not only in this hospital example. They noted, for example,
In small acts and through his presence, Peter showed up in ways that strengthened others. . . . Karl Weick, who was a close friend of Peter’s, described his experience this way: “Peter had a profound ability to bring us together, to draw the best from us. His spirit infused everything he wrote, everything he gathered, pretty much everything he touched.”
Illustrations of scholarship that tells about it
Designs of scholarly activities
Some ways of designing our scholarly activities embody ways of telling about it. One example is Nag’s heart meetings (https://www.nagsheart.com). Kathy Kram (personal communication) described how, at a Nag’s heart meeting in the spring of 2019,
We spent an entire weekend in a group of eight, actively listening to one another about our research and our struggles with doing our research in the contexts in which we work and live. It was the compassion and attentiveness that enabled profound shifts in my thinking and others’ thinking about how to move forward with courage, compassion, and empathy.
Another design example was presented by Hansen and Trank (2016). They described ways to conduct compassionate research, using as an illustration an ethnographic study of the first permanent death penalty defense team in the United States. They suggested (p. 356), based on their study, that a compassionate research methodology
incorporates the defining components of compassion—witnessing the suffering of others, feeling their pain with them, making sense of it, and seeking to alleviate their suffering. The dual purposes of alleviating suffering in the immediate context and informing theory is achieved through infusing compassion into the research process itself, and involves three essential elements: ethnography, aesthetic inquiry, and emotionalism.
Scholarly writing
Some scholars have published books or other scholarly writings that flow from their experiences of attention, astonishment, and compassion. Andrew Hoffman (2016, p. 33) wrote Finding purpose: Environmental stewardship as a personal calling, in which he described how care for the Earth is a profound calling for him, and how:
To protect something, we have to love it. And to love it, we have to take the time to appreciate its beauty and value. In 2014, I took some time to do just that. After giving a talk in California, I added three extra days to tour the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite National Park by motorcycle with an old friend. Those three days reminded me of what sustainability is all about, allowed me time to reflect on my purpose and, at the most basic level, helped to restore my soul.
Mark De Rond (2017) wrote Doctors at War, which empirically explored the complex experiences of doctors in Afghanistan providing care for troops wounded in battles there. As De Rond put it (p. xv),
This slim volume tells their story. While it has its roots in serious scholarship, I have not dressed it up in the jargon, conceptual niceties, and conventions that are typical of academia, for fear that doing so would suck all the life right out of it.
Further (pp. xvii–xviii),
This book has a singular aim: to try to portray the lived experience of those whose lives, in spurts, revolve around damage-control, resuscitation and early surgical management in a war zone. Simple though this sounds, lived experience cannot be plucked from trees and passed around like fruit; rather it is something one approximates, using whatever empathy, imagination, and analytical skill is required to bring into sharper focus the world as experienced by “the other.” . . . I hope this narrative may . . .[allow] their world to come to life in all its hard-hitting realism: a world of banter and emotional turmoil, of the sacred and profane, of caring too little and too much, of playing God and of playing not.
Maitlis (personal communication) tells about her interviewees’ experiences of trauma and growth by sharing their stories, as far as possible, in their own words in her scholarly writing (Maitlis, 2009; in press). She does this so that “readers and listeners can connect viscerally with her participants’ lives, understanding their experience from a place of shared humanity.”
Relationships with practitioners
We may also tell about it by means of our research approach. I noted above, under the section on “pay attention,” that after I was dismissed from a study I was conducting at a school I started to pay attention to the fact that although I was conducting research that was very fine from the perspective of standard research expectations, the participants in the study were assessing the value of the research in very different ways than I was. In particular, it was important to them that they be recognized for the good they were doing, not just failures that had occurred. They felt very vulnerable, especially when the change intervention they were implementing was not succeeding. This was certainly not something I had learned about in any research methods courses I had taken.
I knew of an article by Evered and Louis (1981) that described how insiders to a setting and outsiders to it often inquire quite differently about a setting, and that outsiders often ignore the insiders’ concerns. So I worked with Meryl Louis to develop a means of doing research called insider/outsider team research (Bartunek & Louis, 1996) that involves external researchers collaborating with insider members of a setting to study it so the insiders have a chance to contribute to the story being told about them.
I have subsequently used this approach in multiple studies (e.g. Bartunek, 2003; Bartunek, Lacey, & Wood, 1992; Bartunek, Trullen, Immediato, & Schneider, 2007; Giorgi, Guider, & Bartunek, 2014). Although I am not always able to use it, I do so whenever I can, even if it is not possible to acknowledge explicitly that I am using the approach due to confidentiality concerns.
Scholarly interactions
Finally, we can tell about it in many aspects of our day-to-day work interactions. Hinings (personal communication) described,
When I began to think about retirement . . . I did, in fact, contemplate my future in an active and specific way. The process that I went through with family, friends and colleagues involved asking some of them to also contemplate my future. From reflexively thinking about the outcomes of that process, two aspects became important. One was to continue on, as long as it made sense, as an academic in the general sense of research and teaching. The other, more specific, and more compassionate, I hope, was to give back; to even more actively be a mentor and a coach to graduate students and young faculty; to pass on whatever wisdom I might have. I have managed to do this at the University of Alberta and through PhD and Junior Faculty consortia and workshops at the Academy [of Management], EGOS, the Austrian Early Scholar’s Workshop as well as by being a visitor at several universities around the world.
As another illustration, Belle Rose Ragins (personal communication) had a compassionate practice of writing decision letters during her terms as associate editor and editor at the Academy of Management Review. Ragins would find a photo of the author and post it on her screen while writing her decision letters. If it was a rejection letter (all too often the case) she would send a short prayer that the pain of rejection would be eased for that author. She never sent rejection letters on Fridays or before holidays.
Yet another illustration of “tell about it” can be found in Mandy O’Neill’s (April 3, 2019) blog post on a high quality connections website. She wrote of a time when a friend of hers who was feeling “discouraged about how difficult it was to get a job in her field and by the nasty behavior she observed among some of the people she knew who scored top jobs.” This friend had one day received an email from a senior colleague in her field, saying, in part, “I am writing with no big purpose in mind, just to be supportive of the amazing work that you are doing. If you have anything in my realm that you would like to share, I would be deeply interested.” This buoyed her friend’s spirits immensely, and beautifully illustrated “tell about it” as a way of showing compassion.
Importance of telling about it for organizational scholars
As this section has shown, there are many ways organizational scholars take action based on their contemplative experiences, regardless of whether these actions are publishable in top tier journals. These range from mentoring processes to publishing books and articles, to writing journal review letters to designing conferences, to developing new research methods that express compassion and foster contemplation. There is actually a good deal of our academic work that benefits from our contemplative practices. Such work is crucial for our field, regardless of whether it is acknowledged and “counted” or not. Tsui (2013, p. 176) noted, “When we are judged only on how many papers we publish in certain journals and not on whether our research is important to society, we lose meaning in our work.”
Discussion and Conclusion
I have taken a few lines from one poem by Mary Oliver and reflected on them as indicators of contemplation among organizational scholars. I realize that by including examples that do not reflect all three instructions, I am not telling complete, integrated stories of what contemplation encompasses for these scholars. Further, I cannot be sure that the three dimensions Oliver describes are all present (even in unarticulated form) in the examples. Nevertheless, the individual examples are crucial for providing some indices of the breadth of contemplative experiences we are privileged to enjoy.
Some of what I have presented – revising an interview protocol to make it easier for respondents, astonishment and gratitude at a colleague’s help, writing a scholarly book – may not seem, on the surface, important enough to count as truly contemplative. Yet activities like these are, or at least may, embody considerable contemplative depth, depending on how they are approached and treated and regardless of whether they are explicitly articulated.
Further, many of these experiences reflect compassion for those who are suffering. As I have sought for and found examples for this paper, I have also become a bit awestruck at the depth of the contemplative and compassionate activities in which many of our colleagues are engaged, at the reverence for others that they display. The examples suggest to me that even if we do not think we experience contemplative dimensions in our own lives, we may learn contemplation and compassion from others. Others’ activities may be a gift to us, just as the nurse’s were a gift to Peter Frost.
Without question, there are many more such activities than those described here, regardless of whether they are publicly acknowledged or even recognized. This essay only begins to touch on the many kinds of contemplative practices in which our colleagues engage, and what a difference they might make. In Fletcher’s (2001) terms, these practices often “disappear” in any kind of calculus of formal impact. Yet, they considerably affect the extent to which academia in our field is experienced as something more than a competition for publications and citations in which opportunity structures and incentives discourage paying attention to the depth of what we are studying, and to potential experiences of awe, wonder, and compassion. They influence how much of our field is experienced by its younger members as developmental, and by its older members as life-renewing rather that depleting. Attention, awe and “tell about it” are crucially important for organizational scholars. These all make an important difference in our, and our colleagues’, academic experience.
Hopefully this essay will serve as a call to action for scholars to take and enable the steps necessary to make contemplation more salient at work. Hopefully it can help us to pay attention to contemplative dimensions of our and others’ work, to be astonished by the extent of this work and its outcomes and to tell about these experiences in ways that matter for our own scholarship, our scholarly community, and for our larger world, in part by making us more compassionate. Perhaps Mary Oliver’s poetry, with its very simple, but profound, instructions for living our lives, can help spur such an effort.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Jane Dutton, Aida Hajro, Kathy Kram, Robert Macintosh, Trish Reay, and Margaret Wilson for their helpful suggestions and comments on previous drafts.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
