Pathways to Mindful Qualitative Organizational Communication Research

Laying Down a Path in Walking

What I have learned in the course of my fieldwork is that doing qualitative research in organizations requires researchers to work with whatever happens in the field and to let things happen instead of trying to force or impose predetermined meanings on situations. Practicing mindfulness requires being open to the eventfulness of situations because everyday life’s changing, interdependent nature prevents predetermination. If we claim to take a performative, “grounded in action” (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004) approach to studying organizations, it is important to avoid objectifying or reifying the people, things, and environments we are studying, including the organizations that form the focal points of our inquiries. Practicing mindfulness in the field thus implies following through on the claim that organizations are socio-material realities whose meanings are coproduced in interactions between a multitude of human and non-human actors (see Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009).

One way to stay true to this performative approach is to investigate this coproduction while moving along with it as it unfolds (see also Nicolini, 2009). Although it might be uncomfortable, it is important to relinquish control over the research process as well as its outcomes, which cannot be known beforehand. Perhaps the hardest thing to do in the field is to “lay down a path in walking” (Varela, 1987, p. 63), to make sense of what is happening in the unraveling of situations—and to accept that it will never be possible to capture the dynamic richness of situations in their completeness or actuality, since sensemaking involves reconstructing this richness retrospectively by using concepts that foreground some aspects and obscure others (see Weick, 1979).

The importance of embracing the situationality of everyday life in qualitative research became especially clear to me when I was studying the organizing practices of Buddhist monks and nuns in a remote monastic community in the Indian Himalayas, commonly referred to as “Rizong.” At some point during my fieldwork, the monastery and nunnery where struck by a massive landslide, which dramatically changed the course of my inquiry (see Brummans, 2012). The field forced me, quite literally, to let go of my desire to control the “object” of my fieldwork. I had to concentrate on the unfolding events, but also increasingly folded into the field, together with the nuns, monks, and many other things and beings (the heavy rain; the constant flood of mud, boulders, and trees; collapsing roofs; fleeing horses; sacred artifacts in need of protection). Amid these tumultuous circumstances, I learned a great deal about the nuns’ and monks’ organizing that I would not have been able to learn if the disaster had not forced me to let go of my desire to control the field.

For example, during the disaster, I observed how important artifacts such as Buddhist statues and wall paintings are to the monks, because they treated these symbolic objects as sacred beings, and they interacted with them with such care and considerateness that it seemed as if the artifacts were more important than themselves. Seeing the reverence and calmness with which they spoke to these spiritual objects inside a small temple, the care and delicacy with which they carried the statues away from the rain that was coming through the roof, and the diligence with which they kept coming back to check up on them throughout the night revealed how communicating with these artifacts enabled the monks to concretize their connections with sacred figures such as the Buddha, Buddhist deities, and the founder of their monastic order. At the same time, it allowed them to invoke the mystique and infinite ideality of these beings. These artifacts, that is, reminded them of the preciousness of life and encouraged them to act with compassion and wisdom in these precarious circumstances, rather than become absorbed by narrow self-concerns.

Witnessing the monks’ dedication, I felt a strong desire to assist in protecting these artifacts. While emptying the pots and pans we had put everywhere to catch the incoming rain, removing water that had pooled on the plastic bags we had put over the statues, and checking on the roof and walls of the temple, my concerns about surviving the disaster moved to the background, and I felt increasingly privileged to be here with these sacred beings. Focusing on my connection with these symbolic artifacts, which had initially seemed mere lifeless objects, helped me realize how vital our sense of connectedness is for dealing with an organizational crisis in mindful ways. Had I stayed outside the temple, mindlessly caught up in my own fears and worries, I would not have experienced or understood the inspirational force of artifactual beings such as these in times of calamity.

My experiences in the monastery illustrate how important it is to work with whatever happens in the field and to embrace its serendipity, even if it is overwhelming, scary, or upsetting. More particularly, they show the importance of paying attention to moments of surprise during fieldwork—such as when I first noticed that the monks regarded the statues as actual living beings, rather than mere inanimate objects. “[Irregularity is] the overwhelming preponderant rule of experience, and regularity only the strange exception,” Charles Sanders Peirce (1931-1958, cited in Misak, 2013, p. 48), one of the founders of American pragmatism, noted. Although we may be interested in understanding the recurrent, regular, or routine-like character of organizing processes, Peirce reminds us that it is useful to be aware of the irregular in everyday life, which may present itself in subtle ways or more dramatically, as exemplified by the Rizong disaster. According to Peirce, surprise is key to improving our knowledge and beliefs. Because instances of surprise create doubt or wonder, they serve as the catalysts of inquiry by testing the quality of our body of beliefs, and they can potentially introduce new ideas into it (see Misak, 2013)—anyone who has watched the recent BBC series “Sherlock” knows the importance of paying close attention to moments of surprise in an investigation.

The value of Peirce’s insight became evident during the Rizong disaster, because I discovered that we can only begin to understand an organization’s enactment by folding into, or with, the concrete situations that bring forth this enactment. “Knowledge is about situatedness,” Francisco Varela (1999, p. 7) said—the late Varela was a renowned biologist, neuroscientist, and philosopher with a great interest in Buddhism. “[T]he world is not something that is given to us,” Varela stated, “but something we engage in by moving, touching, breathing, and eating” (p. 8). We know the world by enacting it in interactions with things and beings, “bringing [it] forth by concrete handling” (p. 8)—echoing Weick’s (1979) theory of organizing, as well as pragmatist thought.

In line with these ideas, my fieldwork experiences show that practicing mindfulness in qualitative research involves allowing our understanding of an organization’s enactment to emerge in the situations that envelope us by seeing the interconnections and interactions between the beings and things that bring forth these situations, including ourselves, the researchers. For this reason, it is useful to adopt a non-dualistic approach to studying organizational enactment, as I will discuss in the next section.

Adopting a Non-Dualistic Approach to Studying Organizational Enactment

Closely connected to the idea of laying down a path in walking in qualitative research is the importance of seeing qualitative research methods communicatively, that is, as co-constructive activities in which a researcher engages with a number of other actors, both human and non-human. As I have shown, learning how various interactants, including non-human ones such as artifacts, animals, and the elements, contribute to the enactment of an organization requires us to fold with situations and become interactants ourselves. Thus, our understanding of this enactment emerges in the production and reproduction of relationships in the field. These relationships are not relationships of rapport between individual actors, as is often thought (see Marcus, 2001), but of interdependent origination, where the identities or selves of the actors are constituted in the course of ongoing interactions.

As I will illustrate, cultivating awareness of this interdependent origination in qualitative research is important because it helps us understand how self–other relationships are constituted in processes of organizing, yet also contribute to it. More specifically, cultivating this awareness helps us understand how viewing self and other dualistically (as existing independently) or non-dualistically (as emerging interdependently) has significant consequences for an organization’s enactment, as well as for the ways in which we investigate it (see also Brummans, 2013).

I observed and experienced a form of non-dualistic organizing while living in the monastic community in India, but also while studying the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, an international humanitarian organization headquartered in Taiwan. The consequences of enacting an organization without seeing the world in terms of separate entities became especially clear to me during participant observation in Tzu Chi’s recycling centers. Sorting paper and plastic bottles in the midst of summer with volunteers who were mostly seniors, I often felt overwhelmed by the heat and amount of waste that was arriving by the truckloads. What kept me going was seeing the contentment with which people, twice my age, were doing this tedious work. When talking with volunteers, they mentioned that the work made them feel peaceful. “Just like meditation,” several of them said. They explained that the recycling made them feel active, connected to others, as if they were part of a big family. Creating a cleaner world for generations to come and teaching people about the environment through their activities gave them purpose, illustrating how they embodied the idea of non-duality in their talk and actions. They said that it felt as if they were recycling themselves by prolonging each product’s life cycle, showing how they appropriated material objects into their self-constitution in a way that echoed my experiences in Rizong.

In their discourse, the volunteers repeatedly invoked their dharma master’s credo: “Just do it.” According to the master, a Buddhist nun who founded Tzu Chi as a grassroots women’s group in 1966, abstract concepts such as wisdom, compassion, interdependence, or karma can only be comprehended in the act of helping people, animals, and the environment—not by simply thinking or talking about it, or feeling sorry. The master incarnated the volunteers’ spiritual ideal, and invoking her in their daily interactions made them feel connected to her, giving them the will and energy to keep going (see also Brummans et al., 2013). “We’re on the path,” they said.

Speaking and working with the volunteers gradually showed me how to enact Tzu Chi as they did, which made the recycling easier, even enjoyable. It showed me how the volunteers were able to carry on by finding meaning in the very act of working together and taking a broader, long-term perspective from which each step, regardless of its apparent magnitude, makes a difference.

My experiences in the recycling centers and the monastic order illustrate how a dualistic mode of studying an organization’s enactment ignores the interdependencies between the human and non-human actors that coproduce the organization as a meaningful socio-material reality. In this mode of inquiry, it seems as if a collection of individual selves are enmeshed in interactional games, each caught in their own “ego tunnel” (Metzinger, 2009)—including us, the researchers. Selves are viewed and experienced as separate things with separate minds and bodies that are separate from their environments (see Rosch, 1999). When studying organizational enactment non-dualistically (mindfully), the selfless nature of selves and others, both human and non-human, takes center stage. In this case, we become more and more suspicious of “our feeling of ‘I’ as a true center” (Varela, 1999, p. 61), and “things” such as “I,” “you,” “we,” “they,” “the researcher,” “the research participants,” and so on seem merely conceptual. Thus, the selves people and things inhabit, embody, enact, narrate, and frequently cling to increasingly seem artificial or “empty” of inherent, independent existence. This is not only true for individual selves, but also for collective ones such as organizations. From a non-dualistic perspective, also a collective, organizational self arises and subsides as part of concrete situations that are embodied and enacted in interactions between various actors. What practicing mindfulness in qualitative research can, in turn, help reveal is how organizations are constituted by clinging to the frontiers between the self and other, human and non-human, individual and collective, and micro and macro—or letting go of them altogether.