Management Professor Ron Purser, with co-author Joe Milillo from the Harvard Divinity School, received acceptance of their article, "Mindfulnes Revisited: A Buddhist-based Conceptualization," from the Journal of Management Inquiry. Recent scholarship on mindfulness has narrowly focused on attention enhancement, present moment awareness and its stress reduction effects.
Their article describes how current operational definitions of mindfulness in the literature differ considerably from those derived from classic Buddhist canonical sources. They revisit the meaning, function and purpose of Buddhist mindfulness by proposing a triadic model of right mindfulness. A Buddhist-based conceptualization of right mindfulness provides both a theoretical and ethical corrective to the decontextualized individual-level construct of mindfulness that has informed the organizational theory and practitioner literature.
They also argue that a denatured mindfulness divorced from it soteriological context reduces it to a self-help technique that is easily misappropriated for reproducing corporate and institutional power, employee pacification and maintenance of toxic organizational cultures.