Mindfulness in the Context of Integrative Knowledge: Separating the Science from the Hype

Despite growing academic interest in mindfulness within organizational studies since the early 2000s, society still faces rising individualism, materialism, and isolationism, driven by over-reliance on rationality, science, and technology. This chapter reassesses mindfulness's spiritual foundations, arguing for an integrative approach that reconciles spiritual and rational dimensions of knowledge. It urges separating science from hype while reuniting science and spirituality as complementary forces. The chapter concludes that organizational management can evolve toward a happier, healthier, and more just society by preserving both pillars of human knowledge, rather than simplifying or dismantling them.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Mindfulness has gained increasing relevance as a field of academic interest and research, definitively intercepting organizational studies and practices near the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, in spite of this “mindful” movement, society continues to witness a growing and conflictious triad of individualism, materialism, and isolationism, not surprisingly, dependent upon the triumvirate of rationality, scientific research, and technology to overcome all dysfunctional situations our society may be trapped in. The aim of this chapter is to reassess the spiritual foundations of Mindfulness and deepen its concepts and purposes within the context of an evolutionary integrative approach to knowledge, giving a more robust and profound direction to its insertion into today’s complex environment of accelerated changes in organizational management. After recontextualizing Mindfulness in the actual context of a predominant secularization, this work seeks to reconcile and strengthen the bond between the spiritual and rational dimensions of knowledge, while emphasizing the urgency to separate Science from the Hype and, conversely, bringing together these indispensable forces for humankind: Science and Spirituality. The chapter concludes by highlighting the bright and evolutionary path that may be opening ahead in the field of organizational management thus preventing two powerful vectors of knowledge, two age-old pillars of humanity history, from being lost amid the Hype temptation of naively simplifying or dismantling what took centuries to hardly build, stone by stone, in a slow though steadfast pace, so that a happier, healthier, and more just society will be a definitive and lasting parameter for human evolution.