Immigrant academic mothers negotiating ideal worker and mother norms during the COVID-19 pandemic: Duoethnography as a co-mentoring tool for transformative learning

How are immigrant academic mothers negotiating the confounding terrains of work and family during the pandemic? How can they support each other in learning how to resist the prevalent notions of ideal working and mothering amidst the demanding schedule of working remotely and parenting? This study addresses these questions through sharing a narrative of how two immigrant mothers in academia challenged and began the journey of transforming their gendered work and family identities. Building on personal essays and 6 weeks of extensive journaling that reflected our positionalities and experiences of motherhood, work-life, and intersections between work and home during the pandemic, we offer a fine-grained understanding of how we helped each other as co-mentors to identify moments of our lived experiences as triggers for transformative learning. In doing so, we realized how duoethnography could be more than just a research methodology in helping us co-construct a relational space to empathize and challenge each other's perspectives about our roles as mothers and professors and the gendered nature of social forces shaping those roles.

Learning to manage as learning to fail: The lessons of running

Management learning aims to ensure managerial success and while failure is acknowledged, learners are encouraged to adopt a growth mindset and to bounce back from failure. However, the complexity of contemporary managerial work and the degradation of the managerial labour process mean that managers increasingly experience failures. Managers therefore need to learn not merely from failure but to learn to tolerate failure, that is, to fail well. The article differentiates types of failures and focuses on intractable failures that leave managers feeling inadequate and that corrode their sense-of-self. Therefore, an affective and embodied identity-based understanding of managerial failure is developed and an empirical case study of managers who engage in the most popular managerial sporting activity, running, is used to theorise the process of learning to fail-well. The mixed-methods empirical study using artefact elicitation participant data and autoethnographic authorial data is detailed and suggestions for more reflexive managerial education are advanced.

Be(com)ing other-oriented: Mindfulness-trained leaders’ experiences of their enhanced social awareness

The potential significance of mindfulness for social relations at work has been recognized in the recent management literature, yet a thorough investigation has been lacking into how mindfulness may help leaders tap into their other-orientation. In this study, we examine whether and how mindfulness training contributes to the development of leaders’ social awareness by studying the experiences of 62 leaders who participated in an 8-week-long mindfulness training program. Our study contributes to the literature on management learning and mindfulness in leadership in three ways. First, it identifies how the leaders who participated in mindfulness training see themselves developing toward becoming more socially aware in situations involving followers across the three interlinked domains of human functioning—the cognitive, affective, and behavioral—clarifying mindfulness as an interpersonal phenomenon. Second, it highlights mindfulness as a value-based developmental practice instead of merely a personal stress reduction and attention-enhancement technique. Third, it proposes mindfulness training as a viable approach to enhance leaders’ social awareness through a combination of a formal program and continuous self-development, departing from the views of mindfulness as a “quick fix.” It also provides a conceptual framework that illustrates the pathway with the potential to build social leadership capacity.

Secular discernment: A process of individual unlearning and collective relearning

Through a process of action research with a non-religious organization, this article provides a foundation for the characteristics of a secular discernment process. Importantly, we argue that discernment can be conceptualized as a process of entwined individual unlearning and collective relearning. Our action research study contributes to both the discernment and the unlearning literatures by unpacking how discernment encourages a process of individual unlearning – which our study suggests entails a process of ‘setting aside’ and reflexive-distancing from a priori individual knowledge – to be more open and receptive to new ways of emergent collective re-learning. The process of unlearning – and the behavioural norms and routines that are central to discernment – underscores the collective relearning process. The article concludes with future pathways for research.

Can you be Mindful? The Effectiveness of Mindfulness-Driven Interventions in Enhancing the Digital Resilience to Fake News on COVID-19

This study explores the factors that influence the dissemination process of and public susceptibility to fake news amidst COVID-19. By adopting a qualitative approach that draws on 21 interviews with social media users from the standpoint of source credibility and construal level theories, our findings highlight motives of news sharers, platform features, and source credibility/relatedness as major factors influencing the dissemination of and public susceptibility to fake news. The paper further argues that public susceptibility to fake news can be mitigated by building an integrated approach that combines a tripartite strategy from an individual, institutional and platform level. For example, educating the public on digital resilience and enhancing awareness around source credibility can help individuals and institutions reflect on news authenticity and report fake news where possible. This study contributes to fake news literature by integrating concepts from information management, consumer behaviour, influencer marketing and mindfulness to propose a model to help authorities identify and understand the key factors that influence susceptibility to fake news during a public crisis such as COVID-19.

Mindful unlearning in unprecedented times: Implications for management and organizations

Crises trigger both learning and unlearning at both intra-organizational and inter-organizational levels. This article stresses the need to facilitate unlearning for effective crisis management and shows how we could use mindfulness practice to enhance unlearning and transformative learning in a crisis. This study proposes the conceptualization of mindful unlearning in crisis with different mechanisms to foster unlearning in three stages of crisis (pre-crisis, during-crisis, and post-crisis). These mechanisms include mindful awareness of impermanence and sensual processing (pre-crisis stage), mindful awareness of interdependence and right intention (crisis management stage), and mindful awareness of transiency and past experiences (post-crisis stage).

Bring Your Non-self to Work? The Interaction Between Self-decentralization and Moral Reasoning

Spirituality continues to exert a strong influence in people's lives both in work and beyond. However, given that spirituality is often non-formalized and personal, we continue to know little about how moral reasoning is strategized. In this paper, we examine how Buddhist leader-practitioners interpret and operationalize a process of self-decentralization based upon Buddhist emptiness theory as a form of moral reasoning. We find that Buddhist leader-practitioners share a common understanding of a self-decentralized identity and operationalize self-decentralization through two practices in Buddhist philosophy-skillful means and the middle way-to foreground social outcomes. However, we also find that practitioners face tensions and challenges in moral reasoning relates to agency-the 're-centering' of the self as an enlightened self and the use of karmic reasoning to justify (un)ethical behavior-and contextual constraints that lead to feelings of vulnerability and exclusion. We present a model that elaborates these processes and invite further research that examines novel approaches and dynamic interpretations of the self in moral reasoning.

Sounds of Silence: The Reflexivity, Self-decentralization, and Transformation Dimensions of Silence at Work

This article explores silence as a phenomenon and practice in the workplace through a Buddhist-enacted lens where silence is intentionally encouraged. It brings forward a reconsideration of the roles of silence in organizations by proposing emancipatory dimensions of silence—reflexivity, self-decentralization, and transformation. Based on 54 interviews with employees and managers in a Vietnamese telecommunications organization, we discuss the dynamic nature of silence, and the possible coexistence of the constructive and the oppressive aspects of silence in a workplace spirituality context. Instead of studying silence as one-dimensional, we call for an integrated view and argue that studying silence requires consideration of the multiplicity of its interconnected dimensions. By considering silence as a relational and emerging processes constructed around its vagueness and uncertainties, our study reveals the many possible ways silence is organized and organizes and sheds light on silence as a marker of the complexities and paradoxes of organizational life.