Engineering Mindfulness: Translating Contemplative Practice from Silicon Valley
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Date
2025-02-24
Authors
Temple, Katie
Journal Title
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
In this dissertation project, I examine the multiple relational processes establishing modern mindfulness as a legitimate corporate service in the twenty-first century United States. Existing literatures explain the industry’s formation through profit maximization yet growing evidence challenges the programs’ economic benefits, leaving our understandings of this stabilization underdeveloped. Using news stories, popular and academic texts, and in-depth interviews with corporate mindfulness trainers, I trace the cultural history of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI)—an educational nonprofit founded at Google and the first corporate mindfulness program in the U.S. I argue that SIYLI’s curriculum served as a critical site where Buddhist practice and corporate work were reconciled. Using formal lectures and partner exercises, SIYLI’s courses stabilized Buddhist practices such as lovingkindness meditation into a coherent corporate service.After the 2008 financial crisis, SIYLI expanded beyond Silicon Valley to sectors like manufacturing where it became a tool for employees to adapt to finance-driven restructurings. Detached from its Silicon Valley origins, where engineers used mindfulness to foster peer collaboration, mindfulness associated itself with the nexus corporation to help workforces metabolize precarious work conditions. On the ground, however, instructors encountered an “everyday politics” of workplace mindfulness where, in some settings, the practice reinforced corporate control, while in others, it offered the potential for more democratic and embodied forms of contemplation. This project contributes to debates on the financialization of work in the contemporary United States