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Workplace mindfulness training has many benefits, but designing programs to reach a wide audience effectively and efficiently remains a challenge. The purpose of this study is to assess the effects of a widely adopted workplace mindfulness program on the mindfulness, active listening skill, emotional intelligence, and burnout of employees in a large, multinational internet company.

The study sample included 123 employees across three company offices who completed the two‐day Search Inside Yourself (SIY) program. Data were collected using self‐report measures pre‐, post‐, and four‐weeks post‐intervention and were analyzed using paired samples t-tests.

Significant increases were detected in mindfulness and the “awareness of emotion” components of emotional intelligence four weeks post-course. No significant changes were found in participants' self-reported levels of burnout, active listening skill or the “management of emotion” components of emotional intelligence.

Teaching workplace mindfulness and emotional intelligence skills through a highly applied, condensed course format may be effective for increasing mindfulness and the “awareness” components of emotional intelligence. Longer courses with more applied practice may be necessary to help participants build emotional management and listening skills and to reduce burnout.

The present study is, to the authors’ knowledge, the first academic, peer-reviewed assessment of SIY, a workplace mindfulness training program that has been taught to over 50,000 people worldwide.

The purpose of this chapter was to examine the implementation of a flexible work initiative that attempted to challenge two institutionalized precepts of contemporary white-collar workplaces: the gendered ideal worker norm, with its expectation of the primacy of paid work over family and personal life, and the assumption of managerial control over employees’ schedules and work location.

Using ethnographic and interview data, how the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) was experienced by employees in four different teams within the Best Buy, Co., Inc. corporate headquarters was explored.

Comparing more and less successful implementation across teams, results suggested that collective institutional work is required for the emergence of new norms, expectations, and legitimated practices. Findings indicated that managers’ task-specific knowledge – their deep experience with the tasks that the team is charged with completing – is a structural condition that facilitates managers’ trust in employees and encourages team experimentation with new practices.

Data for this study was limited to one organization and four teams. Future research should include similar organizational change efforts in other organizations and in larger teams.

These findings may promote a better understanding, among researchers and practitioners, of the importance of manager knowledge and background and how this appears to be key to achieving institutional change.

This research is an example of an innovative approach to workplace flexibility and applies an institutional theory lens to investigate variation in the implementation of organizational change.

This article examines how contact with the police led to the death of Michael Brown (an unarmed 18-year-old Black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri, who was shot and killed during an altercation with a police officer). And, how Darren Wilson (the White police officer from the Ferguson Police Department who shot and killed Michael Brown) was portrayed in mainstream newspaper articles covering the story of Brown’s death.

Using both frame analysis and Hall’s framework of discursive domains for organizing and making sense of events in social life, we analyzed news coverage of Brown in three of the top circulating daily newspapers in the US: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. The Lexis Nexis database was used to retrieve a set of newspapers using the search term “Michael Brown.” Articles from the three leading newspapers were collected from the day the event occurred, August 9, 2014, through the end of the year, December 31, 2014.

The news articles used in this study were mostly written with an episodic frame. The articles presenting the socioeconomic background of Brown and Wilson were described as profiles on each individual and the neighborhood they came from, rather than a discussion about where they fell on the economic structure of this country and the larger, upstream forces that might influence those positions. The feelings and attitudes of the reader are also likely to be influenced by details included in the articles and how they were presented.

The findings contribute to the broader literature looking at the relationships between police and Black communities. Public health can play a role in advocating and facilitating programs that build better linkages between police and community. The public health field can take a leadership role in holding the news media accountable when they are engaging in frenetic inaction. Only by having difficult and challenging conversations that examines the upstream causes of violence and deaths like Brown’s, can we make progress in preventing them.

In a diverse society, empathy would intuitively seem to represent a powerful force for social good. In particular, we expect empathic people to tolerate (rather than reject) attitudes that might be different from their own, and to resolve and/or avoid (rather than escalate) potential disagreements with others. Some research supports this benign view of empathy, but somewhat surprisingly, there is a “dark” side to empathy, one that can sometimes exacerbate attitudinal conflict. That is, empathy can often be parochial, in the sense that people are inclined to reserve their compassion for others only when they are deemed to be worthy of such support. In this chapter we review classic and contemporary research on the light and dark side of empathy, and consider its implications for the kinds of dynamics that could potentially emerge when people encounter people and ideas that are different from their own.

Darren J. Carroll (dcarroll@innocentive.com) is President and Chief Executive Officer of InnoCentive, which connects a virtual global community of 50,000 qualified scientists with its client companies that are seeking solutions to high‐tech problems. The InnoCentive model allows its customers to tap into inexpensive solvers – scientists residing in Russia, China, India, the EU, or North America– who are uniquely prepared minds. A seeker company – clients such as Procter & Gamble, Dow, Eli Lilly – posts problems anonymously on the InnoCentive Web site. The problem solvers submit solutions. The best one that fits the posted criteria is awarded payment. Confidentiality and integrity of the marketplace are assured. InnoCentive validates the award amount offered by estimating the complexity of the problem, the amount of resources required, and the value of the solution to the seeker company. The value proposition of a third party, like InnoCentive, to be the go‐between for those seeking answers to problems and those providing the answers includes: problem definition assistance; access to a growing network of 50,000 respected scientists; preliminary vetting to screen out ideas that clearly do not meet the criteria. The bottom line – when doing research for new products, the competitive advantage lies in getting to a solution faster, better, and cheaper. And that’s where an open innovation model can help.

This chapter examines the framing of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement in mainstream media. An analytic sample of 4,303 articles collected from the Dow Jones Factiva database reveals variation in depth, breadth, and intensity of BLM coverage in the following newspapers between 2012 and 2016: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Al Jazeera English. We review contemporary literature on racial inequality and employ Media Framing and Critical Race Theory to discuss the implications of our findings on public perceptions, future policy formation, and contemporary social protest worldwide.

This paper discusses how a small business experiences professional management by examining the relationship between organisational networking and cultural organising in the workplace. A network perspective is presented in order to evaluate the ways in which workplace relations are enacted to cultural organising. A social constructionist perspective of organisational networking is proposed which emphasises how individuals attribute value and meaning to the interactions they have with co‐workers in the workplace. A work place ethnography is presented which discusses the recruitment of a “professional” manager and his attempts to introduce new working practices into the family business. The analysis highlights how organisational members shape cultural organising by invoking emotional categories to produce mutuality and a sense of belonging in the workplace. In continually re‐enacting workplace relationships in this way, it is found that individuals attempt to trade away variance, divergent views and new organising practices concerned with change. The paper concludes with a final analysis of the ethnography and its implication for small business research and training.

We examined the moderating role of age on the politics perceptions—organizational commitment relationship. Confirmatory factor analyses of data collected from 633 office employees of a private sector organization indicated that the scales measuring politics and commitment reflected unique constructs. Perceptions of politics were inversely but weakly related to commitment. However, results of hierarchical moderated multiple regression analysis revealed that perceptions of organizational politics and commitment were essentially unrelated among workers in and above their 40s, but were moderately related among younger workers. Implications of the results and directions for future research are discussed.