Dancing the cliff edge: The place of courage in social life.

This project takes a new look at courage, engaging psychology, poetry, philosophy, sociology, and the social sciences generally to enhance our understanding of one of humanity's most basic virtues. The basic premise of this work is that a new image of courage, one that can capture in the phenomenon a variety of feelings as well as a logic of appraisal, must not take the individual as its starting point. Working inductively from myriad images of courage, the project builds a new theory of courage as a form of social life. As such, courage is triggered by felt duress to the whole, and takes shape in the constructive opposition of individual life to social involvement. Duress tends toward two familiar poles: the first, visible in images of corporate corruption, is runaway individualism that masquerades as heroism but ultimately self-destructs. The second, visible in the famous image from the 1989 uprising in Tiananmen Square, is an overbearing and oppressive formal structure in which social life is not allowed dynamic movement. Courageous action arises from such duress when people in a position to act draw upon their capacity for individuated action to constructively oppose threats to collective life. The project tests this new understanding of courage by extensive analysis of over 600 stories of courage from knowledge workers. Findings illustrate that thee basic elements of this theory are necessary elements in courage stories. Findings also show that courage is more prevalent in work organizations than social scientists have acknowledged, and that the experience of courage at work is related to felt beauty, vitality, and inspiration that changes people's sense of what is possible and opens the door for change. Through a variety of images from visual to poetic to statistical, this project makes the case that a poetic social science, one that draws upon juxtapositions of multiple images, is better able to illuminate concepts basic to social life. Through its structure, its method, and its argument, this work attempts to elucidate such a poetic social science that is capable of embracing and illuminating something as mysterious as courage in social life.Ph.D.Labor relationsPsychologySocial SciencesSocial researchUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124216/2/3122074.pd

Compassion revealed: What we know about compassion at work (and where we need to know more)

In this chapter, we examine work by those who have responded to Frost’s (1999) call for research that accounts for suffering and compassion in work organizations. We add to this line of inquiry by reviewing the organizational research on compassion published over the past decade and illuminating connections with extant research on related phenomena. In particular, we explore current understandings of the nature and impact of compassion at work, the conditions that facilitate compassion in work organizations, and efforts to institutionalize compassion. In pointing to what we see as fruitful directions for future research, we invite more scholars to see suffering and compassion as critical and pervasive aspects of organizational life

Understanding compassion capability

We elaborate a theory of the foundations of a collective capability for compassion through a detailed analysis of everyday practices in an organizational unit. Our induced theory of compassion capability draws on the findings of an interview study to illustrate and explain how a specific set of everyday practices creates two relational conditions — high quality connections and a norm of dynamic boundary permeability — that enable employees of a collective unit to notice, feel and respond to members’ suffering. By articulating the mechanisms that connect everyday practices and a work unit’s compassion capability, we provide insight into the relational micro-foundations of a capability grounded in individual action and interaction

Compassion in organizational life

In this article, the authors explore compassion in work organizations. They discuss the prevalence and costs of pain in organizational life, and identify compassion as an important process that can occur in response to suffering. At the individual level, compassion takes place through three subprocesses: noticing another’s pain, experiencing an emotional reaction to the pain, and acting in response to the pain. The authors build on this framework to argue that organizational compassion exists when members of a system collectively notice, feel, and respond to pain experienced by members of that system. These processes become collective as features of an organization’s context legitimate them within the organization, propagate them among organizational members, and coordinate them across individuals