Using mindfulness meditation as an example, and by exploring how it was practiced by activists during Occupy Wall Street, the paper sets out to challenge this consensus and examine the possibility of progressive selfdevelopment practices. According to the general consensus, self-development practices thus produce various individual pathologies and reinforce the societal status quo. The aim of the following paper is to nuance the way in which mindfulness meditation, understood as a set of practices aimed at moment-tomoment awareness, is generally perceived in critical management studies as well as the broader critical social sciences. Whether im-or explicitly, these analyses support what might be termed the hypothesis of pathology the claim that-contrary to their promise of authenticity, liberation and self-actualization-self-development practices actually produce depressed (Ehrenberg, 2010), over-worked (McGee, 2005, self-critical (Salecl, 2011), passive-nihilistic (Cederström and Spicer, 2015 Critchley, 2010), guilty (Spicer, 2011), and/or alienated (Cederström, 2011) subjects who feel empty, superfluous, and without purpose (Honneth, 2004).
Bell and Taylor, 2003 Cederström and Spicer, 2015 Fleming and Sturdy, 2009 Garsten and Grey, 1997 Hancock and Tyler, 2004 Honneth, 2004 Illouz, 2008 Pedersen, 2008 Rose, 1996 Salecl, 2011). Since Christopher Lasch's (1979) famous critique of "the culture of narcissism," it has become something of an orthodoxy within the critical social sciences, generally, and CMS, more particularly, to highlight the oppressive or in other ways problematic aspects of the individual pursuit of authenticity and self-realization (e.g. Hence, in the analysis, it is shown how discursive regimes in self-help literature tend to be constructed in such a way that extroverted criticism cannot emerge as a meaningful activity, and is thus implicitly censored. Theoretically, the article applies Butler’s notion of ‘implicit censorship’ where censorship is understood as productive in the sense of being constitutive of language and subjects. The empirical point of departure for this argument is the two bestselling and culturally resonant self-help books The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. It is thus argued that self-help books are reflective of wider cultural dynamics and concomitant normative pressures directed at the subject in contemporary capitalism, which among other things promote the absence of criticism in the workplace. organizations with an absence of critical voices) through an analytical perspective derived from Judith Butler’s work on censorship, and in this way suggest an alternative to explanations in the existing literature on employee silence, which are often tied to the actions and motivations of the individual employee. This article seeks to explain ‘silent organizations’ (i.e.
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