ABSTRACT
Mindfulness as science has an uneasy relation with mindfulness as practice. Scholars seeking to define mindfulness have typically attempted to turn definitions used by meditation practitioners into scientific constructs—ideally in a manner that honors their Buddhist roots and has relevance for organizations. This produces an abundance of components like present-centered attention, non-judgment, self-acceptance, etc., that relate to each other only vaguely and point only abstractly to a common idea of mindfulness. Metacognitive practice is an alternative to this multicomponent approach. In it, the role of the scholar is not to select certain practitioner definitions as authentic, relevant, and scientific, but to instead theorize about the attempts practitioners make to define mindfulness. In fact, mindfulness may best be understood as repeated attempts to understand mindfulness. Because organizations are dynamic and complex and expertise is never complete, it is seldom clear what “being mindful” should look like in any specific situation. As such, attempts to understand mindfulness must always continue. People must develop metacognitive beliefs and strategies that allow them to enact mindfulness anew in each situation. Such development of metacognition is not individual: it occurs within a community of practice that furnishes supportive technologies, social interactions, terminologies, and activities.
