Ron Purser

Ronald Purser, Ph.D. is a professor of management at San Francisco State University where he has taught twenty years in both the MBA and undergraduate business programs. Prior to moving to San Francisco, he taught at Loyola University of Chicago. He received his doctorate in organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Purser is former chair of the Academy of Management’s Organizational Development and Change division. He is on the editorial board of the journal, Mindfulness, and an executive board member of the Consciousness, Mindfulness and Compassion International Association. Co-author of five books including, 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society (Stanford University Press, 2007), and over 60 academic journal articles and book chapters, his recent writings critically examine Buddhism’s encounter with modernity, capitalism and individualism, particularly in corporate settings. Dr. Purser began his Buddhist training beginning in 1981 at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley. In 1985, he was a student at the Cleveland Zen Center under Koshin Ogui Sensei who had been Shunryu Suzuki’s personal assistant in the early 1960’s. He has studied with numerous Zen teachers and Tibetan lamas, is now an ordained Dharma instructor in the Korean Zen Buddhist Taego order. His recent articles include Mindfulness in the Boardroom (Tricycle), White Privilege and the Mindfulness Movement, Confessions of a Mind-wandering MBSR Student: Remembering Social Amnesia; Clearing the Muddled Path of Traditional and Contemporary Mindfulness; Revisiting Mindfulness: A Buddhist-Based Conceptualization (with J. Milillo at Harvard); Zen and the Art of Organizational Maintenance; Zen and the Creative Management of Dilemmas (with Albert Low); Deconstructing Lack: A Buddhist Perspective on Egocentric Organizations; and A Buddhist-Lacanian Perspective on Lack. His articles Beyond McMindfulness (with David Loy), Mindfulness’ Truthiness Problem (with Andrew Cooper), and Corporate Mindfulness Is Bullsh*t (with Edwin Ng) went viral in the Huffington Post and Salon.com in 2013, 2014 and 2015. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Content and Social Engagement (Springer 2016) and the Handbook of Ethical Foundations of Mindfulness (Springer, 2018).