The Healthy Workplace of the 21st Century: The Benefit of Organizational Wellness Programs on Employee Health and Absenteeism

Every year, obesity rates continue to rise and have reached epidemic proportions throughout the United States. The costs associated with obesity are staggering and many researchers feel that the workplace should be the new front line in the battle for a healthier workforce. Employers must take action to address this worsening health crisis and help reduce spiraling medical costs and absenteeism rates. This capstone reviews the current literature on wellness programs and discusses different companies' approaches to wellness programs that have special emphasis on nutrition and physical activity. It also provides strategies and recommendations for companies eager to initiate a comprehensive, dynamic and directed wellness program to improve the current and future health of their workforce.

Performing the personal within the organizational: Communicating professional identities through Taiwanese commercial airline pilots' personal narratives

This dissertation project explored professionalism and the performance of identities by examining Taiwanese commercial airline pilots' discursive practices in everyday life. The intentions for this project were to not only expand current knowledge of organizational communication from a critical rhetorical perspective, but to further explore the under-appreciated concept of professionalism of organizational members. Theoretically, I traced theoretical analysis in the sociology of professions and further investigated scholarship from identity research in organizational communication studies. This research agenda helped to advance communication-based understandings of the meanings and practices of professional identity as a complement to the sociological conception. I further merged a performance paradigm and critical rhetorical perspective to examine the discursive practices of organizational members and to challenge the bias of traditional textual approaches. Methodologically, I conducted ethnographic interviews with Taiwanese commercial airline pilots in order to understand how they construct their personal, social, and professional identities. Five narrative themes were identified and demonstrated in this project: (1) It takes a lot to become a commercial airline pilot, (2) Being a professional commercial airline pilot is to build up sufficient knowledge, beyond average skill, and correct attitude, (3) Pilots' resistance and dissent toward company management, (4) Popular (re)presentation influences professionalism, (5) Power and fear affect professionalism. Pilots' personal narratives were presented in performative writing and in poetic transcription to make word alive with sounds featuring their meanings. Their personal storytelling created a dialogic space to not only let pilots' voice to be heard but also revealed how identities are created within and against a larger organizational identity. Overall, this project demonstrated the interdisciplinary examination of the meanings, functions, and consequence of discursive practices in everyday professional life. It also critiqued relationships between power, domination, and resistance while reintroducing the roles of the body and materiality in the domain of professionalism, and provides ethical readings of larger and complex organizational cultures. Applying communication-oriented analysis to study professionalism indeed challenged the long time neglected phenomena regarding the power of the symbolic in sociological approaches and raised the awareness of structural, material, and bodily condition of work.

A Framework for Conceptualizing Psychologically Healthy Contemplative Practice.

In recent years contemplative practices such as Zen Buddhism and yoga have become increasingly utilized in the United States (Mann et al., 2001). The most visible contemplative practice in America today is the practice of yoga. According to a 2008 market study conducted by Yoga Journal, yoga was a 5.6 billion dollar industry in America in 2008. This market study also found that 15.8 million people, or 6.9% of American adults, practice yoga (Yoga Market Study, 2008). Zen Buddhism may be less visible than yoga in popular culture, yet its presence in the United States is substantial. While exact statistics are difficult to come by, Harvard University's Pluralism Project cites that the number of practicing Buddhists in America ranges from 2.4 to 4 million people, although it is unclear how many of these individuals practice Zen, or contemplative Buddhism (Pluralism Project Statistics, 2009). The popularity of Zen in America is further evidenced by the presence of Zen centers in most major cities. The sizeable and growing presence of Buddhism in America indicates a move towards the inclusion of contemplative practice in the cultural mainstream (Pluralism Project Statistics, 2009).