Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (36 page)

Flow and art.
A description of how passive visual aesthetic experiences can produce flow is given in Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson (in press). The religious significance of
Mayan ball games
is described in Blom (1932) and Gilpin (1948).
Pok-ta-pok
, as this game similar to basketball was called, took place in a stone courtyard, and the aim was for one team to throw the ball through the opponents’ stone hoop placed about 28 feet above the playing field—
without touching it with their hands
. Father Diego Duran, an early Spanish missionary, gives a vivid description: “…It was a game of much recreation to them and enjoyment among which were some who played it with such dexterity and skill that they during one hour succeeded in not stopping the flight of the ball from one end to the other without missing a single hit with their buttocks, not being allowed to reach it with hands nor feet, nor with the calf of their legs, nor with their arms…” (quoted in Blom 1932). Apparently such games sometimes ended in human sacrifices or the killing of the members of the losing team (Pina Chan 1969).

Flow and society.
The idea that the kind of flow activities a society made available to its people could reflect something essential about the society itself was first suggested in Csikszentmihalyi (1981a, 1981b). See also Argyle (1987, p. 65).

The issue of
cultural relativism
is too complex to be given an unbiased evaluation here. An excellent (but not impartial) review of the concept is given by the anthropologist Melford Spiro (1987), who in a recent autobiographical account describes why he changed his mind from an uncritical acceptance of the equal value of cultural practices to a much more qualified recognition of the pathological forms that cultures can occasionally assume. Philosophers and other humanists have often accused social scientists, sometimes with justification, of “debunking” absolute values that are important for the survival of culture (e.g., Arendt 1958, Bloom 1987). The early Italian-Swiss sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1917, 1919) has been one of the scholars most keenly aware of the dangers of relativity inherent in his discipline.

English workers.
The classic story of how the free English workers were transformed into highly regimented industrial laborers is told by the historian E. P. Thompson (1963).

The suspicious
Dobuans
were studied by the anthropologist Reo Fortune (1932 [1963]). For the tragic plight of the
Ik
of Uganda see Turnbull (1972).

Yonomamo.
This fierce tribe was immortalized by the writings of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon (1979). The
sad Nigerian tribe
was described by Laura Bohannan, under the pseudonym E. S. Bowen (1954). Colin Turnbull (1961) gave a loving description of the pygmies of the
Ituri
forest. The quote concerning the
Shushwap
was contained in a 1986 letter from Richard Kool to the author.

The information about the
Great Isé Shrine
was provided in a personal communication by Mark Csikszentmihalyi.

For the percentages of
happy people in different nations,
see George Gallup (1976). The study that showed U.S. respondents to be about as happy as Cubans and Egyptians was conducted by Easterlin (1974). For a general discussion of happiness and cross-cultural differences, see Argyle (1987, pp. 102–11).

Affluence and happiness.
Both Argyle (1987) and Veenhoven (1984) agree, on the basis of their evaluation of practically every study in the field conducted so far, that there is conclusive evidence for a positive but very modest correlation between material well-being and happiness or satisfaction with life.

The
time budgets
for U.S. workers are based on our ESM studies (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi & Graef 1980; Graef, Csikszentmihalyi, & Gianinno 1983; Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre 1987, 1989). These estimates are very similar to those obtained with much more extensive surveys (e.g., Robinson 1977).

Stimulus overinclusion in schizophrenia.
The concept of anhedonia was originally developed by the psychiatrist Roy Grinker. Overinclusion and the symptomatology of attentional disorders have been studied by, among others, Harrow, Grinker, Holzman, & Kayton (1977) and Harrow, Tucker, Hanover, & Shield (1972). The quotations are from McGhie & Chapman (1961, pp. 109, 114). I have argued the continuity between lack of flow experiences due to severe psychopathologies and milder attentional disorders often caused by social deprivation in Csikszentmihalyi (1978, 1982a).

Among the studies of the
Eskimo
that are worth reading are those of Carpenter (1970, 1973). The destruction of
Caribbean
cultures is described by Mintz (1985). The concept of
anomie
was originally developed by Emile Durkheim in his work
Suicide
(1897 [1951]). The best introduction to the concept of
alienation
is in the early manuscripts of Karl Marx, especially his
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
(see Tucker 1972). The sociologist Richard Mitchell (1983, 1988) has argued that anomie and alienation are the societal counterparts of anxiety and boredom, respectively, and that they occur when people cannot find flow because the conditions of everyday life are either too chaotic or too predictable.

The neurophysiological hypothesis
concerning attention and flow is based on the following research: Hamilton (1976, 1981), Hamilton, Holcomb, & De la Pena (1977), and Hamilton, Haier, & Buchsbaum (1984). This line of research is now continuing with the use of more sophisticated brain-scanning equipment.

Cortical activation
is the amount of electrical activity in the cerebral cortex at a given moment in time; its amplitude (in microvolts) has been used to indicate the general effort taking place in the brain at that time. When people concentrate their attention, their cortical activation is generally found to increase, indicating an increase in mental effort.

The study of
autotelic families
is reported in Rathunde (1988). His findings are in line with many previous investigations, for instance that securely attached infants engage more in exploratory behavior (Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton 1971, Matas, Arend, & Sroufe 1978), or that an optimal balance between love and discipline is the best child-rearing context (Bronfenbrenner 1970, Devereux 1970, Baumrind 1977). The systems approach to family studies, which is very congenial with the one developed here, was pioneered in clinical settings by Bowen (1978).

The people of flow.
This is the term Richard Logan (1985, 1988) used to describe individuals who are able to transform trying ordeals into flow experiences. The quote
“If the reach of experience…”
is from Burney (1952, pp. 16–18).

Eva Zeisel
’s imprisonment is described in a
New Yorker
profile (Lessard 1987). How a
Chinese lady
survived the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution is the subject of
Life and Death in Shanghai
(Cheng 1987).
Solzhenitsyn
’s accounts of prison are from
The Gulag Archipelago
(1976).

The account by
Tollas Tibor
is reconstructed from personal conversations we had in the summer of 1957, when he was released from jail after the Hungarian revolution.

The quote from
Solzhenitsyn
is cited in Logan (1985).
Bettelheim
presents his generalizations about imprisonment based on his concentration camp experiences in the article “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” (1943); for
Frankl
see
Man’s Search for Meaning
and
The Unheard Cry for Meaning
(1963, 1978).

The quotation from
Russell
was cited in an article in
Self
magazine (Merser 1987, p. 147).

CHAPTER 5

The
Tarahumara
festivals that include ritual footraces up and down the mountains of northern Mexico for hundreds of miles are described in Lumholtz (1902 [1987]) and Nabokov (1981). An account of the ritual elements involved in modern sports is given by MacAloon’s (1981) study of the modern Olympics.

The
Icarus complex
was explored by Henry A. Murray (1955).

At this point it might be appropriate to confront squarely the Freudian concept of
sublimation
, a topic that, if bypassed, might leave us with the nagging feeling of an unresolved problem. Superficial applications of Freud’s thought have led many people to interpret any action that is not directed to the satisfaction of basic sexual desires either as a defense, when it aims to hold back an unacceptable wish that otherwise might be expressed, or as a sublimation, when an acceptable goal is substituted for a desire that could not be safely expressed in its original form. At best, sublimation is a poor substitute for the unsatisfied pleasure it helps to disguise. For example, Bergler (1970) has argued that games involving risk provide a release from guilt about sexuality and aggression. According to the “Icarus complex” a high jumper is trying to escape from the ties of an Oedipal tangle in a socially acceptable way, but without really resolving the basic conflict that motivates his actions. Similarly, Jones (1931) and Fine (1956) have explained chess as a way of coping with castration anxiety (to mate the opponent’s king with the help of one’s queen is a sublimated enactment of the father’s castration with the collusion of the mother); and mountain climbing has been explained as sublimated penis envy. Nobody seems to do anything, according to this point of view, except to resolve a festering childhood anxiety.

The logical consequence of reducing motivation to a search for pleasure that is instigated by a few basic genetically programmed desires, however, is a failure to account for much of the behavior that differentiates humans from other animal species. To illustrate this, it is useful to examine the role of enjoyment in an evolutionary perspective.

Life is shaped as much by the future as it is by the past. The first fish to leave the sea for dry land were not programmed to do so, but exploited unused potentials in their makeup to take advantage of the opportunities of an entirely new environment. The monkeys who use sticks to fish for ants at the mouth of anthills are not following a destiny carved in their genes, but are experimenting with possibilities that in the future may lead to the conscious use of tools, and hence to what we call progress. And certainly human history can only be understood as the action of people striving to realize indistinct dreams. It is not a question of teleology—the belief that our actions are the unfolding of a preordained destiny—because teleology is also a mechanistic concept. The goals we pursue are not determined in advance or built into our makeup. They are discovered in the process of enjoying the extension of our skills in novel settings, in new environments.

Enjoyment seems to be the mechanism that natural selection has provided to ensure that we will evolve and become more complex. (This argument has been made in Csikszentmihalyi and Massimini [1985]; I. Csikszentmihalyi [1988]; and M. Csikszentmihalyi [1988]. The evolutionary implications of flow were also perceived by Crook [1980].) Just as pleasure from eating makes us want to eat more, and pleasure from physical love makes us want to have sex, both of which we need to do in order to survive and reproduce, enjoyment motivates us to do things that push us beyond the present and into the future. It makes no sense to assume that only the pursuit of pleasure is the source of “natural” desires, and any other motivation must be its pale derivative. The rewards of reaching new goals are just as genuine as the rewards of satisfying old needs.

The study of the relationship between
happiness and energy consumption
was reported in Graef, Gianinno, & Csikszentmihalyi (1981).

The U.S.
dancers’
quotations are from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 104). The Italian dancer’s is from Delle Fave & Massimini (1988, p. 212).

The cultivation of
sexuality
. An excellent historical review of Western ideas about love, and of the behaviors that accompanied it, is given in the three volumes of
The Nature of Love
by Irving Singer (1981). A compendium of contemporary psychologists’ views on love was collected by Kenneth Pope (1980). A very recent statement on the subject is by the Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg (1988), who expands the classical description of love as
eros
or as
agape
to three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Liza Dalby (1983), an American anthropologist who spent a few years training as a geisha in Kyoto, gives a good description of the refinements involved in the Far Eastern approach to sexuality. For the lack of romance in antiquity, see Veyne (1987, esp. pp. 202–5).

The way in which the rules of the Jesuit order developed by Saint Ignatius of
Loyola
helped organize life as a unified activity, potentially suited to provide flow experience for those who followed them, is described in I. Csikszentmihalyi (1986, 1988) and Toscano (1986).

A brief introduction to Patanjali’s
Yoga
can be found in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1985, vol. 12, p. 846). Eliade (1969) provides a more thorough immersion in the subject.

Some of the most powerful contemporary insights on the psychology of
aesthetics
are in the works of Arnheim (1954, 1971, 1982) and Gombrich (1954, 1979), who stress the role of order (or negative entropy) in art. For more psychoanalytically oriented approaches, see the three volumes edited by Mary Gedo,
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art
(1986, 1987, 1988).

“There is that wonderful…”
is from Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson (in press).

“When I see works…”
and
“On a day like this…”
are from Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson (in press).