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The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.

This paper argues that the quest for meaning and the problem of suffering are in an irresolvable state of tension and that this tension remains of central importance in modernity and a prominent issue in the reconstruction of contemporary social theory and social science.

The approach focuses on an examination of the work of Max Weber and Emmanuel Levinas on issues of rationality and suffering bringing them into a productive dialogue and juxtaposition.

The work of Max Weber shows how practices of rationality in modernity are still haunted by the ethical call to responsibility that suffering incurs. The work of Emmanuel Levinas complements and reconfigures Weber’s framing of the issues involved and deepens the general point that a reconstructed social theory would incorporate the implications of suffering more deeply into its practices.

A social science and social theory oriented by an epistemological framework is inadequate to the ethical responsibility the presence of suffering invokes. A reconstructed social theory in an ethical framework calls for the best knowledge capable of being produced. As such, a nihilistic or disengaged pluralism, as well as a social science framed primarily by methodological concerns, is inadequate. What will be required is both critical examination of explicit and implicit assumptions of theory and research as well as active, engaged dialogical practices with alternative perspectives.

An engagement between Weber and Levinas is almost unprecedented, especially on issues rationality and suffering despite their shared perspectives. What Levinas offers the reconstruction of social theory today is explored.

To explore what suffering is, how suffering is embedded within the sociology of sport literature, and what suffering can do to athletes in sport. In addition, to discuss the value of an interdisciplinary approach and co-presence when researching athletes in suffering.

In the first part of the chapter, the concepts of pain, violence, and suffering are separated, and a justification for the study of suffering in sport is given. The second part of the chapter details sport and social problems, and the suffering body in sport is discussed, pulling from interdisciplinary theories and methodologies of suffering external to the sociology of sport.

Social inequalities and hidden forms of suffering may be reproduced in sport. Sport is questioned as a force of social mobility for vulnerable people. The context of sport can offer ‘healing’ properties for people in suffering. The impact of using an interdisciplinary approach and considering co-presence and relational suffering when researching suffering is discussed.

The difficulties understanding the complex, multi-dimensional nature of suffering are shared. New ways of engaging within the research act and specific theoretical approaches are suggested for improving the understanding of suffering within sport.

The authors aimed to explore how involvement in a creative development accelerator impacted participants. In particular, the authors considered the role of suffering in the acceleration process.

The authors conducted an ethnography of a rapid prototyping program in video game development. Data collection included participant observation (162 h before, 186 during and 463 h after the main prototyping), interviews (23 formal and 35 informal) and artifact analysis (presentations, documents, games).

Acceleration led to individual suffering via burnout, lack of sleep, overwork and illness. In turn, participants required varying periods of recovery after participation and diverged in their longer-term reaction to the experience. The authors make two contributions. First, the authors deepen empirical understanding of the embodied impact of participation in an organizational accelerator. Second, the authors develop a theoretical process model of suffering in an accelerator program based on time and initiation.

This paper focused on a single iteration of a program based out of an incubator in the United Kingdom (UK) Suffering was discovered as part of a larger study of the program.

Business and technology accelerators are becoming a popular way to organize work. This research suggests that accelerator structures might lead to unintended and negative participant experiences.

This research challenges the assumption that accelerators always benefit, or at least not hurt, participants. The authors add to the limited attention paid to suffering in organizations. The authors conclude the impact of an accelerator is more complex than usually portrayed.

Health care delivery is experiencing a multi-faceted epidemic of suffering among patients and care providers. Compassion is defined as noticing, feeling and responding to suffering. However, compassion is typically seen as an individual rather than a more systemic response to suffering and cannot match the scale of the problem as a result. The authors develop a model of a compassion system and details its antecedents (leader behaviors and a compassionate human resource (HR) bundle), its climate or the extent that the organization values, supports and rewards expression of compassion and the behaviors and practices through which it is enacted (standardization and customization) and its effects on efficiently reducing suffering and delivering high quality care.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that synthesizes the literature in health services, HR management, organizational behavior and service operations to develop a new conceptual model.

The paper makes three key contributions. First, the authors theorize the central importance of compassion and a collective commitment to compassion (compassion system) to reducing pervasive patient and care provider suffering in health care. Second, the authors develop a model of an organizational compassion system that details its antecedents of leader behaviors and values as well as a compassionate HR bundle. Third, the authors theorize how compassion climate enhances collective employee well-being and increases standardization and customization behaviors that reduce suffering through more efficient and higher quality care, respectively.

This paper develops a novel model of how health care organizations can simultaneously achieve efficiency and quality through a compassion system. Specific leader behaviors and practices that enable compassion climate and the processes through which it achieves efficiency and quality are detailed. Future directions for how other service organizations can replicate a compassion system are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of suffering for meaning making and spirituality in organizational contexts.

The paper explores how organizational spaces may be created for meaning making and how this is linked to the idea of compassion.

The paper suggests that while suffering has been explored in organizations, it has not been studied relative to existential meaning making. This is identified as a significant gap in research on organizational spirituality. The paper attempts to fill this gap and suggests that the study of suffering has to separate suffering as an objective phenomenon, which should be eliminated in organizations, from suffering as a subjective experience in which meaning may be found. It is also proposed that, for existential meaning to be uncovered in the face of suffering, organizational spaces have to be created in which such meaning making can take place.

The paper suggests that suffering can be a pathway to the discovery of spiritual meaning.

Nineteenth-century animal protectionists endeavored to frame laws that gave animals direct legal protections, and they conducted large-scale public education campaigns to define the harm of cruelty to animals in terms of animals’ own suffering. However, animal suffering was only one of the many possible definitions of cruelty's harms, and when judges and other legal interpreters interpreted animal protection laws, they focused less on animal suffering and more on human morality and the dangers of cruelty to human society. Battling over the definition of human guilt for cruelty, protectionists and judges drew and redrew the boundaries of the law's reach and the moral community.

During the four years of preliminary meetings that led to the 1977 Protocols Additional I and II governing internal armed conflict, the prohibitions against superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering – two concepts that gird the regulation and moderation of war and limit the use of certain means and methods of warfare – were invoked as a means of calling into account the actions of imperial states. These meetings took place in the context of the conflicts in Southeast Asia, following the wars of decolonization and national liberation in the 1950s and 1960s. The participants in these meetings were freedom fighters and liberation movements who used this forum, which was open to them for the first time, to push for a wider understanding of the concepts of superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering. Their intention was to hold imperialism and imperial states accountable for suffering and injury beyond that of physical death or wounding and to recognize the violence of colonization and the social and cultural devastation it brought. These interventions were a critical attempt to broaden and deepen the meaning of the laws of war, to make them responsive to more than established sovereign state violence, and to ensure that they reflected the experience of colonization/decolonization. This episode matters because the prohibitions against unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury are two elements that detail the general prohibition first codified in 1907 Hague Convention IV, Article 22, namely that the “the right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.” However, the history and formulation of these two concepts has yet to be fully explored, the meaning of each is debated, and taken together the two are among “the most unclear and controversial rules of warfare.”

This paper seeks to explore an alternative direction to break the theoretical impasse in CSR.

The study employs ancient insights from the core of Buddhist teaching, featuring the Four Noble Truths and the concept of “me” and “mine”, for the modern application of CSR by investigating the crux of major related theories.

The Noble Truths emphasize that suffering should be eradicated at its root. The Buddhist model of CSR suggests that beyond doing good such as supporting philanthropy and avoiding evil as mitigating the impact of corporate malpractice, which are consistent with major CSR theories, it is also crucial to purify the hearts of stakeholders from the “self” and “what belongs to self”, the genesis of suffering. Detachment is the key.

The shift from an institutional to an individual level, more specifically the transformation from a mindset of over‐consumption to one of conscious consumption, is an alternative direction to the progress of theory and practice in CSR.

Defiled by greed and profitability, consumers and investors, who provide income and funding to an organization and define its business practice, are of the highest priority among all stakeholders to start the change according to the Buddhist model of CSR.

This paper takes Buddhism as timeless insight, rather than a religious belief, to propose an alternative model and direction to development of CSR in theory and practice.