The Happiness Agenda

Contemporary Anglo-American society is awash with political, organizational and individual efforts to be happy. It is extant across the realms of: governmental debates and mandates, employment policies and management consultancy advice, news stories, television fiction and documentaries, psychology, self-help courses, and even school classrooms. This widespread cultural momentum towards happiness is a culmination of events that have transpired over the past circa three hundred “Industrialized” years since the Age of Enlightenment. Throughout this period up to the modern day, happiness has come to be defined as: pursuable and attainable, able to be measured scientifically and provided by legislation, spiritual, practicable, located within the individual and attainable in correlation with the surrounding capitalistic structure. Whereby a focus on one’s individual, hedonistic happiness is now morally defensible, and in accordance with what have become commonly accepted societal norms. This leads to the denouement of this book that, following on from the popularized coinage of Homo economicus (The Economist Online, 2005) and even Homo siliconvalleycus (Thrift, 2005h: 151): modern humankind is presently aspiring toward the neologistic genus of Homo happicus.

This chapter discusses the first chronological shock that led to the present, peculiar structuring of the cultural circuits of happiness in Anglo-American modernity: its nineteenth-century embracement at a macro-political level. As contended in the previous chapter, the societal strive toward happiness did not occur in grand sweeping strokes, usurping the prominent hegemonies of before. Epochal, mythic shifts in mass-discursive, cultural phenomena are rather rhizomatic, their expressive arrays of actors, objects and templates developing from a near inexhaustible catalog of causes (recall Stromberg, 1981: 12). Some of the varied yet related historical, philosophical and political developments which seem most amenable shall thus be proffered to provide a sustainable history of the present (recall Foucault, 1991: 31), to establish both that happiness is embedded in the dominant macro-political philosophy of modern Anglo-American society and why this is so.

This chapter concerns the second historical shock that contributed to the formation of the modern cultural circuits of happiness: its twentieth-century assimilation with organizational practice, whereby a widespread humanistic belief prevalent in management thinking from this period is that: being happy and productive at work are necessarily connected. This is central to the circulation of the Happiness Agenda as it facilitates its operation at the meso-organizational level of society, bridging between more abstracted macro-philosophical theory and political policy and micro-personal interpretation and enactments.

This chapter details the third shock to have transpired, enabling happiness to become central to and circulate throughout modernity: the (predominantly) twenty-first-century emergence of a practicable positivity within influential psychological circles and society at large. It is affective at a micro-sociological level, supporting the meso-human relations and macro-utilitarian developments previously discussed and, in addition to the prominence of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) and Positive Organizational Behavior (POB), derives most notably from the formalized positive psychology movement.

Having established the relevance of the spiritualistic embodiment of happiness in modern Anglo-American society, attention must now turn to the final prominent issue relating to its cultural dissemination and embracement. Bell and Taylor, once more, offer an interesting insight in their comment that although it is relatively commonplace “to note the progressive diffusion of religious and New Age philosophies into secular contexts, especially in business and management … rarely have researchers explored the processes and practices entailed in this diffusion” (2004: 451, emphasis added). While many of these have indeed been considered in the preceding discussions of the existence of and relations between objects, subjects, templates and subject positions, most, however, also account for how agents attempt to utilize or even subvert the pull of the Happiness Agenda and its actants to comport themselves in culturally reinforced ways.

As perhaps with any prolonged contemplation of the present, a slight expectancy befalls the final comments to speculate upon how developments currently in fruition might ultimately play out. There are then two principal avenues of potential progress resulting from this book which should be, at least briefly, deliberated upon, the first of which pertains to proactive and actionable advisements for future study. This overall account is, admittedly and even necessarily, unconventional in terms of its structure and approach to research. The primary intention here has been to identify and expose the Happiness Agenda, and to show how it can be understood and analyzed. Having addressed such a task, subsequent efforts could focus on specific occurrences in greater depth, in contrast to the attempts here to demonstrate the breadth, variance and multi-dimensionality of the processes under investigation.