Going Against World Trends

Abstract

Neo-liberal social and economic schools of thought and changing demographics appear to be leading to a worldwide retreat in the provision of universal social benefits. However, Botswana seems to be taking the opposite route. The article examines the country's major safety net schemes and suggests why her sociocultural and political milieus mitigate against a more selective approach to providing social benefits.     

Going Bad and Staying Bad: Crystallizing Dramatic Self Change

Symbolic interactionists recognize how selves transform for better or worse. When transforming for worse, or going bad, selves often stay bad, owing to societal response. In this article, we examine fictional characters from popular media (specifically, Michael Corleone from The Godfather trilogy and Walter White from Breaking Bad) and a nonfictional athlete (Lance Armstrong) to discuss staying bad as self‐conscious choices made by those who go bad. Using Athens' depiction of self transformation and adding the notion of particular trajectories (teleological, immersed, and ideational), we compare and contrast the characters' transformations from noble, or potentially heroic, to unapologetically blemished. Our analogic connection depict patterns of development that stress the fundamental importance of agency in regard to processes of staying bad, even when such agency appears self‐destructive.     

The Use of Self from a Relational Perspective

This article explores the implications of a contemporary relational perspective on the use of self in social work practice. The author is responding to an article by Andrea Reupert, who interviewed social workers and reported they tended to see their concept of self as individualistic, autonomous, and only partially defined by others, even though social work practice focuses on person-in-environment. In this article, the author expands the concept of self and argues that a contemporary view of the therapist’s self is one that is dialogic, contextualized, decentered, and multiple. Additionally, the author suggests that this relational perspective has implications for teaching and supervision. Several clinical vignettes are provided to illustrate the concepts under discussion.     

The Schoolkid Self

The article considers the critical nature of elementary school experiences for children's emotional development. To do this, aspects of two theories are compared. One of the theories is from a recent doctoral dissertation on the subjective experiences of childhood. The other is developmental theory inherent in self psychology. There are concepts in both theories related to children's experiences in elementary school and implications for ways elementary schools can provide empathic environments supportive of healthy emotional development. The concepts are illustrated with children's narratives related to their school experiences, narratives which were part of the research data.     

The Naked Self: Being a Body in Televideo Cybersex

Unlike text‐based cybersex, televideo is an embodied experience. Participants present their bodies as an object to be looked at. Through in‐depth interviews this study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self, exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject. Televideo cybersex participants manipulate this relationship by presenting themselves as only a body, the experience of which acts back in an erotic “looking glass” affecting how the self conceives of the body. While in some cases the medium serves to create a “disembodied” context for interaction, as this study illustrates, it may also serve to fully embody. The obvious relationships among self, body, and social situation made evident in any form of sexual experience are largely unexplored in sociology, yet fully within the realm of interest and theoretical models of symbolic interaction.     

The Self at a Time of War in Northern Sri Lanka

The article takes one young Tamil woman, Vasantha, and her account of growing up in the northern war zone of Jaffna in Sri Lanka. Vasantha's narrative and her adolescence, like others of her generation, was framed by living at the margins of the Sri Lankan state (though under its bombardment) and under the control of a repressive quasi-state actor, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In this article, I twin Vasantha's fashioning of her life-story with a meditation on the ways in which the Sri Lankan war, specifically LTTE control over Tamil lives, has come to ambivalently frame and produce particular understandings of selfhood, articulations of collectivity and individuality. Here, I argue that individuation takes many different forms, and, specifically, that the ruptures of war produces individuation in unexpected ways. I take Vasantha's story to explicate the experiences of young people in northern Sri Lanka, and, as an illustration of the contraction and expansion of particular possibilities of selfhood in the midst of political.     

The Branded Self:

This investigation makes the argument that to a considerable degree, our sense of our selves is connected to the way advertising helps us shape our identities and focuses our attention on brands as a way of signifying who we are to others. My point of departure is Norbert Wiley’s The Semiotic Self (1995:37). I will use Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to deal with Wiley’s notion that the self involves an internal conversation in which the present self (the “I”) talks about the past self (the “me”) to the future self (the “you”). The branded self discusses some important concepts in semiotic analysis and relates them to the notion of the “self” and then to other matters, such as branding.     

The Presentation of Occupational Self in Science

I examine the ways in which scientists create and present self-identities. Previous work, in particular research on social stratification in science, has underplayed identity and its contextual variations. I draw upon interviews with scientists who work in two distinct types of American universities, which provides a comparative basis on which to study identities in different contexts of scientific practice. I focus on three aspects of careers, which ground my comparative analysis: commitment, mobility concerns, and the uses of work history.     

The Effect of Simulated Self Versus Object Movement in a Nonsearch Task

This study examined 6‐month‐old infants' abilities to use the visual information provided by simulated self‐movement through the world, and movement of an object through the world, for spatial orientation. Infants were habituated to a visual display in which they saw a toy hidden, followed by either rotation of the point of observation through the world (simulated self‐movement) or movement of the object itself through the world (object movement). Following habituation, infants saw test displays in which the hidden toy reappeared at the correct or incorrect location, relative to the earlier movements. Infants habituated to simulated self‐movement looked longer at the recovery of the toy from an incorrect, relative to correct location. In contrast, infants habituated to object movement showed no differential looking to either correct or incorrect test displays. These findings are discussed within a theoretical framework of spatial orientation emphasizing the availability and use of spatial information.     

The Genesis of Self in Early Childhood*

The works of Cooley, Mead, and Piaget on the genesis and emergence of self in early childhood are examined in light of recent research in developmental linguistics and assessed in terms of the author's own participant observation studies in preschools. Central to the emergence of self is the acquisition of language which is conceptualized as a conversation of gestures. Young children take the standpoint of others and present selves as early as one year of age. The level of reflexivity present in their behaviors is a function of the complexity of the situation and the degree of familiarity with the objects confronted in that setting. Naturalistic studies of early childhood are proposed.     

The Archive as a Social World

Qualitative Sociology - Historical scholars often adopt a solitary ethic, conceiving of their work as the product of a lonely and isolated individual toiling away in a dusty archive. In this...     

The Biosociology of the Social Self

In sociology today, a consensus exists that the human self is exclusively socially determined. Many sociologists maintain that any considerations of the biological basis of human behavior are irrelevant. The arguments which are made today in favor of the social determination of the human personality use the theoretical insights of the Pragmatists and Symbolic Interactionists as their source of reference and proof. All of the various Pragmatic and Symbolic Interactionist theories use a number of assumptions about the biologically innate nature of human nature. To show that the theories which have presented a social deterministic view of man are themselves deeply immersed in biological assumptions demonstrates that the irrelevance of biological factors as determinants of the human self has not been convincingly proved yet. Also it suggests the possibility that theories dealing with man's social nature and those concerned with innate species-specific characteristics may not necessarily be mutually exclusive.     

The Search for Fuller Mutuality and Self Experiences in a Women's Psychotherapy Group

This article examines the reconnection experience of four women, mutually sharing their feelings, thoughts, and implicit relational knowing of each other within the group treatment setting. Initially, Carol, Marcia, Helen, and Nancy were in a six-month psychotherapy group, describing and recounting their histories and life narratives of rape, abuse, neglect, and generally traumatic childhoods. Four years later, they met again, just to see how everyone was doing. The social worker hired a camera-woman to film the five hours of this re-engaging group process. What emerged was a dynamic example of intersubjectivity, affect attunement, emotional regulation, and the power of mutuality and intrinsic responsiveness.     

The Dilemma of Authentic Self Ideology in Contemporary Japan

This paper examines dilemmas inherent in the pursuit of the modern ideology of authentic self, which first emerged in the 1960s and is now widespread in contemporary cultures. The ideology is exemplified, in a religious scene, as self-transformative religions wherein seekers seek to transform themselves spiritually in order to realize their authentic, or sacred selves. Through an examination of Aum Shinrikyo, which began as a typical self-transformative religion but later transformed into a destructive cult, I will explain the intrinsic moral imperatives of the ideology of authenticity. This study of Aum explores the introverted lifestyle and extreme desocialization, which resulted in obsession with the central guru, being legitimated by the ideology. This search for authenticity resulted in the members cutting themselves off from the reality of the world. The final analysis suggests that possible consequences of the endless pursuit of the authentic self are a vacuum self and a loss of empathy with other people. The ontological conditions created by this bring about potential destructiveness, either internal or external.     

The Semiotic Self and Serious Leisure

Examinations of the self and leisure are uncommon, not to mention those bearing on leisure and the semiotic self. The goal of this article is to help correct this deficiency. To this end, the serious leisure perspective is presented, followed by a discussion of how it is related to the semiotic self as formulated by Norbert Wiley. The principal vehicle by which this is accomplished is by way of the meaning of leisure. Moreover participants in serious leisure find there a powerfully attractive leisure career, an experience that is unavailable in the other two forms: casual and project-based leisure. This career frames the development of the semiotic self through leisure.