Specialization and the Survival of Self‐Help Organizations

This article examines the survival rates of 589 self‐help organizations in order to understand how self‐help niches, organizations specializing in biomedical, human services, and behavioral health, differentially impact longevity. Drawing on a study of the self‐help movement, we examine how the various mechanisms by which specialization impacts self‐help movement organizations' chances of survival. Extending the concepts of embeddedness, countervailing powers, and organizational specialization to self‐help organizations, we investigate how formal structures and professional alliances differentially promote longevity. Results show how formalization enhances self‐help organizations' longevity, and serves as a mechanism by which specialization impacts organizational viability. While formalization has a robust and beneficial impact on longevity, some professional linkages are negatively associated with survival and others are positively associated with it.     

Vying Constructions of Reality: Religion,Science, and "Positive Thinking" in Self-Help Literature

This article tracks how self-help literature, from the 19th century through the 20th, has rallied the support of religious, scientific, and spiritual constructions of reality to strengthen the validity of the genre's central concept of positive thinking. Positive thinking claims that people can become healthy and happy by thinking positive thoughts, thereby implying that individuals in isolation can accomplish the restorative healing regularly attributed to social interaction. The genre's history provides an index of the struggle between religious and scientific sense making in mediated popular culture. I argue that from 1880 to 1910, self-help books relied on alternative religious notions to argue that individuals should practice positive thinking. From the 1940s through the 1960s, as psychology entered popular culture, some self-help encouraged readers to explore "negative" root causes of ill health and unhappiness. By the 1980s and '90s, positive thinking had incorporated popular psychology into a hybrid "spirituality," a concept that encouraged readers to place negative thoughts in the past and envision only a positive future. The trajectory chronicled here allowed the genre to accomplish two ends: to remain culturally viable by reflecting popular depictions of self and society and to retain the core idea of positive thinking relatively unchanged.     

Fighting Corruption without the State: Civil Society Agency and the “Otokoto Saga”

The violent outburst of Owerri's civil society in September 1996 arguably signaled a new order in the fighting of corruption – through self‐help efforts. This outburst was a demonstration of public discontent over the activities of a few rich citizens in that town who were believed to have been involved in varied corrupt practices in making “fast” wealth. It was also a vociferous indictment on the State and its agents for ineptitude in fighting corruption, and complicity in criminal acts. Drawing from both primary and secondary sources in social research, this study critically examines the chain of events preceding, and the dynamics of the developments surrounding the societal conflicts in Owerri, Nigeria, popularly dubbed “Otokoto Saga.” It analyzes the varied dimensions of the societal conflicts, the authentic roles of civil society agency in a “self‐help strategy” and the responses of the State (and its actors) to the inadvertent eruptions. It further shows how Owerri's civil society agency “forced” the state to take critical steps towards the restoration of sanity in the town. The paper argues that civil society's critical awareness of its own roles in maintaining a corrupt‐free society was instrumental to their violent reactions. It concludes that deep‐seated fear and frustration underlined the reactions of the civil society, while moral panic and outrage triggered such reactions.     

England – whose England? Narratives of nostalgia,emptiness and evasion in imaginations of national identity

This paper explores the contested and racialised nature of Englishness as a national identity. Based on qualitative interviews of white mothers in London, the paper examines the different ways in which the interviewees positioned themselves in relation to concepts of Englishness. National identity involves ways of being, a sense of place and belonging. It is produced through forms of myth‐making and narrative production which depend on particular constructions of time and space. This paper examines how nation‐ness is imagined and lived by the interviewees. It asks how constructions of Englishness related to constructions of the self and how imaginings of belonging involved imagining of otherness. It also describes how, for some of the interviewees, the domestic, particularly in notions of cleanliness and dirt, as well as food and consumption, was a key metaphor for explaining their relationship to national identity.     

The Logic of A Co‐Operative Economy and Democracy 2.0: Recovering the Possibilities for Autonomy,Creativity, Solidarity,and Common Purpose

Over the past 30 years, the collectivist‐democratic form of organization has presented a growing alternative to the bureaucratic form, and it has proliferated, here and around the world. This form is manifest, for example, within micro‐credit groups, workers’ co‐operatives, nongovernmental organizations, advocacy groups, self‐help groups, community and municipal initiatives, social movement organizations, and in many nonprofit groups in general. It is most visible in the civil society sector, but demands for deeper participation are also evident in communities and cities, and the search for more involving and less bureaucratic structures has spread into many for‐profit firms as well. Building on research on this form of organization, this article develops a model of the decisional processes utilized in such organizations and contrasts these “Democracy 2.0” standards for decision making from the Democracy 1.0 (representative and formal) standards that previously prevailed. Drawing on a new generation of research on these sorts of organizations, this article and this special section discuss: (a) how consensus decisional processes are being made more efficient; (b) how such organizations are now able to scale to fairly large size while still retaining their local and participatory basis; (c) how such organizations are cultivating a more diverse membership and using such diversity to build more democratic forms of governance; (d) how such organizations are combatting ethnoracial and gender inequalities that prevail in the surrounding society; and (e) how emotions are getting infused into the public conversations within these organizations and communities.     

Dimensions of Precariousness in an Emerging Sector of Self‐Employment: A Study of Self‐Employed Nurses

Changing economic ideologies and a new emphasis on entrepreneurial opportunities have led to a rise in self‐employment in Canada, especially among women. Although some people benefit from self‐employment, it is considered to be a precarious form of employment. Despite a growing body of literature on gender and self‐employment, there is more to learn about its precarious nature across industries and types of entrepreneurs. This ethnographic study examines the experiences of self‐employed nurses in order to better understand self‐employment in professional caring work. In some ways, these nurses' experiences fit with what is known about female self‐employment but this specific sector highlights how precariousness can take different forms across different areas of work. In particular, this study reveals new insights about the complexity and ambiguity of precariousness.     

THE EVOLUTIONARY LOGIC OF HONORING SUNK COSTS

Although economics claims that sunk costs should not figure in current decision‐making, there is ample evidence to suggest that people squander resources by honoring bygones. We argue that such wastage of resources was tolerated in our evolutionary past by Nature because it served fitness‐enhancing functions. In this study, we propose and model one such function. We demonstrate how the honoring of sunk costs could have arisen as a commitment device that Nature found expedient for scenarios where conflicts over temptations between the emotional and rational centers of the brain might sabotage long‐term investments. By applying this idea to the self‐concept, we argue that this model provides a rationale for cognitive dissonance, a well‐established phenomenon in social psychology. (JEL D01, D03)     

Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop‐Motion Animation Programmes For Young Children

This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self‐understanding, self‐examination and “self‐work”, and through which the “self qua self” is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as “excellence”, “total quality”, “performance”, “knowledge”, “play at work” and “wellness” in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of “human resourcefulness” as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management’s wider historical–cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term “derecognition of finitude”. It is the modern synthesis — with the “self” at the centre of its system of values — that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organizations use “work” to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self‐expression. Management thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self‐expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realized identity.     

You are your brand: Self‐branding and the marketization of self

Personal branding was popularized in the late twentieth century through a spate of self‐help literature which enjoined workers to take responsibility for themselves by taking an entrepreneurial approach to the self, seeing themselves as products to be marketed as a means of managing the risks of an unstable labor market. Self‐branding discourse frames the “authentic self” as a source of material value which workers can leverage to build a reputation, which they can later capitalize upon in their attempts to remain competitive as workers. This article examines the literature on self‐branding to trace its origins as a framework for conceptualizing the self. The discourse of self‐branding proposes a singular, profitable self which is at once authentic and consistent. In this review of self‐branding literature, I explore what thinking of the self as a brand does to the way individuals relate to themselves. I examine the social construction of authentic self‐brands, how branding the self on social media impacts the process of self‐presentation, and how workers experience the imperative to self‐brand.     

Techno‐social Life: The Internet,Digital Technology,and Social Connectedness

This essay explores what it means to be socially connected in a techno‐social world. It describes how a “triple revolution” in social connectedness has been catalyzed by the ever‐increasing use of the Internet, mobile communication, and social media networking (Rainie and Wellman 2012). It argues for the usefulness of the concepts of the community and the network in understanding how social connectedness is created and experienced in the use of digital (computerized) communication technology. It examines some of the consequences – both benefits and hazards – of being near‐continuously available to one another via the Internet, mobile phones, and social media. And it describes how digital (online) and face‐to‐face (offline) spaces become fully integrated and experienced as a single, enmeshed reality. The article concludes that people's use of digital communication technology tends to strengthen social connectedness and prompt, not deter, face‐to‐face interaction and local community ties.     

“Do Some Wondering”: Children and their Self‐Understanding Selves in Early Elementary Classrooms

Self‐knowledge has been a central theme in many diagnoses of late modernity, and it has cued scholars to investigate everyday situations in which people express reflexive selves. Using participant observation and interview data, we examined two American elementary classrooms where children learn to express a type of “self‐understanding self” called the enterprising child. We suggest that this form of self emerges through classroom talk characterized by the popular pedagogical concept of metacognition, which encourages the learner to be aware of her thinking and learning and, crucially, to express an awareness of herself as a thinker and learner. We emphasize an interactionist view toward the situational self, and argue that how teachers manage classroom discourse socializes children into venerating the dispositional tendencies that correspond with new capitalist workplaces. We conclude by discussing the implications this may have for modern personhood, symbolic inequality in classrooms, and the political economy of linguistic forms.     

Performing Beauty: Dove's “Real Beauty” Campaign

Dove, a popular beauty brand, impressed some in the advertising world with its unique “Campaign for Real Beauty” and made others cringe. But little is known about how real women respond. “Real” beauty according to Dove means various shapes and sizes—flaws and all—and is the key to rebranding, rebuilding women's self‐esteem, and redefining beauty standards. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with sixteen Canadian women and guided by social semiotics and dramaturgy, I examine Dove's presentation of beauty and women's reactions to it from a “beauty as performance” frame. This study examines processes of interpretation and finds that expressing beauty, the self, and a public image inextricably requires elements of performance.     

The Self as Public Property: Made in Israel

This article examines the connection between state order and self‐understandings in everyday life through a case study of the “Boarding School for Gifted Disadvantaged” in Israel. It includes content analysis of governmental protocols that documented the establishment of the boarding school (governmental constitution of a new self‐concept) and interviews with sixty of its graduates (self‐understandings in everyday life). The findings reveal how the new cultural order invented a new selfhood, “gifted disadvantaged,” previously unknown in Israel. This category is based on structural distinctions between being “naturally” gifted versus the governmental constitution of gifted status. Interviews with graduates indicate that they experience selfhood as a philanthropic gift bestowed on them by the state of Israel and voice their gratitude toward the state. The concluding discussion suggests that the graduates experience their selfhood as “public property.” The self, perceived as having been constructed from outside, is in a continuous dialectic between the presence and the absence of certain personal qualities.     

“Above the below”: body trauma as spectacle in social/media space

The exposure and, more particularly, self‐exposure of psychological and bodily trauma has become the central feature of our “postdocumentary” culture. TV talk shows, observational documentary, life‐style programming and reality television all facilitate the exhibition and consumption of personal pain and suffering (as well as joy and individual success). Generally speaking, this showcasing of personal trauma is a gendered one; with many of the established and newer formats dismissed as feminised media culture; with few, if any, intellectual pretensions. This is partly the case because the domain of emotional suffering, at least, has been conventionally designated a “feminine” one, with women especially, licensed to speak about bodily or psychological insecurity, vulnerability or damage. When “masculine” damage or trauma is at stake, its presentation and articulation in media culture takes on quite different forms and meanings. Bearing in mind this context, this essay examines an example of the new hybrid of reality TV and performance piece: the David Blaine event entitled “Above the Below”. It does so in order to explore the meanings, symbolics and ethics of the current specularisation of bodily trauma in social and media space; revealing the multiple ways in which an ethics of the self and of becoming is articulated in a popular form. Ultimately, the aim is to make more complex our understanding of “the apparently oxymoronic ‘popularity’ of trauma” as cultural text (Radstone , p. 189).

This dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside gives rise to a fourth aspect of the felt experience of physical pain, an almost obscene conflation of private and public. It brings with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self‐exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibility for camaraderie or shared experience. Artistic objectifications of pain often concentrate on this combination of isolation and exposure. (Scarry , p. 53)     

Self and Society in Popular Social Criticism 1920–1980

Since the tumult of the 1960s, sociologists and cultural historians have suggested that a “new sensibility” has become more prominent in the United States and other advanced capitalist democracies. In most accounts, the core of the change is an increase in expressive individualism, popularly justified by discourse very much indebted to the language of academic and clinical psychology. Among symbolic interactionists, Ralph Turner's proposal that there has been a shift from “institutional” to “impulsive” anchorage of the self has been the single most influential contribution to this debate. Turner's analysis is placed in the larger context of his work and considered in the light of changes in social criticism and the rhetoric of self in popular “conduct-of-life” literature published between 1920 and 1980. Three relatively distinct waves of social criticism are found in that literature during that period, with each one more firmly based on individualistic and psychologistic views of self and society than its predecessor.     

Visual Expressions of Corporate Superiority: A Review of Jacqueline Hassinck’s Photographic Art Project and Booklet ‘The Table of Power’

Arguing that institutional rationality constitutes a meta‐institution upon which the specific institutions of the capitalist social order depend, this paper explores the possibility that it might be interrogated through the imaginary worlds created by readers in their responses to literary fiction. It does so by constructing a fictive encounter between the response aesthetics of Wolfgang Iser and two novels by Ian McEwan, Saturday and Enduring love, both of which feature institutional rationality as a core element of the ‘reality’ from which they are constructed.

The conclusions are somewhat negative. The problems posed to McEwan’s personifications of institutional rationality, despite the author’s reputation for arbitrary and sometimes macabre plotlines, are nowhere such as to call into question their understandings of the events which befall them. Nor, reading the novels as explorations of that very one‐dimensionality, are readers likely to be induced into a questioning of their own understandings of the world. This is because the novels in question, like most modern literary fiction, have been produced within a tradition which reaches back to the romantic/humanist reaction to institutional rationality, and this makes it possible for readers to distance themselves from characters in which it is exemplified. Far from producing a critical Imaginary, readers who respond in this manner are likely to externalize any interrogations of institutional rationality suggested by its fictional recontextualization and produce, instead, one in which the superiority of their own understandings of the world is confirmed. Whilst this may be opposed to institutional rationality in the routinised sense of an antagonistic accommodation, nothing new is added by the reading of the novels.

Whilst some of the problem may lie in the characterization of the principle protagonists in the selected novels – which is both flat and static – it is suggested that there is also a problem with the initial expectation of a critical imaginary created by Iser’s theory. The fact is that its creation depends on an assumed response on the part of the reader that has no evidential basis. This empirical deficit cannot be made good either by Iser’s earlier construct of an ‘implied reader’, nor by his later posit of self‐aware role‐taking as a fundamental anthropological need. Whilst one cannot rule out the possibility that some readers might respond as Iser supposes – even to the novels discussed in this paper – there is no particular reason to rule it in either.     

Domestic violence intervention program: Unconditional shelter?

This case examines the difficult choices facing a domestic violence shelter in crisis. Beth George had been on the run from her estranged husband with her two sons for three years. When the shelter hired Beth rather than another former resident (her roommate at the shelter) for a staff position, the roommate called Beth's ex‐husband and told him where they were. Police arrested Beth, sent the children back to their father, and began an investigation of whether shelter staff had knowingly harbored a fugitive. The shelter had just begun a fundraising campaign for a new building, but all financial contributions immediately stopped, throwing the organization into financial crisis. The executive director and staff were under enormous pressure and faced possible criminal sentences. The board had to try to minimize the damage to its reputation in the media, figure out how to keep the organization from failing financially, decide whether to continue to employ Beth George and the executive director, who were under criminal investigation, and fend off attacks from fathers' rights activists. The case explores the difficult management issues facing an organization and individuals in crisis. It examines how class, sexual orientation, race, and feminist ideology structure services to battered women. It also provides a window into the difficult job of front‐line workers skating on the edge of the law as the law begins to recognize and protect victims of intimate violence. It invites readers to consider how one should decide what and whom to believe. Finally, it considers the significance of grass‐roots feminist mobilizing to support feminist organizations.     

Are You Truly a Recovering Dope Fiend? Local Interpretive Practices at a Therapeutic Community Drug Treatment Program

Previous qualitative research on treatment programs for drug addiction/alcoholism has primarily focused on those processes whereby participants are expected to construct a new sense of self according to institutional parameters. The present article builds on that research and explores how contemporary programs attempt to resolve the problem that it is almost impossible to tell if someone has engaged in this self‐construction process. Informed by five months of ethnographic fieldwork at an adult residential drug treatment facility, the article asks: under what circumstances do program members call into doubt a client's efforts to create an institutional self, and how do they express this skepticism? The article reveals that staff and clients employ a set of local interpretive practices about community and emotions to assess whether clients are constructing the institutional self of a “recovering dope fiend.” It specifically considers how they interpret a client's emotional displays to represent that client's current self under construction. That is, a client's ability to control anger appropriately or to handle anxiety demonstrates s/he is effectively “doing the program” of self‐construction.     

TRADITION AND TECHNOLOGY IN LOCAL NEWSCASTS:

In Counter-Statement , Kenneth Burke distinguishs between the psychology of form and the psychology of information—meaning as brought by readers to a text and as supplied by a text. That distinction can help us understand local news as relevant, formalized, public information, where social standards of relevance (tradition) encounter technologically enhanced and restructured information (technology). These two competing presentational modes put into tension sociocultural and technological formalisms, grounding news in shared culture yet creating possibilities for new ways of seeing and understanding the world. Tradition stabilizes thought even as the new technologies rescore our senses of time and place, and both energize our lives.     

Social psychology in a postmodern age: A discipline without a subject

This article reconsiders the question of the crisis of social psychology. I argue here that there is a crisis in social psychology but it is not one of a growing separation between the discipline’s psychological and sociological wings. Instead, the crisis is the result of structural transformation and associated cultural shift. It involves the gradual displacement of an earlier concept of the strong, autonomous ego by the postmodern production of the imaginary self. The self in the unfolding era of postmodernism increasingly resembles a composite of commercially produced images rather than a self-directed ego. The displacement of the self-concept by the self-image produced what has been a vaguely apperceived but, as yet, not adequately conceptualized, crisis in social psychology. I conclude with an argument on behalf of a personality and social structure approach to social psychology as the only form of social psychology conceptually able to deal with the real crisis within social psychology, that is, the erosion of the self.