The Authenticity of Self: Conceptualization,Personal Experience,and Practice

Scholars across the social sciences often use the concept of authenticity to refer to such different things as sincerity, truthfulness, originality, and the feeling and practice of being true to one's self or others. Whereas the concept of authenticity refers to all of these things, a careful employment of this concept requires a clear understanding of it. By reviewing theory and empirical research on authenticity, we aim at a more precise conceptualization of authenticity. We argue that authenticity is about being true to one's self. When one is true to one's self, one experiences authenticity. This conceptualization views authenticity as a self‐reflective and emotional experience. In order to understand authenticity, a researcher must then take into consideration at least two things: people's emotional experiences of being true or untrue to one's self and people's ideas about what their true self is.     

The managed heart revisited: health and social control1

In this paper I investigate emotional labour in the field of nursing. I show how new ideologies of health promotion have become attached to the prior agenda and already-embedded relationships which structure health provision. Beginning with an outline of health promotion principles and policies the paper goes on to trace how the radical dimensions of health promotion philosophies are subverted in practice by discussing data from a research project into nursing roles in health promotion. I present the data to show how nursing's focus on relationships and relationship skills create divisions of knowledge and information between ‘expert’ discourses located in the institutions of health provision and the everyday agenda of the populations using their services. In the final section of the paper I argue that a focus on the deployment of emotion work in specific social and institutional contexts provides a perspective on emotions as resources that are consciously drawn upon by actors in order to achieve socio-cultural and wider political ends.     

Working at the edge: Emotional labour in the spectre of violence

Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with police officers, door(wo)men and prison officers we present intimate, emotional and sometimes harrowing accounts of both the physical and emotional pain routinely endured by those employed as agents of social control. This article positions labour undertaken in such contexts as ‘edgework'; exploring how the boundary, or ‘edge', between safety and danger is negotiated and managed ‘in the moment' through embodied performances of empathetic and antipathetic emotional labour and emotional neutrality. Placing the concepts of edgework and emotional labour in dialogue, we open up a space in which to explore gendered conceptualizations of emotional labour and offer a more feminist appreciation of edgework that moves us beyond narrow concerns with pleasure, to account for embodied experience and emotional performance. In so doing, this article offers a unique insight into the emotional labour repertoires of both men and women who work in the spectre of violence.     

‘It's Just Acting’: Sex Workers’ Strategies for Capitalizing on Sexuality

This article reports on an ethnographic study of female sex workers in Britain who work in the indoor prostitution markets. The empirical findings contribute to the sex‐as‐labour debate and add to the sociological literature regarding the gendered and sexualized nature of employment, particularly the aesthetic and emotional labour of service work. Grounding the empirical findings in the theory of identity management and emotional labour and work, the article reviews some of the existing examples of how sex workers create emotion management strategies and describes an additional strategy, that of the ‘manufactured identity’. I argue that sex workers create a manufactured identity specifically for the workplace as a self‐protection mechanism to manage the stresses of selling sex as well as crafting the work image as a business strategy to attract and maintain clientele. Drawing on comparisons between sex work and other feminized service occupations, I argue that sex workers who are involved in prostitution under certain conditions are able to capitalize on their own sexuality through the construction of a manufactured identity. The process of conforming to heterosexualized images in prostitution is conceptualized as not simply accepting dominant discourses but as a calculated response made by sex workers to manipulate the erotic expectations and the cultural ideals of the male client.     

The context of employment discrimination: interpreting the findings of a field experiment

Although field experiments have documented the contemporary relevance of discrimination in employment, theories developed to explain the dynamics of differential treatment cannot account for differences across organizational and institutional contexts. In this article, I address this shortcoming by presenting the main empirical findings from a multi‐method research project, in which a field experiment of ethnic discrimination in the Norwegian labour market was complemented with forty‐two in‐depth interviews with employers who were observed in the first stage of the study. While the experimental data support earlier findings in documenting that ethnic discrimination indeed takes place, the qualitative material suggests that theorizing in the field experiment literature have been too concerned with individual and intra‐psychic explanations. Discriminatory outcomes in employment processes seems to be more dependent on contextual factors such as the number of applications received, whether requirements are specified, and the degree to which recruitment procedures are formalized. I argue that different contexts of employment provide different opportunity structures for discrimination, a finding with important theoretical and methodological implications.     

‘Who should do the caring’? Involved fatherhood and ambivalent gendered moral rationalities among cohabiting/married irish parents

Drawing on qualitative couple interviews with cohabiting/married mothers and fathers, this paper examines accounts of involved fatherhood in contemporary Ireland. It shows that while the ideal of fathers as heavily involved in day-to-day parenting is widespread, the reality is somewhat different – and this despite increased participation of Irish mothers in the labour market. Given this mismatch between fatherhood ideals and realities, it begs the question: how do we account for this inequitable division of family work? Gender-differentiated parenting experiences, I argue, are strongly influenced by ambivalent attitudes on the part of both fathers and mothers. I argue that mothers draw on ‘primarily mother’ moral rationalities that associates ‘good’ mothering with large amounts of time in direct provision of childcare, while fathers display a ‘primarily worker’ rationality associated with strong commitment to the labour market. It is the clash of these contrasting normative societal demands that gives rise to a pervasive sense of ambivalence about ‘who should do the caring’. This ambivalence, I demonstrate, is especially prominent in single-income families where the father is the sole breadwinner. In dual-income families, several parents go some distance towards reconciling these contradictory claims, these competing moral discourses.     

Social Capital in Korea: Relational Capital,Trust, and Transparency

This article starts by distinguishing two different types of social capital, that is, societal moral resource capital and relational capital. Social capital as a societal moral resource is best characterized in Putnam's works. Social capital as the relational mobilization of information and control is best conceptualized by Coleman. By contrasting these two aspects of social capital, and by contextualizing the peculiarity of social relations in East Asian countries, this article explores the characteristics of social capital in Korea. For that purpose, I focus on the working of relational capital, or inmaek, in the creation and reproduction of social inequality. Moreover, I calculate the macro-level transformation of Korean society in terms of the role of societal moral resources.     

Beyond the Self: External Influences in the Career Development Process

The purpose of this article is to explore the wide spectrum of external influences that affect career decision making across the life span and, in particular, how these factors may directly or indirectly alter one's career trajectory and the extent of one's work volition. Career development practitioners are encouraged to respect externally oriented frameworks, explore the social influence of career choice alternatives faced by clients, encourage clients to voice their emotional responses to external constraints, and use career decision‐making strategies that seek an optimal balance of internal and external influences.     

Middle class identities in a neoliberal age: tensions between contested authenticities

This paper explores in‐depth interviews on aspects of middle class identity in a neoliberal age, taking the case of Chile's rapid and stark transition to a neoliberal economic model which was imposed by a dictatorship but later reproduced during democracy. ¹ The paper reveals that there are no challenges to middle class identities (eg from the working class, or peasants). In this respect, these are neo‐liberal middle class identities in that their way of thinking is preconditioned by market dominance. Informed by Bourdieu's views on class identities, this article emphasises the horizontal, non‐hierarchical nature of contemporary class taste, and contributes to debates on stratification and culture, settling accounts with older class theory which perceives contests between the popular and middle classes. Notwithstanding this, however, I argue that processes of horizontal differentiation do involve tensions between cultural and moral boundaries. This article therefore also offers an alternative approach for exploring how middle class identities experience processes of individualization. It is argued that individualization processes should be placed in social and ethical registers as they could be in tension with various ways of understanding authenticity: being true to oneself or to one's origins.     

Effort on Display: Unemployment and the Interactional Management of Moral Accountability

In this study of moral accountability in vocational guidance conversations at a public employment office in Sweden, I adopt a combination of approaches to explore implicit accounts as intrinsic to institutional activities. In this setting, participants managed moral accountability by normalizing a person's conduct, preempting potential critique, and marking transgression. Clients were never held accountable for lack of competence, knowledge, or skill or for failing to get a job. A critical element in sustaining oneself as a morally accountable client in this setting is to successfully display one's efforts properly in situ as well as through the institutional record.     

The neoliberal mom: how a discursive coalition shapes low-income mothers’ labor market participation

Research has elucidated the conflict low-income mothers face when trying to comply with the imperatives of the neoliberalism and mothering discourses. Feminist scholars have argued that low-income mothers’ alternative conceptions of morality and behavior constitute an act of resistance to inferiorizing definitions embedded in these discourses. Drawing on this literature, I offer a new conceptualization of the seemingly contradictory discourses. Based on interviews with 48 low-income Israeli mothers, I suggest that the neoliberal ideology is not limited to the neoliberal discourse, which primarily measures the individual's commitment to the labor market, but rather has diffused into the mothering discourse, which sets the standards for good mothering. This diffusion constructs a discursive coalition of ‘neoliberal moms’, wherein the current hegemonic notion of good mothering and the neoliberal call for personal responsibility intersect and shape mothers’ perceptions and decision-making processes. Moreover, the neoliberal mom constructs an alternative morality: moral motherhood. Accordingly, the moral component of good mothering means taking personal responsibility to act in ways that promote one's children's future inclusion. I argue that the discursive coalition framework helps us to better understand mothers’ labor force entries and exits, and how these constitute a way of negotiating paths to social inclusion.     

Abortion Counselling in Britain: Understanding the Controversy

This article reviews literature from a number of disciplines in order to provide an explanation of the political controversy attached to the provision of abortion counselling. It will show how this is an area of health policy debate in which women's reproductive bodies have become a setting for political struggle. The issue of abortion counselling in Britain has undergone a number of discursive shifts in response to political manoeuvring and changing socio‐legal framing of abortion. In particular, the article shows how much of the controversial reframing of abortion counselling was a tactical shift by political actors opposed to abortion per se, and this work is critiqued for not contextualising abortion. The article then focuses on women's abortion experiences and discusses research that shows how women's decision‐making processes, and responses to an abortion, are related to gendered socio‐cultural contexts: the extent to which women having an abortion feel they have transgressed societal norms and values, for example, is likely to affect their abortion experiences. Finally, it is suggested that providing a non‐judgemental context, and challenging negative discourses on abortion, may be the most effective way of minimising the possibility of negative emotions.     

Children's attitudes to parents', teachers' and employers' perceptions of term‐time employment

This article is concerned with examining working children's perceptions of how adults in a range of different settings view their employment. In particular, the article explores how participation in the labour market influences adult‐child relationships within the home, at school and at work. Children interact with adults across a variety of different spheres. Dependence and independence permeate children's relationships with adults in different social settings. Entry to the labour market and access to earnings promotes responsibility among children and encourages self‐reliance. The purpose of the article is to assess the extent to which these traits affect children's interaction with adults within and across the social spaces of the home, school and place of employment. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experiencing parenthood,care and spaces of hospitality

Drawing on research conducted in Australia and the United Kingdom, this paper explores how parenting and care provision is entangled with, and thus produced through, consumption in hospitality venues. We examine how the socio‐material practices of hospitality provision shape the enactment of parenting, alongside the way child‐parent/consumer‐provider interactions impact upon experiences of hospitality spaces. We argue that venues provide contexts for care provision, acting as spaces of sociality, informing children's socialization and offering temporary relief from the work of parenting. However, the data also highlight various practices of exclusion and multiple forms of emotional and physical labour required from care‐providers. The data illustrate children's ability to exercise power and the ways in which parents’/carers’ experiences of hospitality spaces are shaped by their enactment of discourses of ‘good parenting’. Finally, we consider parents’/carers’ coping behaviours as they manage social and psychological risks associated with consumption in such public spaces of leisure.     

Moral dilemmas,trials, and gray areas: Exploring on-the-job moral development of public relations professionals

This qualitative exploratory study applied moral development theory to examine how 35 public relations professionals perceived their on-the-job moral development. Findings suggest that public relations professionals gain moral growth via dialogue and experience-based encounters involving moral values and moral intuition over the span of their careers. Results confirm previous theoretical research regarding moral development of public relations professionals situating practitioners as moral thinkers who apply personal and societal moral values to industry contexts.     

Emotional labour: skill and work in the social regulation of feelings

I define emotional labour as the labour involved in dealing with other peoples’feelings, a core component of which is the regulation of emotions. The aims of the paper are firstly to suggest that the expression of feelings is a central problem of capital and paid work and secondly to highlight the contradictions of emotions at work. To begin with I argue that ‘emotion’is a subject area fitting for inclusion in academic discussion, and that the expression of emotions is regulated by a form of labour. In the section ‘Emotion at home’I suggest that emotional labour is used to lay the foundations of a social expression of emotion in the privacy of the domestic domain. However the forms emotional labour takes and the skills it involves leave women subordinated as unskilled and stigmatised as emotional. In the section ‘Emotion at work’I argue that emotional labour is also a commodity. Though it may remain invisible or poorly paid, emotional labour facilitates and regulates the expression of emotion in the public domain. Studies of home and the workplace are used to begin the process of recording the work carried out in managing emotions and drawing attention to its significance in the social reproduction of labour power and social relations of production.     

The Temporality of Emotion: Constructing Past Emotions

Symbolic interactionists have developed a rich literature on emotion that has advanced our understanding of the socially constructed nature of emotions and has provided a wealth of understanding about emotions and emotional life. Left unexplored, however, has been the temporal nature of emotion. Similarly, interactionists' renewed interest in time and temporality has not focused on emotion. In this article I describe the implicit leads in these two literatures that need to be pulled together to make the linkage clear. Drawing on the work defining emotions as social objects and on George Herbert Mead's theory of the past, I describe how emotional pasts are used as foundations for situated actions. I also explain how we use the emotional pasts in four areas: the individual level, individuals in interaction, collective behavior, and the social structural level. This linkage provides insights for understanding how we use emotional pasts when we construct and enact behavior. I argue that emotional pasts are important tools used in the interpretation and construction of present emotions, to situate selves and others, and to construct the social order.     

Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui

Abstract

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.     

Not to Be Hungry Is Not Enough: An Insight Into Contours of Inclusion and Exclusion in Affluent Western Societies

In its view of the contemporary world, social theory—and particularly its postmodern trends and proponents—attributes a dominant role to the realm of consumption and consumerism in shaping both individual lifeworlds and the system of social hierarchies as a whole. In this article, building on the case of middle‐aged to late‐middle‐aged post–Soviet Jewish immigrants in contemporary Germany and illuminating a particular condition that I call “condemned to consume,” I seek to reexamine this tendency to celebrate consumption and consumerism while downplaying and marginalizing realm of work and employment. I interconnect this examination with questions regarding the distribution of resources and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on the “condemned to consume” condition, I seek to claim that in affluent Western societies, which are able to provide relative material well‐being or at least subsistence even to those at the margins, the main contours of inclusion and exclusion are not grounded primarily in one's ability to enter the realm of consumption but, rather, in one's ability to participate equally in the realm of work and employment. I underscore this idea by connecting lack of regular, meaningful employment with the concept of exclusive inclusion.