Fighting with Oneself to Maintain the Interaction Order: A Sociological Approach to Self‐Injury Daily Process

This article proposes an interactionist approach to self‐injury behavior in youth. Mostly based on in‐depth interviews with seventy people who self‐harm or who have self‐harmed at some point in their lives, it describes the process of daily self‐injuring. It shows that this practice consists less in the self‐harm in itself than in a liminal emotional state, composed of several successive steps, and that self‐injury makes sense because concerned individuals subjectively see it as the most practical of known activities for releasing emotional troubles, then maintaining the interaction order surrounding them.     

Self‐Esteem,the Fear of Crime,and the Decision to Protect Oneself From Victimization

This research extends prior work that examines self‐esteem as an outcome of protective behaviors against crime victimization by focusing instead on the moderating influence of self‐esteem on the relationship between the fear of crime and the decision to protect oneself from victimization. The fear of crime is conceptualized as two separate components (fear of victimization and perceived risk) in accordance with prior work. Self‐esteem is conceptualized as three separate components (worth, efficacy, and authenticity), and measured with a recently designed instrument for capturing each aspect of self‐esteem separately. Data are collected through surveys of a population at high risk for victimization (undergraduate college students). Logistic regression analyses demonstrate that self‐esteem does play a role for deciding whether to engage in protective behaviors, and that the specific components of self‐esteem moderate defensive behavioral outcomes differently. Specifically, the self‐worth, self‐efficacy, and authenticity components of self‐esteem influence the decision to carry protection, but not the decision to take a self‐defense class. Implications for both the fear of crime and self‐esteem literatures are addressed.     

Career Engagement: Investigating Intraindividual Predictors of Weekly Fluctuations in Proactive Career Behaviors

This study applied a microlevel perspective on how within‐individual differences in motivational and social‐cognitive factors affected the weekly fluctuations of engagement in proactive career behaviors among a group of 67 German university students. Career self‐efficacy beliefs, perceived career barriers, experienced social career support, positive and negative emotions, and career engagement were assessed weekly for 13 consecutive weeks. Hierarchical linear regression analyses showed that above average levels of career engagement within individuals were predicted by higher than average perceived social support and positive emotions during a given week. Conversely, within‐individual differences in self‐efficacy, barriers, and negative emotions had no effect. The results suggest that career interventions should provide boosts in social support and positive emotions.     

Self-interest and the theory of action

The concept of self-interest remains underdeveloped in sociology although central to economics. Recent methodological and social trends render sociological indifference to the concept untenable. The term has enjoyed historical predominance in the West since the sixteenth century. While it is seen in modern economics as a singular motivating force, Adam Smith regarded self-interest in economic action as necessarily moderated by sympathy. In addition to its problematic economic conceptualization self-interest has an experiential basis in unequal power relations. An alternative to the concept of self-interest is presented by Amartya Sen in his account of commitment; its inconsistencies, however, render Sen's statement unsatisfactory. Differences between present and future interests indicate that the distinction between self-interested and other-interested action is not sustainable.     

Desperately seeking social approval: Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen and the moral limits of capitalist culture

Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen shared much in matters of economic ontology. Both dismissed the very notion of an autonomous economic self and instead investigated the processes through which self and other are mutually constituted under changing cultural traditions of individual aspiration. Their strikingly similar critiques of status-oriented consumption and concern for the moral basis of the market economy are established in this manner. However, the political implications of their analyses point in different directions, with Veblen being the more radical. The Smithian individual can always use spectatorial insights to assert through genuinely praiseworthy behaviour personal moral distance from social norms of status-oriented consumption. The Veblenian individual, by contrast, has no such capacity for elevating abstract moral principles above socially-situated conduct, as mind and environment co-evolve in line with changing material circumstances of life. For Veblen, the rise of status-oriented consumption itself acted as a form of moral self-education that more deeply entrenched the social norms of ownership out of which it arose, thus the impossibility of an autonomous economic self was matched by the impossibility of an autonomous moral self. To his way of thinking, moral degradation in conspicuous consumption was irredeemably inscribed into the whole cultural structure of capitalism.     

The powerful relational language of ‘family’: togetherness,belonging and personhood

This article examines the notion of ‘family’ to consider how it may be understood in people's everyday lives. Certain recurrent and powerful motifs are apparent, notably themes of togetherness and belonging, in the context of a unit that the person can be ‘part of’. At the same time, there may be important variations in the meanings given to individuality and family, evoking differing understandings of the self and personhood. I consider these ideas further through globally relevant but variable cultural themes of autonomy and relationality, suggesting the term ‘social person’ as a heuristic device to distinguish the sense of ‘close‐knit selves’ that may be involved in some understandings of personhood. I argue that this version of personhood may be powerfully expressed through ‘family’ meanings, with a significance which can be at least provisionally mapped along lines of inequality and disadvantage within and between societies around the world. These forms of connectedness may be hard to grasp through those theoretical and methodological frameworks which emphasize the (relational) individual. I argue that, in affluent English speaking societies, ¹ there may be little alternative to the language of ‘family’ for expressing such forms of relationality and connection.     

Commentary on 'Managing the process of change in residential child care: A consultancy approach'

This paper draws on a ten month British study completed in April 2001 investigating service responses to women of South Asian background who had attempted suicide or who self-harmed. The scope of the study is briefly outlined and an analysis of perspectives documented in the study is presented, drawing on research interviews with 18 staff from a variety of health and social care disciplines and with seven survivors of attempted suicide/self-harm. The implications of this analysis for improving practice are considered. Attitudes surrounding attempted suicide and self-harm are discussed. The issue of ‘race anxiety’ is also discussed. The factors seen by workers as contributing to South Asian women's attempted suicide are considered, with a particular focus on the difficulties caused in the delivery of services by common-sense accounts of cultural issues. Current approaches to the delivery of services to South Asian women are identified and analysed, showing how their current organisation can lead to circularity in referral systems and consequent non-intentional neglect of the needs of this client group. It is urged that proper consideration be given to the support and professional supervision of staff in this complex area of work.     

Theory,practice and use of self in the open dialogues approach to family therapy: A simple complexity or a complex simplicity?

In the family therapy literature there is increasing interest in the dialogical approach, particularly as it becomes well‐grounded in psychotherapy research. One embodiment is ‘open dialogues’, which has developed over a 30‐year period in Western Lapland, Finland. This paper outlines my experience of visiting Keropudas Hospital in Tornio, Finland, the birthplace of open dialogues. It explores the seven theoretical principles of open dialogues, associated elements of clinical practice, and the therapist use of self. The author utilises these aspects to reflect on dialogical moments through words and images based on three conceptual themes, which illustrate the relevance of open dialogues for family therapy practitioners and their contexts.     

Effects of Social Supports on the Career Choice Consideration of Chinese Farmers: A Social Cognitive Perspective

Drawing from social cognitive career theory ( Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994 ), this study explored social supports’ influence on the career choice consideration of farmers during China's current process of urbanization. A questionnaire was designed based on interviews with 140 people and a pretest with a sample of 419 participants. A total of 628 participants were involved in the formal questionnaire survey. Results indicated that social supports had a dual effect: Positive supports were indirectly related to career choice consideration through the mediation of career self‐efficacy, whereas negative supports were related to career choice consideration directly. Implications for future research and the development of a career guidance and social support system for Chinese farmers are discussed.     

Let the countdown begin — Aging experiences of young adults in countdown blogs

This paper examines a particular blog phenomenon that has not yet received much attention: Countdown blogs which are written before a significant birthday (in this paper, it is the thirtieth birthday). The bloggers fill the remaining time, often a year, with the accomplishment of particular tasks, reflections on their lives or photo projects. In their blogs, the young adults demonstrate an age awareness that is often overlooked in aging studies. The paper argues that young adults use countdown blogs to cope with their aging experiences and, in doing so, they apply a particular economic rhetoric and emerge as entrepreneurs of themselves - an identity concept that Foucault presented in the late 1970s. Foucault, however, did not consider the themes of age as symbolic capital nor the marketing strategies that entrepreneurship of the self imply. In a close reading of a sample of twenty-one countdown blogs, the paper suggests new complexities in Foucault's concept. At the same time, it argues that young adults today have developed creative strategies in terms of multimedia projects and heightened self-scrutiny to cope with the finitude of time, the expectations of age-appropriate behavior and the coercions of neoliberal consumer culture.