‘We can’t live without beliefs’: Self and society in therapeutic engagements

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suvi Salmenniemi
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Emotional Wellbeing ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethical Work ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
Shed Light

Therapeutic technologies of happiness, emotional wellbeing and self-improvement are a highly influential cultural phenomenon and a rapidly growing business worldwide; yet little is known of the motivations for engaging with these technologies. This article addresses this gap by investigating how therapeutic engagements are experienced and what participants hope to gain from them. Therapeutic technologies are conceived as psychologically informed regimes of knowledge and practice which aim to transform one’s relationship to oneself and shape the ways in which one makes sense of and acts upon oneself and the social world. Drawing on a set of interviews with consumers of therapeutic technologies in Russia, the article identifies three key motivations for engaging with such technologies: searching for new blueprints for ethical work on the self after a profound transformation of the ideological field; coming to terms with new mechanisms of inequality, particularly in the field of labour; and mobilizing therapeutic technologies as a response to inadequacies in the field of health. By unpacking these motivations and subjective experiences of therapeutic engagements, the article seeks to shed light on the growing popularity of therapeutic technologies under contemporary capitalism.

Symbolic interactionism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Brittan
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Interactionism ◽  
Social World ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Language Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interactive View

Symbolic interactionism is in the main a US sociological and social psychological perspective that has focused on the reciprocal relationship between language, identity and society. Philosophically it has largely been associated with pragmatists such as James (1907), Mead (1934), Dewey (1922) and Pierce (1958), although in the European context it has affinities with hermeneutics and phenomenology. In addition, it has links with various ‘dramaturgical’ approaches to communication that emphasize the interactive processes underpinning the construction, negotiation, presentation and affirmation of the self. In brief, symbolic interactionism is premised on the supposition that human beings are ‘active’ and not ‘reactive’. Although it is not easy to spell out the central propositions of Symbolic Interactionism in a systematic way, nevertheless, most of its proponents are committed to an interactive view of self and society, that is, they take issue with those views that see the social world as a seamless unity that completely encapsulates and determines individual conduct.

Moving between frames: The basis of the stable and dialogical self

2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 510-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Moore ◽  
Carol Jasper ◽  
Alex Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Dialogical Self ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Stability And Instability ◽  
The Social ◽  
Clear Link ◽  
The Stability

Research on the dialogical self has tended to emphasize instability over stability. Grossen and Salazar Orvig (2011) show how norms, values, material objects, and institutions feed into the stability of the self. We expand upon this contribution by introducing Goffman’s (1974) concept of “frames” to theorize both stability and instability. Social interactions do not begin with individuals but with socially given and pre-existing cultural-historical frames which people are called upon to inhabit. Frames comprise historical, institutional, material, and cultural aspects. The key point is that action within a frame tends to stabilize the self, while being caught between frames tends to destabilize the self. The concept of frames can thus provide a clear link between the structure of the social world and the structure of the dialogical self. We use the concept of frames to distinguish the stability produced by one set of expectations, within one frame, from the peculiar instability and dialogical tensions which result from being embedded in discrepant or contradictory frames.

Scholarship and Inquiry in Early Mesopotamia

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Paul Delnero
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Knowledge Acquisition ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
The Many ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractThousands of texts documenting the activities of scribes and scholars that shed light on the social context of scholarship and scientific inquiry survive from the first half of Mesopotamian history (c. 3400 bc to c. 1600 bc). Since these texts provide ample evidence that scholarship occupied a central place in Mesopotamian culture and society during the period in question, examining their content is essential to reconstructing what can be known about scientific knowledge and practice in the ancient world. In this chapter some of this evidence will be considered in order to present a modest overview of the social position and intellectual processes of knowledge acquisition and inquiry during the first phase of Mesopotamian history and to address preliminarily some of the many questions that can be asked about scholarship and inquiry in early Mesopotamia.

scholarly journals Accounting and the Making of Homo Liberalis

2012 ◽  
pp. 67-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Lambert ◽  
Eric Pezet
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Organisational Context ◽  
Management Accountants ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

This paper investigates the practices whereby the subject, in an organisational context, carries out systematic practices of self-discipline and becomes a calculative self. In particular, we explore the techniques of conduct developed by management accountants in a French carmaker, which adheres to a neoliberal environment. We show how these management accountants become calculative selves by building the very measurement of their own performance. The organisation thereby emerges as the cauldron in which a Homo liberalis is forged. Homo liberalis is the individual capable of constructing for him/her the political self-discipline establishing his/her relationship with the social world on the basis of measurable performance. The management accountants studied in this article prefigure the Homo liberalis in the self-discipline they develop to act in compliance with the organisation’s goals.

scholarly journals Babel

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 52-76
Author(s):  
Nina Gładziuk ◽  
Paweł Janowski
Keyword(s):  
17Th Century ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Public Order ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

What interests us here is the fact that Babel as a figure of confusion became almost the self-named epithet of 17th-century England. All the participants of the debate that took place during the revolution or the postbellum associated Babel with the conceptual chaos of the civil war. The lively “pamphlet war” then brought a pluralistic forum for public opinion in which all the confused languages of politics were equal. When all could read the Bible, everyone could read the story of Babel in their own way. But nothing could reconcile those who read the divine right of kings in it with those who read the divine right of the people in it. In the 17th century, Babel was seen as a figure of discursive confusion, as the confusion was experienced in the form of fanatical languages of arguing sects. Liberalism, if the English-speaking world is acknowledged to be its cradle, constitutes an attempt to escape the impasse of the discursive Babel via the legalistic means of the state of law. According to Hobbes, the irreversible multitude of languages makes one ask what public order can reconcile nominalism in the sphere of political opinion with the social Diaspora of individuals released from the bonds of status or corporation. How to build a state while one Christian faith is disintegrating into many sects fighting each other? How to build a state in the chronic pluralism of the social world and multifaceted dissociation of the traditional community? This is why Babel as a figure of confusion provides the primary conceptual capacity for the liberal organization of the world.

scholarly journals Experiencing the COVID-19 outbreak socially: On some recent philosophical contributions

Phronimon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Alloggio
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Analysis ◽  
Global South ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
Set Up

The coronavirus outbreak is currently scrutinised by professional philosophers from different traditions and geographical areas. By focusing on several contributions from European academic philosophers, this article assesses whether such philosophical works manifest and reproduce, consciously or unconsciously, neocolonial and Eurocentric understandings of the Covid-19 pandemic. Particular attention will be given to Agamben’s and Žižek’s interpretations to show the role played in their analysis by reductionist and regressive constructions of the social world. I will then draw on several contributions from African and Africana philosophers (Gqola, Asante, More, West and Outlaw), to set up a theoretical space in which the social experiencing of the coronavirus outbreak, as well as the self-understanding of academic philosophers, could be positively reconceptualised. This act of resignification has its aim in promoting adequate forms of institutional analysis and professional engagement, and it points to the emancipatory task philosophy embodies in the global South

Postmodern and Social Problems of Cities

2018 ◽  
Vol 931 ◽  
pp. 765-769 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gennady V. Sorokin ◽  
Tatyana I. Eroshenko ◽  
Alexander V. Fedoseenkov ◽  
Alexander V. Malyshev
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
General Level ◽  
Theoretical Studies ◽  
Demographic Structure ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Single Tooth ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject

Today it is possible to speak about a postmodern sociology. It is based on the number of provisions reflecting the general level of social and humanitarian knowledge as well the provisions formulated on the ground of the theoretical studies analysis on postmodernism performed. In its diverse manifestations the postmodern paradigm essentially turns into an independent cognitive and theoretical-ideological entity that influences mainly the development of the already existing sociological concepts and arises their new models or modalities. The mono-city is the element of the self-organising social being fabric that is the subject of social synergies. The cognitive and heuristic element of joining social, economic and political problems and the prospects for the development of single-tooth cities can be classified as "fractal". The social world consists of many things that are the processes of formation, and in fact are fractals. The degradation of modern Russia in the social, political and economic sense is an indicator of the destruction of single-tooth cities in the conditions of the modern socio-demographic structure within the framework of the postmodern "end of history".

Music in the Work of Social Reproduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Drott
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Shed Light

This article interrogates music’s role in the work of social reproduction by bringing into dialogue two seemingly antithetical approaches to thinking music’s relation to the social. One is historical materialism; the other is work informed by the “practice turn” in music sociology, exemplified by Tia DeNora’s studies of music as a “technology of the self.” By taking seriously the proposition that under certain conditions music may itself function as a technology, and by reframing this proposition along materialist lines, this article aims to shed light on the changing functions music has come to assume in late neoliberalism. In particular, new modalities of digital distribution like streaming, by simultaneously driving down the cost of music and normalizing its therapeutic, prosthetic, and self-regulatory uses, increasingly cast it as a cheap resource that can be harnessed to replenish the cognitive, affective, and/or communicative energies strained by the current crisis of social reproduction.

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