In Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Book. European Sociological Association; Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. pp. 59--60 (2015) .

In this paper, we explore the impact of individualism and collectivism on three basic aspects of ethical decision making - the perception of moral problems, moral reasoning, and behavior. We argue that the inclusion of business practices within the moral domain by the individual depends partly upon individualism and collectivism. We also propose a pluralistic approach to post-conventional moral judgment that includes developmental paths appropriate for individualist and collectivist cultures. Finally, we argue that the link between moral judgment and behavior (...) is related to individualism and collectivism. (shrink)

Every time another corporate scandal captures media headlines, the ‘bad apple vs. bad barrel’ discussion starts anew. Yet this debate overlooks the influence of the broader societal context on organizational behavior. In this article, we argue that misbehaviors of organizations (the ‘barrels’) and their members (the ‘apples’) cannot be addressed properly without a clear understanding of their broader context (the ‘larder’). Whereas previously, a strong societal framework dampened the practical application of the Homo economicus concept (business actors as perfectly rational (...) and egocentric utility‐maximizing agents without any moral concern), specialization, individualization and globalization led to a business world disembedded from broader societal norms. This emancipated business world promotes a literal interpretation of Homo economicus among business organizations and their members. Consequently, we argue that the first step toward ‘healthier’ apples and barrels is to sanitize the larder, that is, adapt the framework in which organizations and their members evolve. (shrink)

The mobile phone has become part of our everyday lives with astonishing speed. Over four billion people now have access to mobile phones, and this number keeps increasing. Mobile media technologies shape how we communicate with each other, and relate to the world. This raises questions about their influence on identity. Medium-specific properties and user-practices challenge the idea that we understand ourselves through stories. It is proposed that the notion of play sheds new light on how technologies shape identities. The (...) mobile phone mediates identities on four play levels: we play on the mobile, with the mobile, through the mobile, and at the same time we are played by the mobile. Mobile media bring new freedom of movement. Yet at the same time they constrict us. In this dialectic we become moving circles. (shrink)

Aims and Methods: The general conceptual issues involved in psychiatric classification seem to be increasingly neglected in contrast to a focus on specific and empirical aspects which appear to have come to dominate the study of classification in the field. This article explores how the psychiatric field (in the UK and US) has chosen to analyse classification over time. Publication trends of articles in both The American Journal of Psychiatry and The British Journal of Psychiatry over a fifty year period (...) (1960-2010) can be viewed as indicators of the levels of interest within the psychiatric field toward classification. In an exploratory analysis, articles explicitly focusing on classification were counted and further sub-divided according to whether they focused on empirical or conceptual aspects and whether they adopted a general perspective or focused on a more specific aspect of classification. Results: Interest in classification was apparent in a minority of published articles (4.7% of all published articles). Interest in conceptual aspects dropped throughout the fifty years and was found to be considerably less than for empirical approaches which steadily increased over time. General papers about classification have been gradually on the decline and have been increasingly outnumbered by more specifically-focused articles. Clinical Implication: Classification, as a foundational endeavour within the psychiatric field, requires increased attention in the literature. This literature should address conceptual as well as empirical issues. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with rethinking the nature of social life in terms of how it appears — not to us academics at the centre of it, as consisting in a system, or a plurality of systems -but how it might appear from a position more in on the margins, at those moments when ordinary people must relate themselves to each other, unsystematically and practically. To do this, we must also rethink the nature of language and thought as possessing within (...) these moments, a formative or creative character — for it must have the ability to create practical connections between aspects of people's lives, as required, on the spot. This is to privilege the role of rhetoric in these regions over that of logic. This also leads to a rethinking of ideology and power: as being to do with, not ideas, but the practical shaping (or not) — in moments when in practical communication with others — of collective, sharable forms of life. Where it is in such moments, in which different people meet each other in socially constructing their lives together, that political struggles are their most intense, and where ideology can be detected at work. (shrink)

Globalization is regarded as a process or a project or a process/project which is most rapidly developing. Globalization, in case of occurrence, will put its impacts on all dimensions of human life including knowledge and practice. Particularly, its impact on epistemology and education would be remarkable. Given that the appearance and development of informational revolution is the most important background for globalization, the first challenge of globalization relates to the nature of knowledge. According to the information revolution, the most important (...) characteristic of knowledge is to be sought in this equation: knowledge = information. This involves reducing different facets of knowledge to quantitative information which leads to knowledge legitimacy crisis. In addition, having a communicational dimension, knowledge will be qualified by means of the shape and characteristics of community in the era of globalization. The viewpoint of virtual community calls us from another side to rethink on knowledge as well as on the problem of identity because in the consequence of virtual community, virtual identity of pupils is being claimed which involves indentity fragmentation. To deal with these challenges, education needs: a) to resist the reduction of knowledge to information and equate knowledge with wisdom rather than information; b) to extend imaginative and creative procedures; c) to develope interdisciplinary studies as an important way of extending imagination; and finally, d) to provide relationship between virtual and real communities of the pupils. (shrink)

By focusing on the unique velocity and over-stimulation of metropolitan life, Georg Simmel pioneered an interpretation of cultural boredom that has had a significant impact on contemporary social theory by viewing it through the modern experience of time-pressure and social acceleration. This paper explores Simmel's account of boredom by showing how--in the frenzy of modern life--it has become increasingly difficult to qualitatively distinguish which choices and commitments actually matter to us. Furthermore, this emotional indifference invariably pushes us towards more excessive (...) and risky behavior, towards, what I call, "extreme aesthesia." Insofar as novel experiences quickly become routine in the technological age, it appears that only extreme sensations and experiences can break the spell of boredom, allowing us to momentarily feel strongly for something. (shrink)

In this thesis I discuss personal identity as it relates to authoritative contexts. I show how these contexts confer meaning on personal and cultural narratives, which in turn confer meaning on facts and knowledge claims. I outline three conceptions of the self and sublime, and address the implications of these for education. In conclusion I isolate a common product of all three perspectives---unconditional love---and recommend a 'will to positive description' as a necessary and desirable pedagogical goal.

This article is a theoretical examination of the relationship between truth and forms of dialogue, in discursive psychology. To do this, I mainly draw on Bakhtin and Kiekegaard . In contrast to a hermeneutic tradition that has sidelined the importance of the author to discourse , these authors offer an understanding of truth that depends on the author's emotional connection to the truth they are expressing. They most clearly demonstrate the dynamics of our emotional connection to truth in their descriptions (...) of different forms of speech. Kierkegaard describes the relationship between self and truth in irony, while Bakhtin does the same in the epic, the confession and the quarrel. It is my argument that these forms of speech interact with truth and help organise selfhood. I also argue that our current methodological emphasis on the function of words or the play of dominant discourses tend to overlook the experiential landscape of language and its reciprocal relationship with our subjectivity. (shrink)

In an epistemology of contextualism, how robust does consensus need to be for critique to be practically effective? In ‘Relativism and the Critical Potential of Philosophy of Education’ Frieda Heyting proposes a form of contextualism, but her argument raises a number of problems. The kinds of criteria that her version of contextualism will furnish provide, at best, the potential only for an immanent form of critique from within a particular practice, and the possibility that practitioners alone will adopt a general (...) stance of critique. By their nature, the criteria that Heyting endorses will be too transient and ephemeral to assist in any larger project that might be aimed at making effective criticism of the status quo. Further problems are exposed to do with the conditions needed to make critique effective when Heyting's normative argument is situated in the Realpolitik of contemporary education. Drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, and in a manner intended to be complementary to Heyting's normative argument, the paper offers some suggestions regarding the role that doubt might play in justifying criticisms of the status quo. (shrink)

: Interactive constructivism and its implications for education will be introduced in four steps. (1) The context of the approach and its relation to other constructivist developments will be discussed. (2) I will examine essential pragmatic criteria in the tradition of John Dewey that are relevant for interactive constructivism. (3) More decisively than Dewey interactive constructivism launches a meta-theoretical distinction between observers, participants, and agents. (4) Communication as a chief dimension of education can be analyzed out of three perspectives: the (...) symbolic, the imaginative, and the real. Educators must recognize that their interaction with learners includes great demands not only in practical application/implementation but also in theoretical reflection. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the process of self-transformation through which a person comes to embody the ideal of her religion’s vision of the divine, as far as that ideal is expressible in a human life. The paper is concerned with the self as the subject of religious commitments, traits, religious aspirations and religiously inspired ideals. The self-transformative journey that people are invited to undertake poses a number of philosophical and practical difficulties; the paper explores some of these difficulties, concentrating on (...) those that arise in connection with the notion of potential future selves. This paper suggests that imaginative reflection upon exemplary individuals provides one way through these difficulties, for these individuals can show us what it looks like when someone achieves, or draws close to, the ideal. (shrink)

Mainstream psychology has assumed a notion of the self that seems to rest on a substantialist notion of the psyche that became predominant despite important critical theories about the self. Although cultural psychology has recognized the diverse, dialogical, historical, narrative and performative nature of self, as opposed to the idea of self as entity, it is not clear how it accounts for the phenomenological experience of self as a unified image. In this paper, we offer a theoretical contribution to developing (...) the implications of a genetic approach to self in cultural psychology, taking into account an otherwise overlooked dimension: art and aesthetics. We draw on the work of classical authors relevant to cultural psychology, who, although geopolitically and theoretically diverse, are concerted in understanding human psychological life as part of a living process of becoming: James, Mead, Dewey, Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Vološinov. Overall, the hypothesis developed throughout the paper is that self is produced within psychological individuation as an effect of the aesthetic activity involved in everyday discursive life. We deepen the ideas that self is not an entity but a process of open becoming, and that cultural life entails a radical experience of alterity; but we recognize the psychological importance of the sense of unity and closure generated in this process. We argue that self entails not only the process of becoming, but also an aesthetical effect of unity in becoming. Self as an aesthetic effect emphasizes the self as a discursive and technical process of production, involving a product that, despite not being a finished entity, is felt as unitary and as mine by virtue of a specific transformation of experience. We thus propose to define self, on one level, as an epistemological category that points to the paradoxes of identity and agency in psychological individuation; and, on a different level, as a twofold operation that makes possible the subjective experience of a constitutive effort as much as a transient but experienced identity or agency. (shrink)

This article considers the process of commodification as a cultural means of the reproduction of subjectivity. The particular aim is to highlight the psychic processes that are tempted by commodification. Thus, at the background of this essay, there is a psychoanalytical notion of the self that has been developed in an examination of subjectivity and play, a notion based especially on the thinking of D.W. Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin. These analysts see an ambivalent self‐destructiveness of the self reformulated in relation (...) to the ‘potential space’ of play. In relation to this analysis, the influence of advanced capitalism on the self is discussed in some of its more competitive scenes of consumptions. The quiz show The Weakest Link, for example, is considered as a pale, commodified form of play. It is argued that the main seduction of the show is the dwindled and distorted potential space offered by its ultimate, destructive, and in the last analysis sado‐masochistic logic of exchange. In addition to The Weakest Link, a couple of relevant thematisations of commodified culture by contemporary Finnish literature are brought out. Moreover, the commodification of subjectivity by the means of play is loosely related to some general characterisations concerning the prevailing cultural situation. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that, in order for white racial consciousness and practice to shift toward an antiracist praxis, a relational understanding of racism, the "self, "and society is necessary We find that such understanding arises from a confluence of propositional, affective, and tacit forms of knowledge about racism and one's own situatedness within it. We consider the claims sociologists have made about transformations in racial consciousness, bringing sociological theories of racism into dialogue with research on whiteness and antiracism. (...) We assert that sociological research on white racism and "whiteness" tends to privilege propositional and tacit/common sense knowledge, respectively, as critical to shifting white racial consciousness. Research on antiracism privileges affective knowledge as the source of antiracist change. We examine some of Perry's recent ethnographic research with white people who attended either multiracial or majority white high schools to argue that the confluence of these three types of knowledge is necessary to transform white racial praxis because it produces a relational understanding of self and "other, "and, by extension, race, racism, and antiracist practice. (shrink)

This thesis inquires into our ‘human nature’ through an interdisciplinary approach that considers some of the radical changes in intellectual thought at those key points in Western culture in which this concept has been centrally deployed. The broad historical sweep that this study covers finds the preoccupation with defining who we are and what we are capable of inextricably linked with the focus, at most of the pivotal moments examined, on a dominant impulse to conceive human beings as moral creatures.

In her 2006 bestseller about the rise of 'raunch culture' and of such self-ascribed 'Female Chauvinist Pigs' as the tawdry socialite Paris Hilton, Ariel Levy describes these phenomena as being indicative of a drastic cultural shift. Serious concerns have been raised, most recently by the American Psychological Association, about the effects of this culture on young girls. Recent Web sources have coined a term for the self-concept embodied and projected by Paris Hilton and her admirers: 'Hiltonism'. In this paper, I (...) examine this type of self-concept. I begin by exploring raunch culture and Hiltonism in some detail and by delineating three main principles of Hiltonism. Two sections follow in which I scrutinise two putative hypotheses on the provenance of the Hiltonistic self-concept: the postmodern and the hedonistic hypotheses. I conclude that only the hedonistic hypothesis holds water. I close by extracting some of the moral and educational implications of Hiltonism as a modern form of hedonism. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of (...) everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

This article examines the way in which selfhood is constructed in direct-to-consumer advertisements for antidepressant medications. The sample consists of advertisements that appeared in nine popular magazines between 1997 and 2005, television commercials that ran between 2003 and 2005, and online promotional Web sites. The analysis is divided into three sections. First, it is argued that the ads rely on metaphors of communication, information exchange, and plenitude to construct a relationship between biology and selfhood. Second, in offering the choice for (...) antidepressant treatment, the ads grant individuals a new capacity for the exercise of personal agency. Third, the author describes antidepressants as pills that perform a narrative “magic.” In contrast to religious and psychoanalytic narratives that required individuals to incorporate disavowed elements of their selves into an ongoing life narrative, antidepressants are medications that allow individuals to put aside, or jump over, inexplicable and painful moments in their life. (shrink)

This study investigates employment of two elements having a lexical source involving comparison -, `like') which have greatly proliferated over the last decade or so in Israel, Hebrew Kaze and ke'ilu. Here I focus particularly on kaze and compare it to ke'ilu, which was investigated at length in Maschler. The data come from audio-recordings of casual conversations of college-educated Israelis with their friends and relatives. A qualitative analysis of talk-in-interaction reveals three functions for kaze: comparative demonstrative, hedge and quotative. A (...) quantitative perspective on the distribution of these functions is presented, and these qualitative and quantitative analyses lead to an examination of the functional itinerary of this word in Hebrew. The recent proliferation of kaze and ke'ilu in Israeli Hebrew discourse is then tied to the change from a culture in which dugri speech is central to one in which this speaking style is in decline. (shrink)

Despite the burgeoning literature on right-wing populism, there is still considerable uncertainty about its causes, its impact on liberal democracies and about promising counter-strategies. Inspired by recent suggestions that (1) the emancipatory left has made a significant contribution to the proliferation of the populist right; and (2) populist movements, rather than challenging the established socio-political order, in fact stabilize and further entrench its logic, this article argues that an adequate understanding of the populist phenomenon necessitates a radical shift of perspective: (...) beyond the democratic and emancipatory norms, which still govern most of the relevant literature. Approaching its subject matter via democratic theory and modernization theory, it undertakes a reassessment of the triangular relationship between modernity, democracy and populism. It finds that the latter is not helpfully conceptualized as anti-modernist or anti-democratic but should, instead, be regarded as a predictable feature of the form of politics distinctive of today’s third modernity. (shrink)

Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. In addition to recasting social interaction, culture, economics, and politics, it has profoundly transformed the self. It has created new ways of being and constructing a self, but also new ways of being constructed as a self from the outside, new ways of being configured, represented, and governed as a self by sociotechnical systems. Rather than analyze theories of the self, I focus on practices of the self, using this expression in (...) a looser, more general sense than that used by Foucault. I begin by considering and reformulating two early lines of argument about the web as a medium for exploring and emancipating the self. Subsequent sections show how digital hyperconnectivity has engendered new ways of objectifying, quantifying, producing, and regulating the self—considered both as active, reflexive practices and as systemic, data- and algorithm-driven processes. I conclude by reflecting on the broader implications of contemporary modes of governing the self and by underscoring the ways in which hyperconnectivity has colonized the territories of the self, conscripting the self into the service of techno-social systems. (shrink)

The conditions of hunting and gathering through which one line of primates evolved into humans form the basis of what I term the wild self, a self marked by developmental needs of prolonged human neoteny and by deep attunement to the profusion of communicative signs of instinctive intelligence in which relatively “unmatured” hominids found themselves immersed. The passionate attunement to, and inquiry into, earth-drama, in tracking, hunting, foraging, rhythming, singing, and other arts/sciences, provided the trail to becoming human, and provide (...) external grammatical structures that became the basis of human language and animate mind. I outline my new philosophy of history as a progress in precision, counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind. The progress associated with history since the beginning of agriculturally-based civilizations can be considered as a regressive contraction from animate mind of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, to anthropocentric mind, and finally to the ghost in the machine world-view of mechanico-centric mind. Contemporary consumption culture represents an inversion of the original conditions of the human self, and indeed, targets aspects of developmental neoteny to condition conformity to its rational-mechanical system imperatives. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a rapidly growing body of work in the social sciences that underscores the prevalence of the phenomenon of ‘social acceleration'—the speeding up of social life— in many parts of the Western world. Although research on social acceleration has tended to analyze the phenomenon on a social-structural level, there is also a need to investigate how social acceleration has ‘ramifications for the socially dominant forms of self-relation’. One way to gain a more in-depth understanding of (...) this facet of social acceleration is to investigate the speeding up of social life through the prism of the self. The central argument of this article is that there are at least five images of the self which can be associated with the social acceleration phenomenon: the ‘detached’ self, the ‘reflexive’ self, the ‘reinventive’ self, the ‘stationary’ self and the ‘decelerating’ self. By explaining how these kinds of self relate to the speeding up process, we seek to advance a more nuanced and sophisticated theory of social acceleration, which captures some of the complexities and paradoxes that the phenomenon involves. (shrink)

This paper addresses the coconstruction of identities and emotions through the human/animal relationship, arguing that nonhuman animals can and do act as coagents in interspecies encounters. The paper narrates the extraordinary boundary-transgressing experiences of a particular kind of cogency labeled “huminality” . An autoethnographic account of pet-visitation involving a woman, a West Highland white terrier named Fergus, and geriatric residents demonstrates the power of huminality to authorize the emergence and realization of different identities and selves. Examples include the intimate friend, (...) the dignified self, the institutional resister, the gift-giver, and the available self. Huminality, in the emotional spacetime of the hospital, is rooted in empathy, concern, and affection. As ontological choreography, huminality takes us past the animal-Nature/human-culture frontier into uncharted territories of spacetime to engage in forms of life with nonhuman others. Encounters with animals, even on a geriatric ward, can transform our universe and our selves. (shrink)

Every time another corporate scandal captures media headlines, the ‘bad apple vs. bad barrel’ discussion starts anew. Yet this debate overlooks the influence of the broader societal context on organizational behavior. In this article, we argue that misbehaviors of organizations (the ‘barrels’) and their members (the ‘apples’) cannot be addressed properly without a clear understanding of their broader context (the ‘larder’). Whereas previously, a strong societal framework dampened the practical application of the Homo economicus concept (business actors as perfectly rational (...) and egocentric utility-maximizing agents without any moral concern), specialization, individualization and globalization led to a business world disembedded from broader societal norms. This emancipated business world promotes a literal interpretation of Homo economicus among business organizations and their members. Consequently, we argue that the first step toward ‘healthier’ apples and barrels is to sanitize the larder, that is, adapt the framework in which organizations and their members evolve. (shrink)

The figure of the “double” or the other self is an important topic in the history of literature. Many centuries before Jean Paul Richter coined the term, “doppelgänger,” at the beginning of the Romantic Movement in the year 1796, it is possible to find the figure of the double in myths and legends. The issue of the double emphaszses the contradictory character of the human being and invokes a sinister dimension of the psychological world, what has been called in German (...) as “umheimlich.” However, does multiciplicity always involve pathology? Related to this figure in literary history, a new perspective from clinical psychology called “dialogical self” defines the self as a multi-voice reality. Along the same line, postmodernist psychology considers the self a discursive construction. From these perspectives, the “self” is situated a long way away from the classical essential conception of the self. In this paper, we review briefly some important landmarks of the figure of the double in the literature, and we compare the coincidences of the “double” experiencies described in literature with the experiences of our patients. Finally, we discuss how this literary tradition can help us to understand new psychological perspectives. (shrink)

The mobile phone has become part of our everyday lives with astonishing speed. Over four billion people now have access to mobile phones, and this number keeps increasing. Mobile media technologies shape how we communicate with each other, and relate to the world. This raises questions about their influence on identity. Medium-specific properties and user-practices challenge the idea that we understand ourselves through stories. It is proposed that the notion of play sheds new light on how technologies shape identities. The (...) mobile phone mediates identities on four play levels: we play on the mobile, with the mobile, through the mobile, and at the same time we are played by the mobile. Mobile media bring new freedom of movement. Yet at the same time they constrict us. In this dialectic we become moving circles. (shrink)

If the rhetorical and economic investment of educators, policy makers and the popular press in the United States is any indication, then unbridled enthusiasm for the introduction of computer mediated communication (CMC) into the educational process is wide-spread. In large part this enthusiasm is rooted in the hope that through the use of Internet-based CMC we may create an expanded community of learners and educators not principally bounded by physical geography. The purpose of this paper is to reflect critically upon (...) whether students and teachers are truly linked together as a``community'' through the use of Internet-based CMC. The paper uses the writings of Kierkegaard, and Hubert Dreyfus's exploration of Kierkegaardian ideas, to look more closely at the prospects and problems embedded in the use of Internet-based CMC to create "distributed communities" of teachers and learners. It is argued that from Kierkegaard's perspective, technologically mediated communications run a serious risk of attenuating interpersonal connectivity. Insofar as interpersonal connectivity is an integral component of education, such attenuation bodes ill for some, and perhaps many instances of Internet-based CMC. (shrink)

There is no more central issue to education than thinking and reasoning. Certainly, such an emphasis chimes with the rationalist and cognitive deep structure of the Western educational tradition. The contemporary tendency reinforced by cognitive science is to treat thinking ahistorically and aculturally as though physiology, brain structure and human evolution are all there is to say about thinking that is worthwhile or educationally significant. The movement of critical thinking also tends to treat thinking ahistorically, focusing on universal processes of (...) logic and reasoning. Against this trend and against the scientific spirit of the age this paper presents a historical and philosophical picture of thinking. By contrast with dominant cognitive and logical models the paper emphasizes kinds of thinking and styles of reasoning. The paper grows out of interests primarily in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and in the extension and development of their work in Critical Theory and French poststructuralist philosophy. The paper draws directly on some of this work to argue for the recognition of different kinds of thinking, which are explored by reference to Heidegger, and also the significance of styles of reasoning, which are explored by reference to Wittgenstein and to Ian Hacking. (shrink)

This article contributes to the emerging discussion on responsible leadership by providing an analysis of the inner theatre of a responsible leader. I use a narrative approach for analyzing the biography of Anita Roddick as a widely acknowledged prototype of a responsible leader. With clinical and normative lenses I explore the relationship between responsible leadership behavior and the underlying motivational systems. I begin the article with an introduction outlining the current state of responsible leadership research and explaining the kind of (...) magnifying glasses used to examine the case. I continue with a brief summary of Anita Roddick’s development from childhood to adulthood, which provides the biographical background for exploring her motivational systems as a leader. Against this backdrop, I analyze the relationship between motivational drivers and a responsible leadership identity as revealed by Roddick in different behavioral leadership roles. I conclude the article by providing a number of lessons learned for responsible leadership and the development of future global leaders. (shrink)

Individuals actively and continually construct the knowledge required for their working lives. Two outcomes arise from this constructive process: (i) individual change (i.e. learning) and (ii) the remaking of culturally-derived practices comprising work. These arise through a relational interdependence between the contributions and agency of the personal and the social. The relationship is interdependent because neither the social nor personal contributions alone are sufficient. The social experience is important for articulating and providing access to work performance requirements. However, personal factors (...) such as individuals' capacities, subjectivities and agency shape how workers interpret and engage with what they experience and, consequently, how they learn and remake practice throughout their working life. This case is elaborated through a discussion about learning with considerations of intersubjectivity, personal epistemologies, pedagogy and curriculum as experience. (shrink)

The problem with authenticity—the idea of being “true to one’s self”—is that its somewhat checkered reputation garners a complete range of favorable and unfavorable reactions. In educational settings, authenticity is lauded as one of the top two traits students desire in their teachers. Yet, authenticity is criticized for its tendency towards narcissism and self-entitlement. So, is authenticity a good or a bad thing? The purpose of this article is to develop an intimate understanding of authenticity by investigating its current interpretation (...) and criticisms, its struggle with narcissism and relation to freedom. Examining authenticity as multilayered self-exploration reveals a composite of understanding, care, and acceptance. While a side current of acceptable tension shifts our understanding of authenticity from the security of self-determination to the messy interplay involved in being “true to one’s self” and being “in-the-world”. (shrink)

Persons are not just mechanical systems of instinctual animalistic proclivities, but also language-producing, existentially aware creatures, whose experiences and actions are drenched in subjective meaning. To understand a human being as a person is to understand him or her as a rational system that wants, fears, hopes, believes, and in other ways imbues the world with meaning, rather than just a mechanical system that is subject to the same chains of cause and effect as other animals. But contemporary personality psychology (...) has, to a great extent, focused on the behavioral side of personality, while neglecting its meaning side, failing to realize that subjective meanings are part of the very constitution rather than just causes of personality. My overarching purpose with this dissertation is, consequently, to contribute to the establishment of a genuinely non-reductive science of personality that systematically studies the systems of meaning that comprise a person’s worldview in their own right, as sources of meaning in personality. I both establish conceptual and theoretical foundations for the psychology of worldviews and present empirical research on worldviews. The conceptual and theoretical issues are addressed in the introductory chapters and the first paper. I begin by explicating a non-reductive realist philosophy of personality that steers between reductionism and social constructionism, and by suggesting that we need a more coherent understanding of personality and a richer study of it, rather than a radically new methodology. I continue by discussing the limitations of, and conceptual issues with, previous approaches to personality, and by outlining the conceptual foundations for a psychology of worldviews to remediate their weaknesses, demarcating worldview constructs as referring to presuppositions, concepts, and narrative scripts that, by working as the substrata, or background, for intentional thought, feeling, and action, form the most central sources of meaning. I continue by discussing the structure and dynamics of worldviews in terms of the relationship between innate meaning-making mechanisms and the universal features of the existential condition that they address. I conclude the introductory chapters by describing the background of the empirical research and by discussing limitations with the present thesis and directions for future theory and research. I continue, in the first paper, to argue that the study of traits and the study of worldviews form mutually irreducible parts of personality psychology and that worldviews are not inherently less universal in terms of structure, or in other ways less basic, than traits. I conclude this paper by emphasizing the need to address coherence not just in behavior, but also within worldviews and between traits and worldviews, and to complement traditional individual differences research with personalistic methodology. The empirical research is presented in the second and third papers included in this thesis. This research addresses Humanism and Normativism, which are arguably the two broadest and potentially most important worldview constructs in the research literature today, representing whether human beings are thought of as intrinsically valuable and ontologically important or as acquiring value and reality only through the attainment of external norms and ideals . Although originally thought to be opposites, previous research has suggested that they are uncorrelated. In the first empirical paper, I introduce a hierarchical model of their structure, develop scales to measure their facets, and demonstrate through confirmatory factor analysis that they are, contrary to previous wisdom, negatively related in terms of view of human nature, attitude to affect, and interpersonal attitude, but unrelated in terms of epistemology and political values. I present evidence also of discriminant and predictive validity in relation to other worldview variables, life goals, educational field, political and religious orientation, and the Big Five aspects. In the second empirical paper, I use humanism and normativism to explain the broad systems of meaning that potentially underlie, and intersect with, variables from the most important models of the underpinnings of political ideology today, through path modeling. The results suggest that humanism is related to political ideology through preference for equality, as mediated by moral concern with fairness and the avoidance of harm, emotionality, and honesty-humility, and that normativism is related to political ideology through conservative attitudes in general, as mediated by system justification, moral concern with authority, loyalty, and purity, and low openness. Both of the empirical articles provide ample evidence of broad systems of meaning cutting across different aspects of the worldview and of their explanatory power with regards to other psychological phenomena. These studies thereby help to substantiate the viability of the psychology of worldviews. (shrink)

The following paper presents and discuses the epistemological premises of one of the relativistic expressions of the so-called constructivism i.e. the social constructionism. Firstly, we trace constructivism’s theoretical origins and later, we distinguish the main ideas of Kenneth Gergen’s social constructionist proposal. The analysis is done in the following way: (a) we analyse the epistemological premises and the philosophical problems arising from them, and (b) we analyse the problematic impact these premises have in the praxis of social sciences. Finally, we (...) conclude that the exclusion of clear philosophical distinctions inside social constructionism undermines social constructionism’s plausibility. El siguiente artículo presenta y discute los postulados epistemológicos de una de las expresiones relativistas del denominado constructivismo i.e. el construccionismo social. En primer momento, se rastrean los orígenes teóricos del constructivismo y, posteriormente, se distinguen los principales postulados del construccionismo social de Kenneth Gergen. El análisis se realiza del siguiente modo: (a) Se analizan los supuestos epistemológicos y los problemas filosóficos derivados de éstos, y (b) Se analizan las consecuencias que los postulados construccionistas tienen en la praxis que llevan a cabo las ciencias sociales. Finalmente, se concluye que la exclusión de distinciones filosóficas claras por parte del construccionismo social le resta plausibilidad al enfoque. (shrink)

I explore connections between social divisions and diversity within the self, while striving to differentiate internal diversity and multiplicity. When the person is understood as composite or multiple, she is seen as divided into several distinct agent-like aspects. This view is found in ancient, modern, and postmodern philosophy, psychology, poetry, and lay people's accounts of their experience. I argue for a conception of the self as diverse but not composite or multiple.

In a series of books and articles published over the past two decades, the authors have developed a five?stage system for identifying and modifying the mythic structures that guide individual development. In this essay, they draw upon the integral relationship between personal and collective myths in applying this five?stage model to contemporary social issues. They focus, in particular, on the mythic conflicts that underlie the tensions between progress and sustainability and between individualism and community. Based on the contradictory designs inherent (...) in a prevailing myth and in an emerging myth, the authors present a dialectical model that is formulated to lead to a new myth that incorporates the most functional elements of old and emergent forces, while transcending their limitations. The essay closes with a discussion of social actions that may embed a new myth within a culture, along with the conditions that are required to effectively reinforce and maintain it. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of the relationship between creativity and autonomy - originally related to each other in the concept of the `self' as one of the crucial parts of the Meadian and symbolic interactionist heritage - and asks how we should construe this relation today. After a brief reconstruction of the history of the notions of `self' and `identity' the paper takes up the postmodern challenge of these notions by clarifying and partially revising them. It discusses the three (...) aspects of a possibly over-socialized conception of the person, the irreducibility of difference between socialized individuals and the role of power and exclusion in processes of identity formation. (shrink)

Business research and teaching institutions play an important role in shaping the way businesses perceive their relations to the broader society and its moral expectations. Hence, as ethical scandals recently arose in the business world, questions related to the civic responsibilities of business scholars and to the role business schools play in society have gained wider interest. In this article, I argue that these ethical shortcomings are at least partly resulting from the mainstream business model with its taken-for granted basic (...) assumptions such as specialization or the value-neutrality of business research. Redefining the roles and civic responsibilities of business scholars for business practice implies therefore a thorough analysis of these assumptions if not their redefinition. The takenforgrantedness of the mainstream business model is questioned by the transformation of the societal context in which business activities are embedded. Its value-neutrality in turn is challenged by self-fulfilling prophecy effects, which highlight the normative influence of business schools. In order to critically discuss some basic assumptions of mainstream business theory, I propose to draw parallels with the corporate citizenship concept and the stakeholder theory. Their integrated approach of the relation between business practice and the broader society provides interesting insights for the social reembedding of business research and teaching. (shrink)

The concept of the Transitional Economy denotes the problematic processes of change confronting nations wishing to achieve levels of economic development comparable with that of Western nations. Such an objective is problematic, as these nations may also be said to be in a state of transition. Globalization and E-commerce have necessitated a reconsideration of the nature of business activity and its implications for both society and the individual.Writers such as Gray (1998) warn against the "refashioning" of other nations in the (...) image of the American free market. Business ethics can be seen as a symbolic expression of Beck''s (1992) concern with the implications of Risk Society and the uncertainties arising from the realization that scientific, technological, and economic progress are not necessarily concomitant with social, cultural, and political progress. Locating business ethics within the theoretical context of Reflexive Modernity provides a means of evaluating the contribution that it can make to providing a critical forum for considering the ways in which business organisations are responding to concerns regarding business activity. (168). (shrink)