Why doesn't self-help help? Millions of people turn to
self-improvement when they find that their lives aren't working
out quite as they had imagined. The market for self-improvement
products--books, audiotapes, life-makeover seminars and regimens of
all kinds--is exploding, and there seems to be no end in sight for
this trend. In Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life,
cultural critic Micki McGee asks what our seemingly insatiable
demand for self-help can
tell us about ourselves at the outset of this new century.
The answers are surprising. Rather than finding an America that is
narcissistic or self-involved, as others have contended, McGee sees
a nation relying on self-help culture for advice on how to cope in
an increasingly volatile and competitive work world. For Americans
today, a central component of working has become working on
themselves. "Be all one can be," they are told. Build
your own personal brand. As women have entered the paid labor force
in growing numbers, the Protestant work
ethic has been augmented by a Romantic imperative that one create a
vision--a script--for one's life. More and more, Americans are
compelled to regard themselves in effect as "human
capital." No longer simply an enterprising or entrepreneurial
individual, the new worker is the artist and the artwork,
the "CEO of Me, Inc.," in Tom Peters' memorable
phrase, and the central product line. Self-Help, Inc. reveals how
makeover culture traps Americans in endless cycles of
self-invention and overwork as they struggle to stay ahead of a
rapidly restructuring economic order.
A lucid and fascinating treatment of the modern obsession with work
and self-improvement, this book will strike a chord with its
diagnosis of the self-help trap and with its suggestions for how we
can address the alienating conditions of modern work and family
life.
"McGee writes clearly and thoughtfully.... She moves seamlessly from high theory to pop psychobabble, using the former to illustrate the powers of the latter. Overall, she offers a compelling argument for resisting the self-improvement genre's worldview."--American Journal of Sociology "But credit for coming up with real insight into the self-help juggernaut more properly belongs to Micki McGee, a faculty fellow at New York University and the author of Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life.... "McGee's grasp of the philosophical underpinnings... is formidable."--Salon "Sociologist and cultural critic McGee offers a nuanced examination of the socioeconomic roots and attractions of self-help.... She argues, elegantly and persuasively, that self-help's individualistic approach and its false assumption of autonomy disregard the systemic social inequities that cause individual discontent and do not acknowledge social solutions that might actually help.... scholarly in
Micki McGee, Faculty Fellow, Draper Program in Interdisciplinary Studies and Social Thought, New York University
Inhaltsangabe
Acknowledgements Prologue. Covey's Daughter and Her Dilemma Introduction. From Self-Made to Belabored 1. From Calling to Vision: Spiritual, Secular and Gendered Notions 2. From Power! to Personal Power!: Survivalism and the Inward Turn 3. From Having It All to Simple Abundance: Gender and the Logic of Diminished Expectations 4. The Self at Work: From Job-Hunters to Artist-Entrepreneurs 5. At Work on the Self: The Making of the Belabored Self 6. All You Can Be, or Some Conclusions Appendix. Some Notes on Method Notes Bibliography
