Worked Up Selves: Personal Development Workers, Self-Work and Therapeutic Cultures

267 Pages·2010·1.43 MB·English

by  Elaine Swan (auth.)

Worked Up Selves
Also by Elaine Swan
GENDER AND DIVERSITY IN MANAGEMENT: A Concise Introduction (with
Caroline Gatrell)
Worked Up Selves
Personal Development Workers,
Self-Work and Therapeutic Cultures
Elaine Swan
Senior Teaching Fellow, Lancaster University Management School
© Elaine Swan 2010
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-20136-1
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First published 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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ISBN 978-1-349-29948-5 ISBN 978-0-230-24676-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230246768
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
To Steve
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Chapter 1 Changing Selves 1
Chapter 2 History of Working the Self 32
Chapter 3 Therapeutic Cultures: Practices of Social Control 50
or Self-Creation?
Chapter 4 Cultural Representations of Therapeutic Cultures 70
Chapter 5 Expert Relations 100
Chapter 6 Transformations of the Self 140
Chapter 7 Getting in Touch with Their Feelings? 173
Chapter 8 Worked Up Selves 206
Bibliography 225
Index 251
vii
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Paul Milner, Virgina Thorp and Ursula Gavin at Palgrave,
particularly to Paul for all his patience.
I would like to thank the Women’s PhD Pressure Group for their
emotional support, and love of Happy Hour cocktails: Sue Eccles, Carole
Elliott, Caroline Gatrell, Ellie Hamilton, Valerie Stead, Sharon Turnbull
and Helen Woodruffe. A special thanks to Caroline Gatrell, Ellie Hamilton
and Valerie Stead for reading and commenting on chapters and for
being such inspiring academics and friends. Thank you too, Andy Bailey,
my colleague in MDD for providing much needed good humour and
practical support over the years.
A big thanks to Jackie Stacey for supervising my PhD, providing
unstinting encouragement and warm support over a very long time.
A special mention goes to David Cripps and Sarah Vogel for their
interest in the book and debates on therapeutic cultures. Furthermore,
I’d like to thank all of the practitioners interviewed for this research,
who gave up their time to share their insights and experiences so gen-
erously with me.
Thanks to Sparky and the late departed Gretchen for being so furry.
Finally, I am indebted to Steve Fox for his untiring support and
vigorous confidence in me.
viii
1
Changing Selves
Introduction
One must recognise that the desire to invent a life is no longer
evidence of narcissistic self-involvement or an emancipator
countercultural impulse, but rather is increasingly required as
a new form of ‘immaterial labour’ – mental, social and emo-
tional tasks – required for participation in the labour market.
(McGee, 2005: 24)
This quote encapsulates the topic of this book: the emergence of new
modes of work and workers. Thus Worked Up Selves is an exploration of
the growth of personal development, a form of immaterial labour or more
precisely, ‘self-work’ (Tipton, 1983; Heelas, 2002; Chappell et al., 2003).
In personal development this self-work involves self-exploration, self-
expression, self-reflection, self-improvement and experimentation with
appearance, capacities, behaviours, emotions and thinking. Worked Up
Selves focuses, in particular, on the personal development workers who
help people to undertake this type of labour outlined above. These types
of workers include management trainers; life- performance- business-
and executive-coaches; learning consultants; personal development
consultants; facilitators, and management developers. Up to now, this
group have been somewhat neglected as an occupational group in
organisational theory and wider social theory.
A useful way to understand this proliferating type of worker and the
work they do is to draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘cultural inter-
mediaries’ (Bourdieu, 1984). This is a term introduced by Bourdieu to
describe a new category of middle-class worker emerging in the past
thirty years – post-industrial service occupations. These roles involve
1