Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American LifeOxford University Press, USA, 2005 M09 8 - 288 pages 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 |
Contents
Coveys Daughter and Her Dilemma | 3 |
From SelfMade to Belabored | 11 |
Spiritual Secular and Gendered Notions | 25 |
Survivalism and the Inward Turn | 49 |
Gender and the Logic of Diminished Expectations | 79 |
From JobHunters to ArtistEntrepreneurs | 111 |
The Making of the Belabored Self | 139 |
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Common terms and phrases
advice American Anthony Robbins argue Arlie Russell Hochschild artist authenticity belabored bestseller list Bolles Bolles’s Brown calling capitalism career Codependency context Covey Covey’s creating creative Deepak Chopra economic emergence emphasis in original ethic example Feminine Mystique Foucault Franklin FranklinCovey gender groups Helen Gurley Brown Hochschild human Ibid idea ideal imagined increasingly individual invent Julia Cameron labor force labor market literature of self-improvement lives Love masculine metaphor Michel Foucault mind-power mother Moved My Cheese notion offers one’s oneself Parachute path Peck’s political possibility pursuit rational readers religious Road Less Traveled role Scott Lash Scott Peck self-fulfillment self-help self-help books Self-Help Culture self-help literature self-improvement culture self-improvement literature self-invention self-made self-mastery Seven Habits Simple Abundance social movements social theorist spiritual Steinem success suggests things tion Tom Peters traditional Transformation twentieth century University Press values women workers writing York