Rekindling individualism, consuming emotions: Constructing “psytizens” in the age of happiness

Cabanas, Edgar

doi:10.1177/1354067x16655459

Cited by 39 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…56 It is important to be wary though of how neoliberal ideas could turn resilience building into a project of the self, with a focus on individual choice and the pursuit of individual wellbeing, while neglecting the systemic realities facing GPs in the NHS. 50,62…”

Section: Strengths and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The NHS as a 'marketplace' places a limit on quality of care. 49 Previous research has found that neoliberal ideas encourage a 'specific way of being, acting, and understanding the world, which is highly individualistic'; 50 the authors found that NHS marketisation promotes a kind of GP individualism -or atomisation -where GPs feel increasingly removed from meaningful interactions with patients and colleagues, even loved ones. Although some doctors cope better in the new NHS than others, 51 there is a growing recognition that primary care is at breaking point.…”

Section: Comparison With Existing Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Influences on GP coping and resilience: a qualitative study in primary care

et al. 2017

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Background‘Neoliberal’ work policies, austerity, NHS restructuring, and increased GP consultation rates provide the backdrop against increasing reports of GP burnout and an impending shortage of GPs.AimTo explore GPs’ experiences of workplace challenges and stresses, and their coping strategies, particularly focusing on understanding the impact of recent NHS workplace change.Design and settingStudy design was qualitative, with data collected from two focus groups and seven one-to-one telephone interviews.MethodFocus groups and one-to-one telephone interviews explored the experiences of GPs currently practising in England, recruited through convenience sampling. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview approach and analysed using thematic analysis.ResultsThere were 22 GP participants recruited: focus groups (n = 15) and interviews (n = 7). Interviewees understood GPs to be under intense and historically unprecedented pressures, which were tied to the contexts in which they work, with important moral implications for ‘good’ doctoring. Many reported that being a full-time GP was too stressful: work-related stress led to mood changes, sleep disruption, increases in anxiety, and tensions with loved ones. Some had subsequently sought ways to downsize their clinical workload. Workplace change resulted in little time for the things that helped GP resilience: a good work–life balance and better contact with colleagues. Although some GPs were coping better than others, GPs acknowledged that there was only so much an individual GP could do to manage their stress, given the external work issues they faced.ConclusionGPs experience their emotional lives and stresses as being meaningfully shaped by NHS factors. To support GPs to provide effective care, resilience building should move beyond the individual to include systemic work issues.

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Section: Strengths and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Comparison With Existing Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Influences on GP coping and resilience: a qualitative study in primary care

et al. 2017

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“…Continuing and developing this line of thought, sociologists argue that in late modernity, while other identity anchors, such as religion and community, have lost some of their grounding, work has become “a main center of identity” (Beck, 2001, p. 268). Moreover, in neoliberal societies, citizenship is being gradually narrowed down to its economic component alone, based on the ability of the individual to support herself financially (Cabanas, 2016; Kessler-Harris, 2003; Sa’ar, 2016), thus increasing the centrality of work as a marker of “character” (Sennett, 1998).…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inhabiting the Self-Work Romantic Utopia: Positive Psychology, Life Coaching, and the Challenge of Self-Fulfillment at Work

Pagis

2020

Work and Occupations

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Much has been said about the rise of work as a central identity marker in modern society. With the recent popularization of self-help and positive psychology, this identity marker broadened its signification to include new emotional needs such as love and passion, creating a new cultural imaginary: the “self-work romantic utopia.” Sociological studies have criticized this utopia as a myth that serves capitalist neoliberal structures, leading to frustration and self-blame. However, little is known about how workers themselves confront this myth and the strategies they employ when attempting to inhabit it in today’s precarious job market. Based on 60 in-depth interviews with upper-middle class Israeli workers who hired life coaches to improve their work experience, the author identifies five strategies used to inhabit this romantic utopia: starting over, healing, idealization, polygamy, and vision. Through the analysis of these strategies, the author illustrates how even the relatively privileged workers need to adapt the self-work romantic utopia to their life circumstances, inhabiting the myth in partial degrees. Such flexible implementation turns the “myth” into a cultural tool that directs workers’ lives and actions even in a precarious, unstable job market, maintaining subjective experiences of agency in a sphere characterized by growing structural constraints. Yet paradoxically, these strategies eventually strengthen the precarious, noncommitted, and individual-oriented structure of the job market, yielding flexible, individualistic solutions that replace workplace responsibility.

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“…Neoliberalism is not some clever plot to rule the world. It is, by definition, an impudent, generalised refusal to plot or plan anything beyond one's own immediate 'well-being' (Scharff 2016;Cabanas 2016).…”

Section: Periodising Neoliberalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Music and Its Futures

Valiquet¹

2020

Contemporary Music Review

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extraterrestrial colonisation. The miraculous tesseract turns out to be the work of the future people whose advanced intelligence is the implied result of that colonisation process. Note that, despite the prominent thematisation of inter-dimensionality here, linear causality and intentionality in the universe of Interstellar still seem to work as humans would normally expect: without at least some basic abstractions it would be difficult to produce fiction at all. 1 The film's message seems to be that the solution to the catastrophe of global degradation is to be found not in the knowledge we have now, but 'out there' in one of many possible futures. Justice and peace, the trope implies, are matters outside of history: all humanity can do now is try to stay competitive and keep up the appearance of progress. The power of this plot device lies in the way it politicises the present. In Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred, for example, a mysterious force shuttles the protagonist inexplicably between past and present. The book's narrative follows what is in effect a kind of fold in history, linking relationships of care and moments of trauma across two intersecting plot trajectories. The fragmented present forces the reader to confront the horror of slavery not as a bounded, finished historical event but as a process working at the level of the protagonist's genetic code; slavery transposed to the level of metaphysics. Hypothetical changes enacted in the past enable the reader to encounter an apparently harmonious present in the subjunctive, to consider the ways that things could be going differently, and thus arrive at a better understanding of the necessities and contingencies which constitute the now of everyday experience. The name for this imaginary time of hypothetical resolution in French is uchronie. The term comes from the title of an 1876 novel by Charles Renouvier, a central philosopher of history, religion and law under Napoleon III, and an important influence on the pragmatist thinking of William James (Renouvier 1988). In a lengthy preface, Renouvier leads his reader to understand that the core of the text has been passed down in secret by a scholar fleeing the inquisition in the years following the execution of Giordano Bruno. The fictional author of this text finds himself intellectually hamstrung by the church's failure to reconcile the new empirical science with its metaphysical commitment to a single, personalised Absolute. If Europeans in the past had chosen to remain polytheistic, he asks, would they today be better equipped to accept the pluralist metaphysics that the new sciences seem to demand? What, for example, would have happened to philosophy if the Roman empire had chosen not to back Christianity? Renouvier's novel is both the answer to that question and an experiment in the kind of critical history that he saw his pluralist metaphysics as making possible. It treats the Absolute as an event like any other, a specific node in a chain of relations with no necessary outcome at any given time...

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Rekindling individualism, consuming emotions: Constructing “psytizens” in the age of happiness

Cited by 39 publications

References 35 publications

Influences on GP coping and resilience: a qualitative study in primary care

Influences on GP coping and resilience: a qualitative study in primary care

Inhabiting the Self-Work Romantic Utopia: Positive Psychology, Life Coaching, and the Challenge of Self-Fulfillment at Work

Contemporary Music and Its Futures

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