Self and Identity

"Purpose: Employee engagement (EE) is a highly popular topic within workplace research, but has been studied almost exclusively from a quantitative, survey based approach, both in academic and consultancy led research. Yet, employee engagement is essentially an individual concept, concerning self, and this highly personal dimension fails to be captured in positivistic surveys.  This paper offers a novel methodology in an attempt to address this deficit.
Design/methodology/approach: This complex concept needs to be studied from a more interpretivist and ethnographic angle, acknowledging that EE exists within a cultural context. We propose the use of a contemporary, and somewhat contentious, form of ethnography, autoethnography (AE) that weaves together the researcher’s personal and participants’ experiences to illuminate the phenomenon. 
Findings: This paper briefly reviews extant literature on employee engagement, explains autoethnography and argues that AE is a highly suitable method to capture both the individual and social nature of self in employee engagement.
Research limitations/implications: To understand how employee engagement works, we need to get at the depth (Kahn 1992) of the concept, and we offer an innovative methodological contribution to achieve this. To date, this approach has received limited attention and only minimal anecdotal evidence is presented to support the argument for AE. However, there is substantial scope for further research adopting this novel, collaborative approach.
Practical implications:  An autoethnographic approach provides both emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives on the phenomenon, thus harnessing both the experiences of those involved in AE initiatives (eg HR practitioners managing EE and employees being engaged) but also the researcher’s experiences and interpretations of being engaged in their work, to elicit more rich, layered insights. Such nuanced understanding can help facilitate more appropriate, authentic and realistic interventions to harness employees’ whole self and engagement.
Originality/value: Autoethnography provides an innovative approach to studying employee engagement, offering an appropriate alternative to quantitative, snap-shot studies and is more in keeping with the founding scholar’s intentions for research on this topic (Kahn 1990).  "

""The problem of the orientation in the liquid society. Self-transcending and having care as exercise of transformation
Lyotard’s thesis of «économie libidinale» proposes to resolve the problem of the orientation through an unlimited extension of the pleasure. Whatever limits the pleasure would be only a moralistic fabulation. This model does contrast with the ascetic capitalism of the first modernity, but not with the capitalism of the second modernity represented by the broker Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. This paper tries to show that the sentiment and the pleasure aren’t a negativity to repress but are a positivity to be taken care and to be formed. The pleasure, which is positive in itself, degenerates in negativity and in depression if there is no care – care in the sense proposed by Pierre Hadot. One type of limitation of the pleasure which doesn’t follow the logic of repression is present in the erotic phenomenon. The eroticism is based on the momentary postponement of the pleasure. In not satisfying automatically the need with the first available form of pleasure a man has the possibility to choose what is more important for him and in this way to experience his own desire and to become conscious of himself. To exercise the function of preferring means for an individual not to suffer blindly the logic of the need, but to humanize and to singularize the pleasure, i.e. to form his own desire. By forming his own desire the individual forms himself. The theme dealt with in the ancient philosophy, under the concept of epimeleia heautou can be interpreted in this perspective as the care of the desire, which is directed toward a transformation of the individual, toward a second birth. This care requests an act of self-transcending, distancing critically oneself from the own self, a push given by the otherness. I propose to call an otherness of this kind with the name of «exemplarity». The exemplarity doesn’t refer to a form of authoritarian verticality – as the models of social success do – but implies a form of horizontality that expresses solidarity. The representation of this form of orientation isn’t the ladder to the paradise of Climachus, but, if anything, the breaking wave of Hokusai. ""

""Three year postgraduate bursary available at Glasgow Caledonian University, Social Work for Doctorate Study to work on project 'The Making of Professional Identity in Social Work'

Supervised by Professor Stephen Webb and Dr Martin Kettle

email for details: stephen.webb@gcu.ac.uk""

The concept of “identity” is most relevant to the domains of “race”, ethnicity and nation, given that these social categories can gain particular social and psychological traction when they are construed as forms of self-definition. This essay provides a brief overview of social psychological approaches to identity, focusing specifically upon the contribution of Identity Process Theory (IPT) to the social psychology of identity. It is argued that an integrative theory such as IPT is necessary for a holistic understanding of the antecedents and consequences of identity in relation to “race”, ethnicity and nationalism.

In the research reported here, we investigated the debiasing effect of mindfulness meditation on the sunk-cost bias. We conducted four studies (one correlational and three experimental); the results suggest that increased mindfulness reduces the tendency to allow unrecoverable prior costs to influence current decisions. Study 1 served as an initial correlational demonstration of the positive relationship between trait mindfulness and resistance to the sunk-cost bias. Studies 2a and 2b were laboratory experiments examining the effect of a mindfulness-meditation induction on increased resistance to the sunk-cost bias. In Study 3, we examined the mediating mechanisms of temporal focus and negative affect, and we found that the sunk-cost bias was attenuated by drawing one’s temporal focus away from the future and past and by reducing state negative affect, both of which were accomplished through mindfulness meditation

This article proposes and tests a theoretical model articulating when and why differences in devaluation and avoidance of individuals with non-normative characteristics emerge between East Asian and Western cultural contexts. Four main studies examined this theoretical model. In a pilot study, relative to Americans, Koreans devalued a target individual with a non-normative characteristic, and in Study 1 the target’s efforts to forestall disruption of group processes eliminated the devaluation in Korea, with perceived selfishness mediating this process. In Study 2, Koreans, relative to Americans, devalued and avoided coworkers with non-normative characteristics, particularly when the non-normative characteristic was controllable. Study 3 further showed that perceived selfishness mediates this effect with a behavioral dependent variable. Study 4 tested the generalizability to positively valenced characteristics and found that Koreans (relative to Americans) also devalue individuals with positive characteristics at non-normative levels. Implications for individuals with non-normative characteristics, organizational diversity, and cross-cultural interaction are discussed.

In the Philosophical Anthropology of Gregory of Nyssa, inspired by his Trinitarian Theology, the new concept of hypostasis as a unique self implies for the first time the irreducibility of human person to the universal. Moreover, Gregory manages to account for both a deep communion of life and nature among all men and a clear distinction between persons, in a truly harmonious dynamism of the physical and the hypostatic. This union and distinction will also inspire his original conception of proaíresis, which will express the unique character of each person in the community of nature. Difference and creativity are two of its main features.

"This qualitative study investigated the lived experiences of highly sensitive persons (HSPs) to better understand the way they experience careers.  Sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is the underlying personality trait and is present in approximately 20 percent of the population, equally distributed across gender and racial lines.  SPS is considered a non-normative personality trait in some Western societies and subcultures.  Thus, many HSPs experience difficulty finding an appropriate match between innate temperament and career.   
This qualitative research perspective employed semi-structured interviews with 35 participants recruited through social media web sites and snowball sampling.  Participants in the study were primarily from the U.S., but also from five foreign countries.  Participants were chosen based on answers to a recruitment questionnaire and Elaine Aron’s HSP Self-Test.  Major findings reveal a complex, interwoven dynamic interplay between nine major themes: (1) empathy, (2) childhood’s influence, (3) self-care, (4) a rich inner life, (5) creativity, (6) high sensation-seeking, (7) the sociological perspective, (8) the experience of work, and (9) the integral being.  The significance of this study is that it is the first of its kind to investigate this topic in a systematic, scientific manner. 
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