Philosophy and the care of the self: a literature survey

This article reviews a number of recent books and practices that address a renewed interest in the role that philosophy might play in the living of a rich and fulfilling life. The review looks at books addressed to the general public as well as books which discuss such classical and Hellenistic philosophers as took their task to be helping people achieve happiness in life. It then turns to contemporary studies of the self and of wisdom and turns finally to some newly emerging philosophical practices such as philosophical counselling and philosophical discussion groups of various kinds in order to explore whether philosophy can still be a source of consolation or guidance in contemporary life.

Critique as technology of the self

This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' should be read, after Foucault, as a distinctly modern practice in the care of the self, governed by Kant's famous rubric of the 'primacy of practical reason'. In this way, too, Foucault's later interest in Kant - one which in fact takes up a line present in his work from his complementary thesis on Kant's Anthropology - is cast into distinct relief. Against Habermas and others, I propose that this interest does not represent any 'break' or 'turn' in Foucault's work. In line with Foucault's repeated denials that he was interested after 1976 in a 'return to the ancients', I argue that Foucault's writings on critique represent instead both a deepening theoretical self-consciousness, and part of his project to forge an ethics adequate to the historical present.

Conceptualizing the ιnfluence of the self-service technology context on consumer voice

The self-service technology (SST) context is characterized by consumer participation in service production and delivery, independent of service personnel; a lack of interpersonal interaction between consumers and service personnel; and consumers being required tointerface and interact with technology. With these features of the SST context in mind, in situations where SSTs fail to perform as promised, some challenges arise: consumers who are dissatisfied do not have the security or reassurance of service personnel to assist them; service personnel do not have the opportunity to prompt consumers to voice their dissatisfaction; and consumers need to initiate their own complaint response. If consumers fail to report their dissatisfaction directly to the organization, organizations will not know that a problem exists and may experience negative consequences such as consumer switching behavior. As reports of consumer dissatisfaction with SSTs become increasingly common, it is important, therefore, to investigate how organizations with SST-based offerings can encourage consumers to voice their dissatisfaction directly to the organization. Although the antecedents of consumer voice are well documented in the interpersonal services context, in the context of SSTs they have been subject to very little conceptual or empirical scrutiny. This paper argues that voice needs to be revisited with respect to SSTs due to their unique characteristics compared to interpersonal services, and presents a conceptual model of the antecedents of consumers' voice behavior in the context of SSTs.

The health and well-being of adolescents: a school-based population study of the self-report child health questionnaire

Purpose: To evaluate a new generic measure of adolescent health status, the self-report version of the Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ), and provide population-based data. Furthermore, we aimed to examine the impact of common adolescent illness and health concerns on their health and well-being.

Methods: A stratified, two-stage, random cluster sampling design was used to obtain a cross-sectional sample of subjects through schools. A written questionnaire included the 80-item 12-scale self-report CHQ and items measuring health concerns, illnesses/health conditions, and sociodemographics.

Results: A total of 2361 adolescents participated (response rate of 70%). Reliability was high: Tests of internal consistency and discriminant validity reported 90% of item-scale correlations >.4; all scales had Cronbach alpha coefficients >.7. Adolescents with illnesses/conditions or health concerns reported lower scores and larger differences for content-related scales, supporting content and construct validity. Statistically significant age and gender trends were observed for Mental Health, Self-Esteem, General Health, and Family Cohesion scales. Health status worsened as health concerns increased (X2 linear trend, p = .00) with deterioration in health of 5–20% on all scales for emotional health concerns (40% of sample).

Conclusions: The self-report CHQ is a reliable and seemingly valid measure of health and well-being for adolescent health research, although additional measures may be required where scales have high ceiling values. The significantly lower scores reported by adolescents with illness and/or health concerns lend support to the use of standardized health measures and longitudinal research to further examine the impact of adolescent comorbidities and their causal determinants.

Workplace change & the care of the self : health and wellbeing as a professional duty of care?

This paper examines the ways in which transformations in the organisation and practice of teacher’s work have witnessed large numbers of teachers being seen, and seeing themselves, as stressed. These understandings of teacher stress have provoked a number of strategies designed to encourage individuals to take care of themselves – and to take care of themselves in ways that will make schools more effective.

Knowledge, identities and dilemmas of the self in physical education teacher education

The purpose of this study was to understand how becoming a physical education teacher is shaped by personally and socially constructed knowledge and is affected by the rules and resources of the structural systems in which physical education teacher education (PETE) takes place. The study was influenced by the traditions of Personal Construct Theory (Kelly 1955), the theoretical tenets of social constructionism (Gergen 1991), and Giddens’s work on structuration (1984) and self-identity (1991). Ten PETE students participated in the study over almost three years. They undertook repertory grid sessions periodically through their study, followed by ‘learning conversations’, in which the grid itself was discussed, reworked and collaboratively analysed. All conversations were audio taped and were fully transcribed. The data were analysed in three ways, all of which were used to construct a story of the study. First, the grids were analysed for patterns, consistencies across students and for consistencies within students. These grids provided the first level story that related to constructions of knowledge. These constructions were then content analysed using analysis categories developed from Gergen’s notion of the saturated self and Giddens’ ideas of identity in late modernity. These analyses represented what Giddens calls a double hermeneutic since to all intents and purposes, the story of the study was constructed from the participants’ constructions of what it is to be a physical education teacher. The data suggests that during the process of constructing professional knowledge the student experienced a series of dilemmas of professional self-identity. It seems that to become a PE teacher, the dilemmas must be worked through until a position of what Giddens calls ontologist security has been achieved. Some students in this study had not managed to reach such a point before they left university and entered the teaching profession. In spite of this, the methods of the study allowed the participants to begin to articulate their theories and visions of teaching physical education. The therapeutic qualities of Kelly’s theory encouraged a number of the students to ‘see it differently’ (Rossi, 1997) and to begin to develop a rationale for physical education based on educational practice that considers the needs of individuals and the promotion of a socially just community. I have argued however that this ‘critical’ approach to physical education pedagogy was considered risky and as such students who were prepared to engage in such risk strategies also had other strategic relational selves (Gergen, 1991) to minimise risk at key times during their teacher education.

Ethics, aesthetics and the transformation of the self : Foucault's practice of philosophy

Drawing in part on research carried out in the Foucault archives in Paris, the thesis both undertakes a critical assessment of Foucault's late work and attempts to reconstruct the ethical attitude which was emerging in that work. It situates Foucault's project in the context of its Nietzschean inspiration and offers a Foucauldian model of ethics as an aesthetic, transformative work carried out upon the self - as a 'spiritual exercise' in which the critical practice of philosophy takes a central role.

Educational and mental health implications of the multidimensional model of the self-concept for adolescent girls : comparison of clinical and non-clinical samples

The importance of a positive self-concept as an educational outcome and a facilitator of other desirable outcomes are well established within the education research field. Although the multidimensional and hierarchical model of the self-concept is widely accepted within the educational psychology, this perspective is not widely used within the mental health research. Hence, the purpose of the present investigation is to compare the psychometric properties of the short version of the Self-Description Questionnaire (SDQII-S) based on responses by a large sample of female adolescent high school students (N= 829) and a clinical sample of adolescent girls who have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa (N= 75). The well-established psychometric properties of the longer version of the SDQII generalise well to both samples of adolescent girls, and analyses provided good support for the invariance of the factor structure across the two samples. Furthermore, analyses employing new structural equation modelling approaches to comparing the latent mean differences indicated that there were differences (although surprisingly small) between the two groups that were generally consistent with a priori predictions. The important educational and clinical implications of these results are discussed.