The Existential Self in Society explores the ways in which we experience and shape our individuality in a rapidly changing social world. Kotarba and Fontana have gathered eleven original essays that form an exciting contribution and an ideal introduction to the emerging field of existential sociology.

Bibliogr.: p.9-18

This major study develops a new account of modernity and its relation to the self. Building upon the ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that 'high' or 'late' modernity is a post traditional order characterised by a developed institutional reflexivity. In the current period, the globalising tendencies of modern institutions are accompanied by a transformation of day-to-day social life having profound implications for personal activities. The self becomes a 'reflexive project', sustained through a revisable narrative of self identity. The reflexive project of the self, the author seeks to show, is a form of control or mastery which parallels the overall orientation of modern institutions towards 'colonising the future'. Yet it also helps promote tendencies which place that orientation radically in question - and which provide the substance of a new political agenda for late modernity. In this book Giddens concerns himself with themes he has often been accused of unduly neglecting, including especially the psychology of self and self-identity. The volumes are a decisive step in the development of his thinking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals in the areas of social and political theory, sociology, human geography and social psychology.

Third version of a long-standing textbook that examines the self in everyday life. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Existentialism and Sociology (originally published under the title The Existential Sociology of Jean-Paul Sartre) is the first work to systematically and critically analyze the existential ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and to demonstrate their importance and connection to central sociological categories found in the theories of Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Mead, and others.Drawing also on sociological and Hegelian social thought, Hayim analyzes key existential concepts of negation, temporality, choice, anguish, and bad faith, and carefully situates them in the different relations of self to the other—relations of indifference and destruction, as well as relations of engagement and pledge. She joins the two orders of being—ontology and sociology—and establishes intellectual and ethical continuity between the phenomenology of Being and Nothingness, Sartre's momentous early work, and neglected sociological categories in his later works: Critique of Dialectical Reason and Notebooks for an Ethics.Hayim makes accessible to the social scientist a rich repertoire of existential motifs and perspectives on community and group interactions and their inextricable bond to the life practice of the individual. Distinguishing among social groups as different orders of social consciousness and organization, Hayim addresses issues of transcendence and inertia, leadership and authority, freedom and bondage, bureaucracy and control, and identifies Sartre's concept of the practico-inert as the radical center of our intersubjectivity today, and its threat to human intelligibility.The author contends that the massive language of a sociology of things instills in the human actor a feeling of helplessness and gross inferiority vis-a-vis the social world. She offers, in contrast, the existential emphasis on the importance of substituting live human experience for mechanistic processes of explanation, and of establishing

This book offers a new perspective on the motherhood experience. Drawing on existential philosophy and recent phenomenological research into motherhood, the book demonstrates how motherhood can be understood as an existential crisis. It argues that an awareness of the existential issues women face will enable mothers to gain a deeper understanding of the multifaceted aspects of their experience. The book is divided into four sections: Existential Crisis, Maternal Mental Health Crisis, Social Crisis and Working with Existential Crisis, where each section. Each chapter is based on either experiential research or the author’s extensive therapeutic experience of working with mothers and reflects different aspects of the motherhood journey, all through the lens of a philosophical existential approach. The book is essential reading for mental health practitioners and researchers working with mothers, midwives and health visitors, but it is also written for mothers, with the aim to offer new insights on this important life transition.