Changing Selves

Abstract

This quote encapsulates the topic of this book: the emergence of new modes of work and workers. Thus Worked Up Selves is an exploration of the growth of personal development, a form of immaterial labour or more precisely, ‘self-work’ (Tipton, 1983; Heelas, 2002; Chappell et al., 2003). In personal development this self-work involves self-exploration, self-expression, self-reflection, self-improvement and experimentation with appearance, capacities, behaviours, emotions and thinking. Worked Up Selves focuses, in particular, on the personal development workers who help people to undertake this type of labour outlined above. These types of workers include management trainers; life- performance- business- and executive-coaches; learning consultants; personal development consultants; facilitators, and management developers. Up to now, this group have been somewhat neglected as an occupational group in organisational theory and wider social theory.

One must recognise that the desire to invent a life is no longer evidence of narcissistic self-involvement or an emancipator countercultural impulse, but rather is increasingly required as a new form of ‘immaterial labour’ — mental, social and emotional tasks — required for participation in the labour market.

(McGee, 2005: 24)