Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life
Micki McGee
Abstract
Why doesn't self-help help? This book puts forward this paradoxical question as it looks at a world where the market for self-improvement products—books, audiotapes, and extreme makeovers—is exploding, and there seems to be no end in sight. Rather than seeing narcissism at the root of the self-help craze, as others have contended, the author shows a nation relying on self-help culture for advice on how to cope in an increasingly volatile and competitive work world. The book reveals how makeover culture traps Americans in endless cycles of self-invention and overwork as they struggle to stay ah ... More
Why doesn't self-help help? This book puts forward this paradoxical question as it looks at a world where the market for self-improvement products—books, audiotapes, and extreme makeovers—is exploding, and there seems to be no end in sight. Rather than seeing narcissism at the root of the self-help craze, as others have contended, the author shows a nation relying on self-help culture for advice on how to cope in an increasingly volatile and competitive work world. The book reveals how makeover culture traps Americans in endless cycles of self-invention and overwork as they struggle to stay ahead of a rapidly restructuring economic order. A lucid treatment of the modern obsession with work and self-improvement, it will strike a chord with its acute diagnosis of the self-help trap and its sharp suggestions for how we can address the alienating conditions of modern work and family life.
Keywords:
self-help,
self-improvement products,
extreme makeovers,
narcissism,
self-invention,
overwork,
audiotapes,
advice,
makeover culture,
restructuring economic order
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2005 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195171242 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171242.001.0001 |