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In this paper I seek to contribute to a growing understanding of the role of the self in qualitative forms of research and narrative. In calling upon the work of symbolic interactionists, postmodernists, and feminists, I explore how self-narrative might inform our scholarly work, both in terms of creating more advanced self-understandings and in promoting open and honest discussions about how our personal and professional lives intersect. After reviewing the philosophical rationale as well as various uses of self-narrative in social science and educational research, I examine my own deployment of self-reflexive writing as part of an effort to bridge the chasm between my personal life and my life in the academy.

In this article we consider how cultural resources rooted in religion help to constitute and animate people working in industrialized societies across both religious and nonreligious domains. We argue that redemptive self-narratives figure prominently in the symbolic constructions people attach to their experiences across the many domains of human experience; such redemptive narratives not only can shape their identities and sense of life purpose, they inform their practices and choices and animate their capacity for action. To consider how redemptive self-narratives can provide a basis for agency in organizations, we analyze and compare the career narratives of a retired Episcopal Bishop and a celebrated CEO.

Amidst the exponential spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study aims to explore the evolving dynamics underlying consumers' narratives about luxury-brands over social media. While visualizing these Online Luxury-Brand Self-Narratives (OLBSNs) as a decision-making situation, the authors question the “rational-being” assumption of the Net Valence Model (NVM) during a pandemic situation. Specifically, the authors draw upon Terror Management Theory (TMT) to explicate the role of pandemic-induced mortality salience in rendering the idealistic assumptions of NVM unattainable. The authors uncover evidence of risk-taking behavior among luxury consumers while using OLBSNs as a potential meaning-providing structure during the pandemic.

This study employed a cross-sectional survey method. The authors conducted a structured Qualtrics survey to collect data from 588 respondents. The authors examined the hypothesized relationships using structural equation modeling.

In contrast to the conventional wisdom of NVM, the results suggest a positive influence of not only perceived benefits but also perceived risks on intention to engage in OLBSN and brand advocacy during the ongoing pandemic.

This study explains the emerging dynamics of pandemic-induced mortality salience in OLBSN decision-making and has implications for luxury-brand marketers in designing brand communication strategies over social media.

This study makes an original endeavor to extend NVM beyond rational decision-making context by integrating the theoretical tenets of TMT within NVM while also delineating the decision-making mechanism of OLBSNs during the pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of identity play process by including the stories we live by in depth. Over the past decade, identity play literature has placed more emphasis on the role of self-narratives. Yet, the “stories we live by”, including the told or untold stories of past and imagined events of the future, have not been considered in depth in these self-narratives.

This conceptual paper draws on the personal construct theory, narrative identity and constructivist psychotherapy literatures and attempts to include the stories we live by in scholarly conceptualizations and explorations of identity play processes.

Drawing on the personal construct theory, narrative identity and constructivist psychotherapy literatures this paper offers a comprehensive conceptual model of how the stories we live by infuse individual identity construction processes. The model highlights the inter-connectivity among stories we live by, identity play, identity work, sensemaking and social validation. Looking through the lens of the personal construct theory and taking these inter-connectivities into account lead to the observation of temporality in identity construction and the plurivocality of self-narratives.

This paper looks at identity play through the lens of the personal construct theory. However, self-narratives are seen as a medium for manifestation of personal constructs. Thus, this paper also draws on the narrative identity literature and dialogical-self concept, which helps access the multiplicity of the self-narratives to widen our grasp of personal constructs. This paper combines discourse of deconstruction with the dialogical-self concept and provides more means for the explication of identity play.

As more and more people decide to commit their lives to print, autobiographies constitute a significant resource to explore stories of harm, violence and crime. Published autobiography, however, presents a unique form of storytelling, unavoidably entailing the accumulation and (re)telling of a mass of stories; about oneself, others, contexts and cultures. Relatedly, paratexts – or the elements that surround the central text, such as covers, introductions and prologues – demonstrate how these texts are both individually and collectively shaped. Taking the co-constructed nature of all narratives, including self-narratives, as its starting point, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how terrorists who have authored autobiographies understand the world and their actions within it. In doing so, this chapter provides a practical demonstration of how insight derived from literary criticism can profitably be brought to bear in systematically breaking down and analysing an autobiography – that of a notable American jihadist, Omar Hammami – including its paratextual elements. In particular, I argue that considerations of genre, the inclusion of different types of events and stories collected from others all provide valuable strategies for the ‘doing’ of narrative criminology using autobiographies.

This paper has two purposes. First, I offer a reading of interpretive biography (Denzin, 1989a) as an alternative method for understanding how individual lives are rendered meaningful in postmodern communication processes. Second, given the importance of many rock performers as cultural heroes, I present an interpretive biography of Pete Townshend, chief songwriter and most visible member of the classic rock band the Who. This method of inquiry is grounded in the more general tradition of interpretive interactionism (Denzin, 1989b, 1990a) and has its roots in C. Wright Mills's (1959) concept of the sociological imagination. Its guiding question is this: How is the postmodern self (or stated more accurately, selves) created within and sustained by the mass media? I argue that as postmodern cultural symbols, Townshend and the band (however ambiguously) mirror a collective search for identity on the part of audiences and society-at-large.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the main forms and components of future consciousness, to identify the important values for enhancing future consciousness, and to describe a variety of educational strategies for heightening future consciousness.

This paper presents a historical review of the development of future consciousness and a psychological review of recent theory and research on its components and benefits, and argues for a teaching philosophy and strategy based on positive psychology and the development of virtues and wisdom.

Future consciousness is multi‐dimensional and involves all the major capacities of the human mind. A set of different forms of future consciousness has evolved over time, encompassing practical and social intelligence, mythic narrative, rationality and emotionality, science fiction, and future studies. Psychologically, future consciousness involves human emotion and motivation, learning and memory, all major forms of cognition, and self‐identity. Psychological processes that contribute to expansive, optimistic, and creative future consciousness can be effectively taught. The development of virtues necessary for enhanced future consciousness can be facilitated through future‐focused self‐narrative activities.

This paper provides a succinct and comprehensive review of the major historical forms of future consciousness and its basic psychological components, and develops an educational approach to teaching future consciousness based on this comprehensive review. The approach is unique in that it is grounded in comprehensive historical research, contemporary psychology, and recent thinking in the study of the future, and creates a virtue and wisdom based approach to teaching future consciousness that subsumes and transcends all traditional educational approaches.

This paper aims to investigate the practice of conviviality as the right setting to explore how social capital interacts with business relationships and in particular how resources impacting business relationships take shape in social relations.

This paper has adopted the single case study method combining in-depth interviews, participant observations and focus groups. The investigated case is an Italian business community located in Hangzhou (China), recognized as one of the most active foreign communities in organizing convivial activities.

The study shows that conviviality contributes to generating resources thereby creating interactions in business relationships via social relations through self-narrative, community feeling and empathy. These resources bear distinguishing features. Based on relationships of trust, they are fitting and mutual knowledge-based resources and they are resources performing a sense of inner time.

The paper contributes to the interpretation of the interplay between business relationships and social capital through conviviality and is in line with a direction of research, which is increasingly involving industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) researchers, which is the analysis of social capital in business networks.

The concept of (self-)identity has become increasingly central to institutional theory’s microfoundations, yet remains relatively underdeveloped. In this chapter, the authors use an autobiographical interview with a gay Protestant minister in the US to explore the role of narrative conventions in the construction of self-identity. The analysis of this chapter offers the basis for a new understanding of the relation between institutions, self-identity, and agency: how we agentically engage institutions depends not only on who we narrate ourselves to be, but also on how we narrate ourselves into being. This suggests that narration as a specific modality of micro-institutional processes has important performative effects.

The purpose of this paper is to examine artists’ experiences of involuntary career transitions and its impact on their work-related identities.

Semi-structured interviews with 40 artists in the Netherlands were conducted. Self-narratives were used to analyze the findings.

Artists who can no longer make a living out of their artistic activities are forced to start working outside the creative realm and are gradually pushed away from the creative industries. This loss of their creative identity leads to psychological stress and grief, making the professional transition problematic. Moreover, the artistic community often condemns an artist’s transition to other activities, making the transition psychologically even more straining.

This study provides in-depth insights into how artists deal with changes in their work-related identities in the light of involuntary career transitions.