Private Self Research Articles

Competing strategies between public and private self: separation and diffusion of the entrepreneurial identity of solo entrepreneurs on social media

Social media are gaining significance in organizations and their business strategies. Therefore, the self-presentation of solo entrepreneurs on social media requires a strategic analysis and concept due to their specific business structure. Solo entrepreneurs work on their own without having any employees in their company. In other words, they stay as the personification of a one-(wo)man-firm. The business structure of solo entrepreneurs is particular since they operate in the most decentralized form of a firm, which is a one-person firm. In some way, solo entrepreneurs can be regarded as independent (self-employed) laborers. When presenting themselves online, they must decide which characteristics of the private self should be emphasized and which should be incorporated into the entrepreneurial identity to be useful to the business. Our qualitative study conducted twelve semi-structured interviews with solo entrepreneurs to understand how they present themselves on social media and how the solo entrepreneur offered online differs from the private self. We have found that there are features of the personal self that are kept strictly out of the entrepreneurial sphere, but there are areas that make a mix of personal and entrepreneurial selves. Our results help to understand the group of solo entrepreneurs and their unique characteristics in an increasingly important field of digital media.

The Eyes Have It: Physiognomy, Gender and Construction of the Public and Private Self in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley

In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), the narrator remarks of the eponymous heroine: ‘Her nature is in her eye …’ (Brontë [1849] 2008, 326). Specifically, throughout the text, Shirley’s eyes are described as flashing; Caroline’s, meanwhile, are described as glowing. While Brontë’s interest in and exploration of phrenology is well-documented, Shirley’s focus on the eyes is quintessentially physiognomic. This article explores the two major sequences that describe the heroines’ flashing and glowing eyes in relation to Brontë’s use of physiognomic principles and her ideals of gender. I argue that Brontë’s portrayal of Shirley and Caroline not only questions the allegedly unifying power of physiognomy but also gives it a phrenological treatment in which the external signifier does not always match the internal signified. Furthermore, the specific imagery of flashing and glowing is emblematic of Shirley’s refusal to adhere to binaries. While flashing ‘reads’ as masculine and glowing ‘reads’ as feminine, Brontë’s conception of Shirley and Caroline demonstrates that masculinity and femininity, far from being a binary, work on a scale.

‘Tomorrowland’: identity construction and expression through flags and costumes in a music festival

ABSTRACT Tomorrowland is a unique electronic music festival where most attendees are showing up with flags, accessories, and costumes. This research investigates consumers’ identity construction and expression through the experience of such a festival, focusing on the material possessions that are used there. Through a naturalistic interpretive approach, using interviews, observations and projective material and following a grounded theory analysis, we propose a typology of seven profiles of festivalgoers based on their external appearance and behaviours. We also describe seven functions fulfiled by the material possessions of festivalgoers. Finally, we discuss our findings along four interpretive dimensions related to the (re)creation and expression of private and collective selves and we provide some implications for festival and event managers.

Pamela Anderson and Marilyn Monroe: sex symbols and the naked truth

ABSTRACT Pamela Anderson is one of the latest in a long line of Hollywood sex symbols that reveal a persistent obsession with celebrities as arbiters of sexual standards and knowledge. Specifically, Anderson’s star image is situated in relation to Marilyn Monroe’s eroticised identity of the 1950s. In addition to the obvious surface similarities that exist with Anderson and Monroe (hyperfeminine, platinum blondes, Playboy centrefolds, numerous marriages, sex scandals), they both epitomise the role of sex symbol, and the tension famous women face between a public and private self, objectification and subjectivity. The public’s desire to learn about the real women behind the sex symbols becomes a quest to learn a form of ‘truth’ about sexuality itself.

Fabricating Feelings in the Post-War Workplace: Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and Christine Brooke-Rose’s The Middlemen (1961)

This essay focuses on two satirical works of the early 1960s: Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and Christine Brooke-Rose's The Middlemen (1961), both of which are set in and around synthetic textile firms. In these novels, synthetic textiles function in analogic relation to the synthetic emotions that were coming to inform the modern workplace. More specifically, the novels document the emerging importance of inner feeling within professional frameworks and contexts. The main character of Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye is in the process of conducting ‘human research’ within his working-class district while Brooke-Rose stages an encounter between psychology and public relations through documenting the psychotherapeutic experiences of her corporate middlemen. Both writers send up new office and corporate jargon that drew on psychological discourse in an attempt to fuse, as Nikolas Rose notes, the values of ‘democracy, productivity and contentment’ (Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 1999). Together, the novels offer illuminating perspectives on the complex politics of emotional expertise that was beginning to seep into cultures of governance and work in the post-war period.

Is Instagram changing the agenda for political self-personalization? Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen’s professional and public private self on Instagram

With the advent of digital media, politicians have increasingly turned to social media platforms to personalize themselves independently from the mass media. With a focus on three dimensions of self-personalization, that is, the public professional self, the public private self and the use of Instagram practices, this study explores the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen’s strategic visual self-personalization practices on Instagram during a two-year period following her election on 27 June 2019. Firstly, based on a visual content analysis, this study sheds light on how the prime minister presents her professional and private self and how she exemplifies a change in political self-personalization practices using the platform-specific features that Instagram has brought to political communication. Secondly, a quantitative data collection of user engagement suggests that private and softer political content especially succeed in engaging the followers.

The antecedent cognitions of brand love and its impact on brand loyalty: the moderating role of sustainability marketing

PurposeThis study aims to examine the moderating effect of sustainability marketing on brand loyalty of brands that advertise their sustainable development agenda goals. The study highlights the mediating effect of brand love having cognitive antecedents of brand authenticity, popularity and congruence with private and social self of the consumer.Design/methodology/approachA mall intercept survey was used to collect data from consumers who use brands that embrace sustainable marketing strategies. Only those brands were selected which are popular as well as advertise sustainable practices in their brand communication (mainstream and social media). The data was self-administered by trained research assistants, who gathered data from a sample of 350 respondents.FindingsThe findings revealed that the popularity and authenticity of a brand play an essential role in developing brand love and later influences brand loyalty behavior. A larger effect is seen on brand love when there is congruence of private and social self with the brand. The brand has even a stronger relationship with brand loyalty when moderated by sustainability marketing.Research limitations/implicationsBrand love has the potential for long-term influences, only if sustainability marketing is used as a backbone. Brand managers should target an authenticity-seeking segment of consumers, who once convinced can lead to repeat business and brand loyalty and reduce dissonance. As sustainability marketing provides multiple benefits, genuine branding strategies should be devised that amalgamate into a single message spun around sustainability concerns and connecting the ethos of authenticity, popularity and self-expression. Future research may take into consideration more categories than this study on clothing, and consumer goods, adopting a mixed-methods approach. Moreover, a range of potential antecedents of brand love can be determined along with potential outcomes when aligned with external efforts such as sustainability, corporate social responsibility and international investment.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study investigating the moderating role of sustainability marketing on the relationship between brand love and brand loyalty and the mediating role of brand love between brand authenticity, popularity, social/private-self-expression and brand loyalty. It is also the first study documenting how sustainability marketing reinforces the brand loyalty for popular brands in developing countries like Pakistan. This study fills a research gap as it expands the existing literature on sustainability marketing and brand love that is generally focused on brand dimensions and not the brand communications and thus has not reached similar results.

Resilient women: transnational homes and identities in Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age

ABSTRACT Foregrounding theoretical expositions of the home and identity, this paper examines historical novel by Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam entitled A Golden Age (2007), which explores gendered roles within familial separation during political unrest. Using a transnational lens, it addresses shifting meanings of home and identity amidst nation-fragmentation during the politically fractious period of Bangladesh liberation war. Deploying a historico-literary imagination, the novel's emphasis on women's intimate struggles to keep family intact offer insights into meanings of home in terms of mother–child ties and geopolitical tensions that shape new borders within domestic and national spaces. As a point of departure, Kuah-Pearce's concept of transnational identities is applied to make sense of private and communal selves of female characters whose articulations of (un)homely affiliations in times of transnational crises are a means to redefine their resilience, and critique the practices of discrimination and segregation that disrupt the space of the home.

‘Skip the warts’: Personal Branding and Pornification inThe Look of Love

As the owner of the Raymond Revuebar in Soho and as publisher of pornographic magazines, British businessman and property magnate Paul Raymond had a lasting impact on British culture. The Look of Love seeks to assess that impact in its dramatisation of his life. The biopic locates Raymond as an early exponent of ‘personal branding’ via scenes which depict his flair for public relations and his crafting of a public image emphasising wealth and luxury. It also critiques this process, suggesting that his commitment to personal branding leads him to commodify those closest to him, among them his former wife, girlfriend and daughter. Where typically the juxtaposition between the public and private self has been utilised in biopics in order to convey a figure’s personality, The Look of Love exploits actor Steve Coogan’s associations with impersonation to rework this convention: the film suggests that even in supposedly private moments, Raymond was always seeking to impress an audience via his recreations of iconic film characters. But just as Raymond is represented as committed to this branding project, exploiting those around him to consolidate it, the film itself commits to this version of his life at the expense of others: namely, how Raymond’s ventures and activities were critical in what has been called the developing ‘pornification’ of British society. It is telling that the film includes a sequence in which Raymond instructs a prospective female model to ‘skip the warts’ when recounting her life story: there are warts which the film itself leaves unexamined.

The interplay between ovarian cancer and social relationships: an analysis of patients’ metaphors

Objective Research showed that ovarian cancer poses unique challenges to patients’ care experiences and that patients’ social networks could affect their care path significantly. The present study aimed to analyse the metaphors that patients used to signify the impact of the illness on their social relationships and the role of relationships in dealing with cancer. Design Following a qualitative description approach we conducted 38 semi-structured interviews with Australian (14) and Italian (24) women diagnosed at different stages of ovarian cancer. Results The analysis identified four themes bringing together the meanings expressed by participants’ metaphors: Lack of comprehension and communication; Isolation, marginalisation, and self-isolation; Discrepancy between the private and public self; and Social relationships as empowerment resources. Conclusion The polysemic nature of patients’ metaphors captures both the empowering and especially disempowering role of social relationships in dealing with ovarian cancer. Results also show that metaphors are used to make sense of the impact of ovarian cancer on social relationships and to express different strategies for managing patients’ networks.

Solitude skills and the private self.

Solitude skills and the private self.

Youth materialism and consumer ethics: do Gen Z adolescents’ self-concepts (power and self-esteem) vary across cultures (China vs. France)?

ABSTRACT Youth materialism excites adolescents’ unethical consumer beliefs (UCB-dishonesty). We develop a second-stage moderated mediation model, investigate the relationships between materialism and Generation Z teenagers’ consumer ethics (UCB-dishonesty), and treat two self-concept mechanisms (power and self-esteem) as dual mediators and culture as a moderator (China vs. France). We theorize that materialism enhances power (public self) and reduces self-esteem (private self). French adolescents’ sense of power increases UCB more than their Chinese counterparts. Chinese teenagers’ self-esteem reduces UCB more than their French counterparts. We challenge the assumption that the interaction effects between consumers’ self-concepts and UCB are the same across cultures. We offer the following discoveries based on 1,005 (409 Chinese and 596 French) adolescents. First, the measurement model of consumer ethics with four subconstructs is superior to the model with one overall construct. Second, a sense of power and self-esteem mediate the relationships between youth materialism and consumer ethics, creating two positive and negative paths for power and self-esteem, respectively. Third, French adolescents display a higher magnitude and positive intensity between adolescents’ power (public self) and UCB-dishonesty than their Chinese counterparts across all four subconstructs. Chinese teenagers illustrate a lower magnitude but a higher negative intensity between self-esteem and UCB than their French counterparts across three subconstructs, with one exception: Adolescents’ self-esteem has no impact on “no harm, no foul” across cultures. Neither buyers nor sellers experience substantial financial gains or losses. Finally, cultures moderate the second-stage mediation effects. Scholars must enhance adolescents’ self-esteem and curb their power to promote honesty. We offer implications for materialism, consumer ethics, self-concepts, and culture for consumers and retailers.

Dark, darker, social media: dark side experiences, identity protection, and preventive strategies of micro entrepreneurs on social media

PurposeSocial media has been gaining importance in recent years as an integral part of entrepreneurs’ business and marketing strategies. At the same time, the entrepreneurial use of social media can lead to dark and negative consequences. This aspect has received less attention in the literature so far. The purpose of this study is to advice entrepreneurial practitioners to balance the sides of pros and cons as being an inherent reality to acknowledge the full scenario of business life and the interplay of diverse influences.Design/methodology/approachThe qualitative interviews focused on the dark side experiences of micro-entrepreneurs on social media and on strategies to protect their private identities and businesses from those dark side effects. For the theoretical classification of dark side experiences, the framework of Baccarella et al. (2018) was used and adapted based on the experiences reported.FindingsTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is one of the first to provide an understanding of the negative experiences micro-entrepreneurs face on social media. The research showed the relevance of five out of the seven dark-side building blocks and identified time as a further influential aspect. Thereby, the authors learn to comprehend the negative sides of social media for micro-operated businesses. The findings highlight the need to understand entrepreneurial social media use with simultaneously negative hazards and economic and social challenges. Addressing the entanglement of the entrepreneurial and private selves of micro-entrepreneurs, the findings demonstrate entrepreneur’s attempts of distancing or cleaning the negativity from their private identities and their businesses.Originality/valueThis paper problematizes dark sides as critical elements in entrepreneurial practice, which are too often neglected when discussing entrepreneurial marketing in general and entrepreneurship in social media specifically. The self is always captured between two sides, including the problematic (“dark”) and the bright.

The Cycle That Brought Me, This Self, and Art Together

This account details one individual’s struggle with the social construction of womanhood in Kurdish society, those roles that females are taught, misogyny and self-hatred that they see deeply imbedded in Kurdish society. Connecting their artwork to their private self, the authors open the space of their personal struggles with gender identification and being queer.

Being a Celebrity: Alienation, Integrity, and the Uncanny

AbstractA central feature of being a celebrity is experiencing a divide between one's public image and private life. By appealing to the phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we analyze this experience as paradoxically involving both a disconnection and alienation from one's public persona and a sense of close connection with it. This ‘uncanny’ experience presents a psychological conflict for celebrities: they may have a public persona they feel alienated from and that is at the same time closely connected to them and shapes many of their personal interactions. We offer three ways in which a celebrity might approach this conflict: (i) eradicating the divide between their public and private selves, (ii) splitting or separating their private and public selves, or (iii) embracing the arising tension. We argue that it is only this third approach that successfully mitigates the negative effects of the alienation felt by many celebrities.

Colloquial Crumbs: Reclamation of Spaces in Food and Memory in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days

Autobiographical narratives—in the form of travelogues, memoirs, diaries, and other personal accounts—are crucial literary interventions that have aided a global and cosmopolitan expansion. Such self-narrations, excavating the lives of writers, elucidate and explore various cultural associations within society. Moreover, as the process of self-narration and the creation of an identity progresses, autobiographies, cumulatively known as ‘life-writing’ since 1990, essentially highlights the differences between the public and the private self, which gives rise to a tendency to marginalise the woman writer—who is often characterised by an ambiguous existence in the public domain. My paper will explore this idea of self-reflection and self-discovery in its attempt to situate Sara Suleri’s memoir Meatless Days (1989) within the postcolonial female identity, thereby unravelling the domestic space as a crucially inventive and creative space for the reclamation of the identity of a writer. The relationship of the domestic space with metaphors of food significantly emerges as a unifying trajectory to an imaginative home/land in turmoil. It forms a site emblematic of cultural identity and critical contentions in the ways in which they were presented and represented, beginning to allow an efflorescence of not only an aesthetic imagination of the domestic space but also a way of reclaiming it. Essentially, through an analysis of the memory and food and consumption metaphors (often extending out to be the feminine domestic space) that Suleri significantly uses in her narrative, this paper will explore facets of identity creation and continuity as a counter-narrative of patriarchal nation-building against the backdrop of ongoing political turmoil.

Smart devices, cell phone cameras, social shaming and the loss of the right to a private self: Interview with Michel Paradis about the modern panopticon

KEYWORDS: SurveillancePanopticonsurveillance capitalismdemocracysocial shamingsecurity cameraschilling effect

Not Just Tears and Laughter

This article rethinks the spatiality of emotions through the lens of Zhang Henshui’s Fate in Tears and Laughter, one of the most popular novels in the Republican era (1911-1949). Drawing on Ling Hon Lam’s work on the spatiality of emotion in premodern Chinese theater, this study reformulates emotion as a space that transposes an affective body into a spectatorial position in front of the emotion-realm mediated by theatricality. This article sets out to delineate the melodramatic polarization of emotions (tears and laughter), the spatial topography of emotion embedded in geographical loci, and the emotional spectatorship in which a private self is enmeshed in a public domain through bodily engagement in laughing, crying and sympathizing with fictional characters. It contributes to a new understanding of the affective assembly of emotions evoked by reading experiences that is as much innate faculties as coded registers of an imagined community.

The influence of event‐time (vs. clock‐time) scheduling style on satiation

AbstractConsumers often need to schedule different activities. While consumers who adopt a clock‐time scheduling style decide when to transition from one activity to the next according to external temporal cues (e.g., clock), those who adopt an event‐time scheduling style tend to perform each activity until they feel internally that it is completed. This research showed that consumers' scheduling style (clock‐time vs. event‐time) could influence their satiation with repeated consumption. Four studies involving actual consumption across various domains (e.g., music, artwork, food) demonstrated that an event‐time scheduling style leads to more rapid satiation with repeated consumption than a clock‐time scheduling style because event‐timers (vs. clock‐timers) have higher private self‐focus. The results further revealed that the satiation effect of scheduling style is mitigated when consumers are distracted from their private self or informed of additional sensitization cues in the consumption stimuli.

The Passionate Fallacy

The Passionate Fallacy