"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." This schoolyard rhyme projects an invulnerability to verbal insults that sounds good but rings false. Indeed, the need for such a verse belies its own claims. For most of us, feeling insulted is a distressing-and distressingly common-experience. In Sticks and Stones, philosopher Jerome Neu probes the nature, purpose, and effects of insults, exploring how and why they humiliate, embarrass, infuriate, and wound us so deeply. What kind of injury is an insult? Is it determined by the insulter or the insulted? What does it reveal about the character of both parties as well as the character of society and its conventions? What role does insult play in social and legal life? When is telling the truth an insult?
Neu draws upon a wealth of examples and anecdotes-as well as a range of views from Aristotle and Oliver Wendell Holmes to Oscar Wilde, John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, and many others-to provide surprising answers to these questions. He shows that what we find insulting can reveal much about our ideas of character, honor, gender, the nature of speech acts, and social and legal conventions. He considers how insults, both intentional and unintentional, make themselves felt-in play, Freudian slips, insult humor, rituals, blasphemy, libel, slander, and hate speech. And he investigates the insult's extraordinary power, why it can so quickly destabilize our sense of self and threaten our moral identity, the very center of our self-respect and self-esteem. Entertaining, humorous, and deeply insightful, Sticks and Stones unpacks the fascinating dynamics of a phenomenon more often painfully experienced than clearly understood.
The Trouble with Blame: Victims, Perpetrators and Responsibility[Paperback]
This text takes up the topic of victimization and blame as a pathology of our time and its consequences for personal responsibility. By probing the psychological dynamics of victims and perpetrators of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, Sharon Lamb seeks to answer some crucial questions: How do victims become victims and sometimes perpetrators?; How can we break the psychological circle of perpetrators blaming others and victims blaming themselves?; How do victims and perpetrators view their actions and reactions?; And how does our social response to them facilitate patterns of excuse?
With clarity and compassion, Lamb examines the theories, excuses and psychotherapies that strip both victims of their power and perpetrators of their agency - and thus deprive them of the means to human dignity, healing and reparation. She shows how the practice of painting victims as innocents may actually help perpetrators of abuse to shirk responsibility for their actions; they too can claim to be victims in their own right, passive and will-less in their wrongdoing. "The Trouble With Blame" clarifies the social cost of letting perpetrators off too easily, and points out the dangers of overemphasizing victimization, two problems which eclipse our need for accountability and recovery.
Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts[Paperback]
Review by an Amazon customer
For clear, engaging explanations of psychological research, this is one of the best books you can get. Cognitive biases are like optical illusions, distorting our decisions, memories and judgement. This book focuses in particular on self-directed biases: the distortions of memory and explanation that make sure that each of us is the hero, not the villain, or our own life story.
When corrupt police frame innocent people, how do they justify to themselves what they are doing? When a couple divorce, how can two former lovers come to hate each other with such passion? When political or military mistakes lead to thousands of deaths, how do the decision-makers live with themselves? The authors take academic research (on cognitive dissonance, stereotypes, obedience and more) and apply it to a wide spectrum of issues from the White House to Mel Gibson's racism.
It is eye-opening to read how malleable and unreliable memory is, and how easy it is to create feedback loops of increasing certainty from just a glimmer of evidence. An appalling example is the recovered memory craze of the 80s and 90s, which is discussed at length. The book isn't entirely downbeat, even though it explains how prosecutions, marriages or therapy sessions can go terribly wrong. It shows how easy it is for good people to hurt others, but that we can avoid these traps with humility and self-questioning. They call science "a form of arrogance control".
A theme running through the work of these two psychologists is how science can address real problems of human conflict. That warm, humane spirit pervades this book and I think anybody curious about the science or the solutions would benefit from reading it.
Up from Scapegoating: Awakening Consciousness in Groups[Paperback]
Ever since Up from Scapegoating has been available on amazon.com I recieved a number of consultation requests from individuals and subgroups who've experienced the scapegoating phenomena and want help. They've ranged from requests by lawyers to help with scapegoated, abused clients who want a handle on group process to members of religious communities who find themselves isolated by the blanket of goodness and denial to students in schools finding a class process to be powerfully scapegoating--often of friends as well as themselves. Each one takes some analyzing but I think there should be a group of people who are interested and can do something to advance a general theoy and practice. The dynamics of victimization by groups attempting to exclude and excommunicate for the purpose of their own wholeness is common to all kind of abuse.
Ostracism: The Power of Silence (Emotions & Social Behavior)[Hardcover]
'Relying on a judicious mix of case studies, experiments, and role play, Williams explores ostracism in narratives, the laboratory, office settings, and even on the internet (being shunned online is by no means uncommon). This wonderful 11-chapter book illustrates that important, unexplored issues amenable to traditional social psychological analysis remain to be explored.'- Choice
'This is a scholarly, engaging, and lucidly written work. Williams, a foremost authority on the topic, has done an admirable job documenting the prevalence of ostracism across history, cultures, and the course of human development ... Social scientists and undergraduate and graduate-level students will be awed by the power of this book to explain a complex phenomenon so elegantly, and to provide so many valuable insights into both the dark and bright sides of human behavior.'- Constantine Sedikides, PhD, University of Southampton, England
Product Description
This illuminating book provides a comprehensive examination of this pervasive phenomenon, exploring the short- and long-term consequences for targets as well as the functions served for those who exclude or ignore.
The Bully at Work: What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job
by Gary Namie and Ruth Namie
Review by an Amazon customer
I experienced all of the behaviors described in this book, and I think the reasons given for the behavior are right on the mark. When my e-mail friends suggested the same reasons (before I read this book), I found them so far-fetched (such as perhaps I was making the bullies look bad through my competence-I said to myself, "They are professional people; surely they are self-confident about their own work.")
This book looks at reasons for bullying, and who become targets for bullying behavior (how and why those targets are chosen). It discusses bullying in other European countries, as well as South Africa, and what progress legally has been made against passing laws against bullying in the workplace. These laws are compared with the legal progress/standing of the target in the United States. The book discusses health ramifications on the target, and all possible actions that can and should or should not be taken personally, and in the workplace.
If I had read this book MUCH sooner (such as when the bullying FIRST started), it would have helped me emotionally. I would have realized MUCH sooner what was happening, and known that I wasn't crazy. I could have fought back sooner, and would have known how, and which strategies to use. I also would have kept detailed records of each bullying incident, and I would have gotten witnesses' statements.
Bully in Sight: How to Predict, Resist, Challenge and Combat Workplace Bullying - Overcoming the Silence and Denial by Which Abuse Thrives[Paperback] Tim Field(Author)
Review by an Amazon customer
Bully in sight made me aware what was happening to me and some of the other people I worked with. It made it clear that bullying is not management. I finally took a stand after 2 breakdowns and took my employer to court. The result was 7 managers joined her and ganged up to eliminate me. I managed to get all this recorded and left a massive paper trail. The result was my company paid me to leave when they realised that I could clearly show that they victimised me. (This is why I am anonymous).
Bully in sight tells you what bullying is, it tells you how to prove it, it gives you some ideas on how to play the game and who to ask for for help. It informs you why your colleagues will disappear and why grievance procedures don't work. It gives you an idea why you are suffering from stress and other weird illnesses when you have never been ill before.
The only downside is the law section is a bit out of date but you can buy an employment law book to help you with that.
Barsteadworth College: How Workplace Bullies Get Away With It[Paperback]
Barsteadworth College is a book about workplace bullying, the damage it causes and institutional suppression of the truth about both.
Workplace bullying is a hot contemporary topic. It crops up in conversations between friends and colleagues and not infrequently in the television, radio and print media. It can often seem that everyone has either been bullied at work or knows someone who has. However, cases where a victim of workplace bullying has taken on 'the system' and won are few and, because of this, are big news when they happen. This is due in no small part to the routine use of 'gagging clauses' in 'compromise agreements', which bring to a close the one-sided battles that take place between bullied employees and their employers/managers. Victimised employees can find themselves placed in situations where they have no alternative but to resign and then contractually prohibited from speaking about their experiences by the agreement that terminates their employment. Thus, it is ensured that the extent of the kind of abuses described in this book remains hidden and that one of the routine social sicknesses of our time and the knock-on actual sicknesses that result stay largely invisible and unchallenged.
The author, Dr Stephen Riley, has experienced workplace bullying and its damaging consequences firsthand and, like many, he is prohibited from speaking by a 'compromise agreement'. In Barsteadworth College he therefore uses fiction as means of describing and analysing the issues: Dr Dan Ripley, a Fine Art Lecturer, moves from Manchester and takes a job at a provincial art college in the south of England. After a time, a new manager arrives and starts to appoint friends and family and to create preferential working conditions for herself and her clique. Those outside of the clique - Dan and two others - are then subjected to a wide range of undermining activities from their line-manager, including staged public humiliations at meetings, unmanageable workloads and endlessly contradictory instructions. The book describes the gradual corrosive effects of the bullying: fatigue, loss of confidence, confusion and then depression. It then describes what happens when Dan complains: the college's managers close ranks and connive with the bullying line-manager to discredit the allegations, eliminate evidence and vilify the complainant.
Ultimately, Barsteadworth College is an appeal to law and policy makers to address the current situation, which is hopelessly skewed in favour of workplace bullies and against their victims and, within this, to address the question of how, when suitable policies are in place, institutions can be made to adhere to them and be answerable if they do not.
Workplace bullying, like childhoodbullying, is the tendency of individuals or groups to use persistent aggressive or unreasonable behaviour against a co-worker or subordinate. Workplace bullying can include such tactics as verbal, nonverbal, psychological, physical abuse and humiliation. This type of aggression is particularly difficult because unlike the typical forms of school bullying, workplace bullies often operate within the established rules and policies of their organization and their society. Bullying in the workplace is in the majority of cases reported as having been perpetrated by management and takes a wide variety of forms. Bullying can be covert or overt.
Extract relevant to the UK
In the United Kingdom, although bullying is not specifically mentioned in workplace legislation, there are means to obtain legal redress for bullying. The Protection from Harassment Act 1997[35] is a recent addition to the more traditional approaches using employment-only legislation. Notable cases include Majrowski v Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Trust[36] wherein it was held that an employer is vicariously liable for one employee's harassment of another, and Green v DB Group Services (UK) Ltd,[37] where a bullied worker was awarded over £800,000 in damages. In the latter case, at paragraph 99, the judge Mr Justice Owen said,
"...I am satisfied that the behaviour amounted to a deliberate and concerted campaign of bullying within the ordinary meaning of that term."
Bullying behaviour breaches other UK laws. An implied term of every employment contract in the UK is that parties to the contract have a (legal) duty of trust and confidence to each other. Bullying, or an employer tolerating bullying, typically breaches that contractual term. Such a breach creates circumstances entitling an employee to terminate his or her contract of employment without notice, which can lead to a finding by an Employment Tribunal of unfair dismissal, colloquially called constructive dismissal. An employee bullied in response to asserting a statutory right can be compensated for the detriment under Part V of the Employment Rights Act 1996, and if dismissed, Part X of the same Act provides that the dismissal is automatically unfair. Where a person is bullied on grounds of sex, race or disability et al., it is outlawed under anti-discrimination laws.
It was argued, following the obiter comments of Lord Hoffmann in Johnson v Unisys in March 2001,[38][39] that claims could be made before an Employment Tribunal for injury to feelings arising from unfair dismissal. It was re-established that this was not what the law provided, in Dunnachie v Kingston upon Hull City Council, July 2004[40] wherein the Lords confirmed that the position established in Norton Tool v Tewson in 1972, that compensation for unfair dismissal was limited to financial loss alone. Unfair dismissal compensation is subject to a statutory cap set at £60600 from Feb 2006. Discriminatory dismissal continues to attract compensation for injury to feelings and financial loss, and there is no statutory cap.
Access to justice in the UK is via self-representation at a tribunal, via a no-win no-fee lawyer, or via insurance or trade union lawyers. Since the Access to Justice act, "collective conditional fees" have blurred the distinction causing controversy for example in the case of Unison v Jervis.
Sociologist Gerhard Falk examines the social psychology that motivates this process of exclusion, focusing on the outcasts in contemporary American society and comparing current experience with examples from the past. Referring to the work of Emile Durkheim and Erving Goffman, Falk reviews the whole range of stigmatised people from the mentally ill to ordinary people with unpopular occupations, like undertakers and trash collectors.
Amid the wide diversity of stigmatised persons, he finds two basic types of outsiders: the 'existential' and the 'achieved'. The first group comprises those who are stigmatised because of their very existence, regardless of their specific actions: the mentally handicapped, for example. The second group describes those whose actions or life conditions have resulted in stigma: from high achievers (often subject to resentment) to criminals. Falk also looks at the ways in which writers past and present have dramatised stigmatised characters in literature. This fascinating overview of a long-standing and widespread social problem will be of interest to all those concerned about creating a more fair-minded society.
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity[Paperback]
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century. He was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
By an Amazon Customer
For those not familiar with Goffman's work he is the acceptable face of Sociology. He avoids the bogus science which has given the whole enterprise a bad name but captures the essence of what makes the study of social interraction so fascinating. The Stigmas covered include disabilities, social deviance or sexual orientation. Stigma proposes a basic principle: That the stigmatised individual has a simple choice regarding the attributes that he or she has that makes them different. They can either control the information by not letting so called 'normals' i.e. everyone else, know what their secret is if its not obviously visible; or they can let it be known and manage the resulting tension. They can 'pass' i.e. pretend to be normal while harbouring the knowledge that their stigma makes them distinct and different.
It is Goffman's extraordinary insight and accurate description that makes his brand of Sociology so engaging. You will read this and say 'Aha' when you recognise that things you thought only you had observed in the minutely detailed interplay of human relations have been bagged, tagged and described in the most accurate and well documented manner. Nobody should go through life without at least once dipping in to the sharply observed world of this great 20th century observer.
Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Penguin Social Sciences)[Paperback]
Asylums is an analysis of life in "total institutions"--closed worlds like prisons, army camps, boarding schools, nursing homes and mental hospitals. It focuses on the relationship between the inmate and the institution, how the setting affects the person and how the person can deal with life on the inside.
By an Amazon Customer
The fact that this collection of essays has been in print for almost four decades is consistent with its enduring signficance. Although Goffman draws on his research in mental institutions, his writings in this book have much broader relevance. In particular, they have to do with the nature of identity, the processes whereby organizations and groupings seek to change the identities and selves of their members, and the strategies used by group members to resist those changes. At a broader level, this book is about the relationship between person and the groups of which s/he is a part. Extremely well written, and very readable with excellent use of illustrative examples, this set of essays provides unparalleled insights into and understandings of the relation between person and society.
Why? is a book about the explanations we give and how we give them--a fascinating look at the way the reasons we offer every day are dictated by, and help constitute, social relationships. Written in an easy-to-read style by distinguished social historian Charles Tilly, the book explores the manner in which people claim, establish, negotiate, repair, rework, or terminate relations with others through the reasons they give.
Tilly examines a number of different types of reason giving. For example, he shows how an air traffic controller would explain the near miss of two aircraft in several different ways, depending upon the intended audience: for an acquaintance at a cocktail party, he might shrug it off by saying "This happens all the time," or offer a chatty, colloquial rendition of what transpired; for a colleague at work, he would venture a longer, more technical explanation, and for a formal report for his division head he would provide an exhaustive, detailed account.
Tilly demonstrates that reasons fall into four different categories:
Convention: "I'm sorry I spilled my coffee; I'm such a klutz." Narratives: "My friend betrayed me because she was jealous of my sister." Technical cause-effect accounts: "A short circuit in the ignition system caused the engine rotors to fail." Codes or workplace jargon: "We can't turn over the records. We're bound by statute 369."
Tilly illustrates his topic by showing how a variety of people gave reasons for the 9/11 attacks. He also demonstrates how those who work with one sort of reason frequently convert it into another sort. For example, a doctor might understand an illness using the technical language of biochemistry, but explain it to his patient, who knows nothing of biochemistry, by using conventions and stories.
Replete with sparkling anecdotes about everyday social experiences (including the author's own), Why? makes the case for stories as one of the great human inventions.
Throughout his 50-book career, Tilly liked to squint hard at social life and find simple patterns. [In Credit and Blame] his undogmatic schematizing could reshape our judgments about what might have been obvious to begin with. -- Alexander Star, New York Times Book Review
Drawing upon sources as disparate as Dostoyevski, Darwin, water-cooler conversations and truth commissions, Tilly illustrated how assigning credit and blame stems from and redefines 'relations between the creditor and the credited, the blamer, and the blamed.' Tilly astutely analyzes how people accept credit and society assesses blame, and the commonalities between the two. With its most vivid examples drawn from the author's own life, this book is simultaneously highbrow and humble and a close analysis of social interaction. -- Publishers Weekly
Product Description
In his eye-opening book Why?, world-renowned social scientist Charles Tilly exposed some startling truths about the excuses people make and the reasons they give. Now he's back with further explorations into the complexities of human relationships, this time examining what's really going on when we assign credit or cast blame.
Everybody does it, but few understand the hidden motivations behind it. With his customary wit and dazzling insight, Tilly takes a lively and thought-provoking look at the ways people fault and applaud each other and themselves. The stories he gathers in Credit and Blame range from the everyday to the altogether unexpected, from the revealingly personal to the insightfully humorous--whether it's the gushing acceptance speech of an Academy Award winner or testimony before a congressional panel, accusations hurled in a lover's quarrel or those traded by nations in a post-9/11 crisis, or a job promotion or the Nobel Prize.
Drawing examples from literature, history, pop culture, and much more, Tilly argues that people seek not only understanding through credit and blame, but also justice. The punishment must fit the crime, accomplishments should be rewarded, and the guilty parties must always get their just deserts.
Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, Credit and Blame is a book that revolutionizes our understanding of the compliments we pay and the accusations we make.
The Stories We Live by: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self[Paperback]
'Who Am I?' 'How do I fit in the world around me?' From early childhood, we are all faced with key questions of human identity. This revealing and innovative book demonstrates that each of us discovers what is true and meaningful, in our lives and in ourselves, through the creation of personal myths. Challenging the traditional view that our personalities are formed by fixed, unchanging characteristics, or by predictable stages through which every individual travels, The Stories We Live By persuasively argues that, strange as it may seem, we are the stories we tell. Based on more than 10 years of research and hundreds of first-hand interviews, the book accessibly links scientific investigation to the struggles and joys of real people. Sensitively told anecdotes and mini-life stories draw readers into exploring the intimate connection between our personal myths and our perceptions, relationships, and life choices.
Providing an integrative view of human beings as evolving story-tellers whose tales deepen and broaden with age, The Stories We Live By describes an ongoing process that allows us, within limits, to develop and revise our stories and open up new possibilities for our lives. This book will be value for all those who are interested in enhancing their self-understanding. It will also serve as useful classroom text for undergraduates and advanced students in personality and social psychology, counselling and psychotherapy.
