The Social Life of Achievement
Convened by: Dr Nick Long & Prof Henrietta Moore
Funders: The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
Background
As ever more countries around the word seek to increase their competitiveness in a neoliberal ‘knowledge economy’, notions of economic, academic, and personal ‘achievement’ are becoming increasingly important in public policy and social life. Moreover, policy interventions often draw on orthodoxies from within the social sciences, which have long seen a drive to achieve or to become competent as both innate and universal. As a result, allowing people to ‘fulfil their potential’ and become ‘achievers’ is seen as a way to support their self-actualisation and foster human flourishing. But such interventions raise big questions. Can we assume that such impulses are really human universals? What other impulses might come into play – and do these have biological or social origins? And even if one is motivated to ‘achieve’ or ‘become better’, are the consequences of success as straightforward as they seem?
This network gathers a range of scholars from diverse disciplines are therefore interested in exploring achievement’s social life: what are the social meanings, and subsequent experiential dimensions, of ‘achieving’? How does this affect the ways in which people both perceive themselves and relate to others? What can be gained from looking at these processes in sequence over the life-course? And what are the implications for how notions of ‘achievement’ are handled in academic thought and writing?
Answering these questions allows us to see a) what might be at stake in policies seeking to encourage ‘achievement’ and b) offer a more nuanced range of tools through which to interpret the causes and consequences of human beings’ motivations to succeed (or not) in any given sphere. To do this requires an interdisciplinary discussion between the empirical social sciences and the psychological sciences, as well as with works literature, film, and art that have sought to evoke the complex subjective consequences of ‘achieving’ in particular circumstances.
Events
1) 29th September – 2nd October 2010: Workshop in Cambridge. Funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, this workshop will bring together network members from the UK, USA and Europe with backgrounds in social anthropology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, management studies, and film theory, to consider how to develop new approaches to studying ‘The Social Life of Achievement’.
Confirmed participants include:
Susan Bayly
Rebecca Cassidy
Andrei Cimpian
Joanna Cook
Mark De Rond
Peter Demerath
Signithia Fordham
Jessica Gerrard
Sarah Green
Jonathan Mair
Ros McLellan
Laura McMahon
Laura Mentore
Kathleen C. Stewart
Renata Salecl
Olga Solomon
Joachim Stoeber
We regret that the workshop is closed to the general public, but we hope to be presenting its outcomes very soon – at conferences and in print. Watch this space, or email Nick at NJL34 [at] cam.ac.uk to go on our mailing list!
2) Nick Long and Henrietta Moore are convening a panel entitled ‘The Social Life of Achievement’ at this year’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans.
The panel runs from 13:45 until 17:30 on Thursday 18th November 2010. Details of the meeting room are still TBC.
Download the AAA Social Life of Achievement panel details.
Relevant publications
Long, N. J. 2007. How to win a beauty contest in Tanjung Pinang. Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 41, 91-117.
Long, N. J. 2011. ‘On having achieved appropriation: anak berprestasi in Kepri, Indonesia’. In V. Strang and M. Busse (eds) Ownership and appropriation. Oxford & New York: Berg.