Why doesn't self-help help? Millions of people turn to self-improvement when they find that their lives aren't working out quite as they had imagined. The market for self-improvement products — books, audiotapes, life-makeover seminars and regimens of all kinds — is exploding, and there seems to be no end in sight for this trend. In Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life, cultural critic Micki McGee asks what our seemingly insatiable demand for self-help can tell us about ourselves at the outset of this new century.

The answers are surprising. Rather than finding an America that is narcissistic or self-involved, as others have contended, McGee sees a nation relying on self-help culture for advice on how to cope in an increasingly volatile and competitive work world. For Americans today, a central component of working has become working on themselves. "Be all one can be," they are told. Build your own personal brand. As women have entered the paid labor force in growing numbers, the Protestant work ethic has been augmented by a Romantic imperative that one create a vision — a script — for one's life. More and more, Americans are compelled to regard themselves in effect as "human capital." No longer simply an enterprising or entrepreneurial individual, the new worker is the artist and the artwork, the "CEO of Me, Inc.," in Tom Peters' memorable phrase, and the central product line. Self-Help, Inc. 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 and fascinating treatment of the modern obsession with work and self-improvement, this book will strike a chord with its diagnosis of the self-help trap and with its suggestions for how we can address the alienating conditions of modern work and family life.

"[McGee] argues...that self-help's individualistic approach and its false assumption of autonomy disregard the systemic social inequities...that cause individual discontent and do not acknowledge social solutions that might actually help." Library Journal

"McGee's grasp of the philosophical underpinnings...is formidable." Salon

"Elegantly written, brilliantly argued, and very important, a must read." Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Time Bind and The Commercialization of Intimate Life

"Wonderfully researched, superbly written, well-organised — this is simply a stand-out of contemporary cultural studies." Toby Miller, author of The Well-Tempered Self

"McGee has revealed the self-help industry as an obsessional treadmill far more than a path to a better life. In an innovative way, Self-Help, Inc. offers a revealing look at the profound dissatisfactions that loiter beneath the topography of our consumer culture." Stuart Ewen, author of PR!: A Social History of Spin

Micki McGee is an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at New York University's John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought. A sociologist and cultural critic, she is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Non-Fiction Literature and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Blue Mountain Center.

Acknowledgements

Prologue. Covey's Daughter and Her Dilemma

Introduction. From Self-Made to Belabored

1. From Calling to Vision: Spiritual, Secular and Gendered Notions

2. From Power! to Personal Power!: Survivalism and the Inward Turn

3. From Having It All to Simple Abundance: Gender and the Logic of Diminished Expectations

4. The Self at Work: From Job-Hunters to Artist-Entrepreneurs

5. At Work on the Self: The Making of the Belabored Self

6. All You Can Be, or Some Conclusions

Appendix. Some Notes on Method

Notes

Bibliography