Synopses & Reviews
When did fidgety children begin to suffer from attention deficit disorder? How did frightened people come to be called paranoid? Why are we considered to have emotional intelligence and not simply caring personalities?
While psychological knowledge began in the relative isolation of laboratories and universities, it has since permeated various professions, institutions, and everyday life. Society and our conceptions of self have fundamentally changed with psychology's modernization of the mind. Ward provides a social and cultural history of the spread of psychological knowledge, assessing the way this proliferation has reconfigured society's meaning, and the way people view themselves and others.
Using ideas borrowed from science and technology studies, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of organizations, Ward examines how American psychology established itself as the central purveyor of truth about the mind and self in the 20th century. He examines how psychology has essentially become common knowledge, and his innovative account offers a novel theory about the growth and influence of numerous different knowledge forms.
Review
Modernizing the Mind is an important book not only for theories of the consturction of psychological knowledge but also for the sociology of the professions, cultural sociology, and the study of modernization....Sociologists, whose own discipline is notable for its lack recognition and prestige both within and outside the academic arena, have much to learn from psychology's tremendous successes in institutionalizing its knowledge claims. They have no better place to start than Modernizing the Mind.Contemporary Sociology
Synopsis
Using ideas borrowed from science and technology studies, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of organizations, Ward examines how American psychology established itself as the central purveyor of truth about the mind and self in the 20th century. He examines how psychology has essentially become common knowledge, and his innovative account offers a novel theory about the growth and influence of numerous different knowledge forms.
Synopsis
Using ideas borrowed from science and technology studies, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of organizations, Ward examines how American psychology established itself as the central purveyor of truth about the mind and self in the 20th century. He examines how psychology has essentially become common knowledge, and his innovative account offers a novel theory about the growth and influence of numerous different knowledge forms.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [243]-274) and index.
Synopsis
Ward examines how American psychology established itself as the central purveyor of truth about the mind and self in the 20th century.
Table of Contents
Introduction
How Truth Travels: Knowledge, Networks and the Organization of Society
From a Moral Philosophy to a Science: The Struggle to Construct and Defend the "New Psychology"
For the Children: The Alliance of Psychology and Education
Molding Morals and Minds: Psychology and the Modernization of Parenting
Minds, Measures, and Machines: The Materialization of Psychological Ideas
A Seance or a Science? Psychology and Its Publics
Psychological Codes of Civility and the Practice of Everyday Life
The Psychologically Examined Life: Issues, Healing, Closure, and the Psychotherapeutic Self
Conclusion: The Psychologization of the United States
Appendix: A Few Important Dates in the History of American Psychology
Bibliography
Index