This chapter begins by interrogating the ideal of authenticity as a paradigmatic modern response to the crisis of master narratives. It critically examines practices of narrative selfhood, and discusses the ways in which social roles offer scaffolds for the development of a self without fully constituting such a self. Role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – is an outstanding example of the exercise of imagination, its double function of finding and making, and its for-the-most-part inherited, moulded, and largely habituated practice. The chapter concludes with a theological discussion of the ways our habitual imagination of selfhood can be broken open without pretence that we might be able to find a fully realized authentic self beneath our narrative and social roles.

Self concept is an evolving sense of self that encompasses work, expression of potential, and purpose for being. Self concept is more encompassing than identity, and includes motivations, beliefs such as self-efficacy, attributions and construals, mental models of self, and social roles. Self concept grows and evolves through life and transitions, but only seldom does the whole self concept come up for review and revision. Narrative construction provided an approach to examining how the stories individuals tell about themselves shape and help create their evolving self concept. The evolution of self concept is reviewed in light of the operation of the transition experiences – cognitive flexibility, generative intelligence, personal intelligences, motivation, and purpose through the use of retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter begins by clarifying the distinction between social parenthood and parenting and explain how the longstanding but malleable association between social and biological parenthood depends upon social and legal conventions determining who is eligible to parent. One way in which to place oneself in that situation is to conceive a child biologically – however, biological parenthood often comes apart from social parenthood. I explore the significance of clinical assistance, money, and distance, in navigating this separation in the context of assisted reproduction. The second part of the chapter incorporates gender into the analysis, looking in detail at the social roles of motherhood and fatherhood, and the interplay of biological parenthood and moral parenthood with the expectations associated with these roles – for example, the effect of the visibility of pregnancy on attributional parenthood, the characterisation of fatherhood as more detached and less sentimental than motherhood, the persistence of associations between fatherhood and breadwinning, and so on. In this chapter, I explore the findings of sociological, psychological, and anthropological research into motherhood and fatherhood in order to demonstrate that one can inhabit a social role comprised in part by normative standards, even if one does not conform to those standards.

Lolita Buckner Innis looks at Roxanne Shante’s 1989 song, “Independent Woman,” to reveal its trenchant critique of then prevailing limitations on the social roles of black women. In “Independent Woman,” Shanté speaks to black women who believe that success comes only from a man. During this era black women, in particular, faced difficult choices since neither law nor society had historically provided them with the opportunity to embrace personal domesticity or their roles as helpmates to black men. Shanté deploys one of second wave white feminism’s unofficial rallying cries, “You’ve come a long way baby,” with an ironic twist, noting that black women are “way behind.” Black women’s desire for helpmate status to black men was sometimes corrupted into a desire for self-abnegation of the lowest form–acting as the “loyal ho,” the black woman who sells herself to please a man. As the lyrics of “Independent Woman” describe, these “sales” occurred both outside of the law, when “bad” women worked as actual prostitutes, and within the law, where “good” women exchanged personal self-regard or ambition in the quest for a male-dominated domesticity.

Interactions in social roles typically involve the exchange of information. Those exchanges create coordination problems. A coordination problem is a situation in which each person wants to participate in a group action but only if others also participate. The relevant group action in social-role-mediated exchanges of information puts conditions on the flow and use of information. It is easy to solve such coordination problems when it is common knowledge that parties will all conform to the conditions. People’s presentation of themselves in social roles create such common knowledge that they will conform to standards of thought and behavior associated with those roles. We offer six examples of how common knowledge solves the coordination problems that typify social role interaction.

This chapter presents an interpretation of Fichte’s theory of society as an original theory of ethical life or ‘Sittlichkeit’ as distinguished from mere morality, or ‘Moralität’, in the very same direction which will be developed in a clearer way by Hegel. Moving from introductory remarks devoted to Hegel’s presentation of the distinction and to the terms “morality” and “ethical life”, it will be shown, first, in which passages of the “System of Ethics” Fichte seems to have in mind a strict sense of “morality” as a limited standpoint distinguished from the ethical one; second, the reorientation of Fichte’s argument in the “System of Ethics” which makes possible a new, ethical, and social point of view; third, Fichte’s peculiar reinterpretation of the Kantian notion of legality as a principle of the organization of social life; fourth, the proper dynamic of ethical life through its institutions: State, church and learned public; fifth, the consequences of the new, ethical point of view for the doctrine of duties in comparison with the tradition and with Hegel’s later view.

Research on gender differences in language use previously focused mainly on affluent, especially Western societies. The present chapter extends this research to acrolectal Indian English, a postcolonial variety of English, investigating how the use of intensifiers (e.g. very, really) is affected not only by the speakers’ gender, but also their age, the gender of the other speakers in the conversation and the formality of the context. Results show some parallels with Western varieties of English, in particular a tendency for women to use more intensifiers than men in informal contexts. However, Indian women modify their usage of intensifiers with respect to the formality of the context more than British women and men, while Indian men do so less than British women and men. In mixed-sex conversations, Indian women also converge with Indian men in their intensifier usage, while neither British women nor men do so. The more flexible use of intensifiers by Indian women may be a response to societal expectations regarding their linguistic behaviour, in order to avoid censure by society. British women likewise continue to be affected by such constraints, but much less so, while the linguistic behaviour of Indian and British men is subject to less criticism.

The present study explores the effect of speakers’ gender in the well-known dative alternation (e.g. Mary gives John an apple vs. Mary gives an apple to John) and weighs the impact of this language-external factor against language-internal factors such as length of the constituents or semantics of the verb. Following up on previous research that explored the dative alternation across nine varieties of English, the focus of the present work will be on Jamaican English, a variety where male and female speakers seem to use the two variants differently. 615 variable dative tokens of acrolectal Jamaican English speech were annotated for eleven language-internal and three language-external factors and subjected to conditional random forest and mixed-effects logistic regression analyses. The results of these analyses indicate that the predictor gender plays only a marginal role vis-à-vis other language-external and -internal constraints. At the same time, if only the two most important language-internal predictors are considered, gender turns out to significantly affect dative choice with male speakers preferring the prepositional variant more than female speakers. These results not only highlight the potential of syntactic alternations to serve as sociolinguistic variables but also point to possibly different social dynamics between male and female speakers in Jamaica.

This paper studies the genitive alternation in British English and Sri Lankan English on the basis of more than 4,000 annotated cases of of- and s-genitives from the British and Sri Lankan components of the International Corpus of English. Specifically, we explore the effects of a variety of language-internal and language-external effects, focusing in particular on how these factors affect genitive choices both on their own, but also in interaction with each other and, a first in this kind of variety research, with the gender of the speakers. Our results corroborate previous findings regarding the language-internal factors, but we also obtain a variety of statistical effects representing interactions of those with variety and gender: for instance, animacy effects are stronger in Sri Lankan English, but animacy and length/weight effects are moderated by speaker gender; we discuss these and other findings with regard to processing, language contact and gender (in-)equality. Methodologically, we are developing two innovations for variationist research, namely a principled way to identify and then also visualise the effect of interactions in random forests.

The list of Proverbial virtues produced in Chapter 3 is compared with Aristotle’s list of moral virtues in order to discover the underlying factors that explain both. Assessing in depth the similarities and differences between the virtue lists of Proverbs and Aristotle, this chapter focuses on their notions of honor, shame, humility and pride. I examine apparent and actual differences in these virtues and discuss the historical, social and doctrinal factors that underlie them. Why, for instance, do Aristotle and Proverbs show marked interest in honor? Or how might Proverbs’ focus on work and Aristotle’s omission of the subject be explained?