@article{ref1,
title="Reading self-help literature in Russia: governmentality, psychology and subjectivity",
journal="British journal of sociology",
year="2014",
author="Salmenniemi, Suvi and Vorona, Mariya",
volume="65",
number="1",
pages="43-62",
abstract="Self-help has become a booming business over the past decades and an increasingly visible part of popular media culture worldwide. The paper analyzes the arrival and effects of this cultural technology in post-Soviet Russia after more than seventy years of socialism. It examines how Russians are engaging with popular psychology self-help as a technology of the self and how they are making it meaningful in their lives. Drawing on a set of one-to-one and focus group interviews conducted with self-help readers, it examines how these individuals negotiate the new ethics and the normative models of personhood put forward by the self-help genre. It argues that popular psychology has offered a new language for making sense of the self and the social world, and highlights how the readers critically engage with the normalizing power of popular psychology by drawing on a number of local historically sedimented discourses.<p />",
language="en",
issn="0007-1315",
doi="10.1111/1468-4446.12039",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12039"
}