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This study aims to investigate the relationship between organisation-based self-esteem (OBSE) and work engagement during a new strength-based intervention over nine months.

A sample of 82 workers composed of 70 sales consultants and 12 area-managers working in an Italian pharmaceutical company received a one-day training based on the FAMILY approach, three times for nine months, with a three-month lag between each workshop. Self-reported measures of OBSE and work engagement were collected before and after each workshop.

Results showed that final levels of both OBSE and work engagement were significantly higher compared to baseline. Moreover, results from a multiple mediation analysis showed that the direct and indirect relationships between OBSE and work engagement changed at different time points, which may have been related to the different contents of the workshops.

This study provides initial evidence suggesting that organisations could leverage on medium-term interventions to provide employees active guidance on how to use their strengths at work, likely to boost higher employees’ positive perceptions of themselves as organisational members and work engagement.

This chapter explores the theme of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 2001; Thapar-Björkert et al., 2016), a central theme in my doctoral thesis.

My thesis looked at the experiences of a group of female undergraduate students in their first year of Initial Teacher Education in Primary Education at the university where I teach. I explored the perceived choices my participants made in terms of choosing to become primary school teachers, arguing that symbolic violence is a controlling force in society so powerful and insidious that ‘individuals do not question their own role in the production and reproduction of domination and subordination’ (Thapar-Björkert et al., 2016, p. 9). Through class and gender, primary school teaching has insidiously presented itself to be a suitable profession for young women.

I position myself as a woman from working-class origins who made the choice to become a primary school teacher and who has recognised the impact of symbolic violence. As a result, some of this chapter is written from an autoethnographic perspective. My overarching methodological approach is narrative inquiry and I have used poetry to present my data throughout. My co-author, Catherine, was one of my doctoral supervisors and we were drawn together by our shared investment in narrative and the impact of early experiences on our subsequent selves. For this chapter, we present our own narrative poems describing the impact of symbolic violence on our own lives alongside that of the participants.

To discuss two research projects, illuminating the ways in which digital technologies are both enfolded into people’s lives and open up new possibilities for practice that, in turn, have to be managed. To revisit this material to reflect on the benefits and limitations of in-depth interviewing for understanding the dynamics of new textual and visual forms of data in everyday life.

A broadly relational approach to technology and practice was employed, pursued through in-depth interviewing in two research projects about digitization and memory making.

In employing the qualitative method of in-depth interviewing to focus upon what people regularly do, the chapter shows how the material and mediating capacities of networked digital technologies such as cameras and smartphones are enacted and actively negotiated in relation to expectations and conventions about the temporality and visibility of personal life through diverse memory practices. These can be considered multiple ‘practices of adaptation’.

The research reported on provides some novel ways of thinking about devices and data in relation to practice.

The objective of this discussion is to present an intersectional framework to better inform our reading and understanding of contemporary reports of sexual assault and sexual harassment. I posit that contemporary incidents of sexual violence must be read within the historical framework of slavery, where plantations served as the first site of sexual exploitation that has provided the ideological and practical scaffold for the continued erasure of the abuses of Black women and men in the workplace and under the law. This legacy, nonetheless, has yielded a coded language for according visibility to the “deep story” of rape and race in the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between Amartya Sen’s notion of adaptation and his views on identity politics by focussing on the issue of slavery and, more specifically, on the example of the happy or contented slave.

The paper is text based. The methodological approach adopted is that of conceptual analysis, as is typical for work of this kind.

The paper concludes that the example of the happy or contented slave is indeed a fruitful one for those interested in exploring the relationship between Sen’s views on “the adaptation problem” and his views on identity politics, especially in relation to the subjection of women. Here Sen’s debt to the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill is particularly important.

One implication of the argument of the paper is that there is a need to consider more carefully the differences that exist between the views of Wollstonecraft and Mill, so far as the example of the happy or contented slave is concerned.

One practical implication of the paper is that, hopefully, it establishes the continued relevance of the ideas of thinkers such as Wollstonecraft and Mill today, not least because of the influence that they have had on theoreticians such as Amartya Sen.

The paper addresses issues which are of considerable social and political significance, especially for women in underdeveloped societies today.

The example of the happy or contented slave has not received much discussion in the literature on Sen, although Sen himself has suggested that the distinction between happiness and contentment is an important one, which does merit further discussion.