Sage Publications Social and Personal Identity: Understanding Yourself

Product Description How can you understand yourself? Where do your views, attitudes and values come from and why do they change? This accessible and illuminating book provides a reliable guide to these questions. The book: · Demonstrates that personal identity is formed around basic needs for security and self-esteem and the personal desires that flow from them · Shows the role of the emotions in personal life · Explores the limits of approaches that deny the existence of ′individuals′ and ′personal experience′ · Demonstrates how we build on everyday problems and dilemmas of life to shape our moods, attitudes and feelings. Shrewd and compelling, the book will be of interest to anyone studying Social Psychology and Sociology. About the Author Derek Layder is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leicester and Honorary Professor of Health and Life Sciences and De Montfort University. He was awarded a doctorate by the London School of Economics in 1976. Appointed Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leicester in 1974 and promoted to Reader in 1995, he became Professor in 1997 and Emeritus Professor from 2002. He has held several visiting academic positions and has also held honorary visiting appointments at The Australian National University (as a Humanities Research Fellow) and the University of Western Sydney (as Eminent Research Visitor). He taught in areas of social theory, social psychology, social research methods and the philosophy of social sciences. He has published numerous academic articles and 12 books. Among his books, in the area of the philosophy of social science, he is the author of The Realist Image in Social Science (1990); in social theory, he has written Understanding Social Theory (second edition, 2006), as well as Modern Social Theory (1997). On research strategies and methods, he has authored New Strategies in Social Research (1993), Sociological Practice (1998), and Doing Excellent Small-Scale Research (2013). He has also written on intimacy, emotion and self-identity, including Emotion in Social Life (2004), Social & Personal Identity (2004) and Intimacy & Power (2009).