How to sell your soul and still get into Heaven: Steven Covey's epiphany-inducing technology of effective selfhood
Human Relations · 2009 · Volume 62 · Issue 8
Abstract
Steven Covey's The 7 habits of highly effective people , one of the most influential and popular contemporary self-help texts, has resulted in the development a large multinational consulting business, several spin-off texts, and much imitation since its publication in 1989. An examination of the text, informed by Critical Discourse Analysis, is conducted with a view to unearthing the textual, discursive and socio-cultural practices that have enabled the work and its message to become so popular. 7 habits is an epiphanogenic (or epiphany-inducing) technology emerging from an `effectiveness' discipline supported by three socio-cultural trends: the postmodern, saturated self; the coming of neo-liberal society and the financialization of the self; and the subjective turn. Covey's discipline of effectiveness aims to produce a self that is simultaneously de-saturated, financialized and expressivist, but supportive of conservative, universalist and late-capitalist modes of being.
Keywords
effectiveness, epiphanogenic, gurus, management development, self, spirituality, technologies of the self
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