Why should researchers be interested in their feelings and emotions as they carry out research? Emotion is what it is to exist, to be human, and is present in every sphere of our lives. All activities are infused with emotion, even those that are constructed as ‘rational’, because rationality and emotionality are interpenetrated and entwined because all thinking is tinged with feeling, and all feeling is tinged with thinking. This book illuminates the emotional processes of doing social and organizational research, and the implications of this for the outcomes of research. With contributions from leading academics and research practitioners, it addresses the significant issue of the sometimes intense emotional experiences involved in doing research and the implications it has for the theory and practice of social research. By examining the nature of feelings and emotions, it explores how we might understand researchers’ emotions and experiences, and considers the often powerful feelings encountered in a variety of research contexts. Topics discussed include: power relations; psycho-social explanations of researcher emotions; paradoxical relations with research participants and the sometimes disturbing data that is gained; research supervision; the politics of research; gender; publishing, undergoing vivas and presenting at conferences. This book will therefore be a valuable companion to researchers and research students from the start of their career onwards.

In the twentieth century, the British Crown appointed around a hundred thousand people - military and civilian - in Britain and the British Empire to honours and titles. For outsiders, and sometimes recipients too, these jumbles of letters are tantalizingly confusing: OM, MBE, GCVO, CH, KB, or CBE. Throughout the century, this system expanded to include different kinds of people, while also shrinking in its imperial scope with the declining empire. Through these dual processes, this profoundly hierarchical system underwent a seemingly counter-intuitive change: it democratized. Why and how did the British government change this system? And how did its various publics respond to it? This study addresses these questions directly by looking at the history of the honours system in the wider context of the major historical changes in Britain and the British Empire in the twentieth century. In particular, it looks at the evolution of this hierarchical, deferential system amidst democratization and decolonization. It focuses on the system's largest-and most important-components: the Order of the British Empire, the Knight Bachelor, and the lower ranks of other Orders. By creatively analysing the politics and administration of the system alongside popular responses to it in diaries, letters, newspapers, and memoirs, Tobias Harper shows the many different meanings that honours took on for the establishment, dissidents, and recipients. He also shows the ways in which the system succeeded and failed to order and bring together divided societies.

Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life: Ordinary Genius is an attempt to create a psychoanalytic space for the quest and questions of our everyday creativity. Official creativity is normally applauded to the point of obscuring all other types of creativity, with detrimental consequences for our psychic life. However, as Gemma Corradi Fiumara demonstrates, the creative force of ordinary subjects can be as vigorous as that of our acclaimed, official accomplishments. Corradi Fiumara focuses on the unsung creativity which emerges from relationships and the world at large. She explores how understanding the operation of creative impulses in an everyday setting can crucially inform psychoanalytic clinical work. There are three main themes: Donald Winnicott’s Psychoanalytic Will Melanie Klein and the Other Side of Genius Genius: Ordinary and Extraordinary. Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life advocates an inclusionary view of human genius, and demonstrates that creativity and genius can be manifested in everyday life with the ordinary as its focus of attention. It will be key reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, philosophers and scholars in social studies.

This book examines the relationship between concepts of heroic "gallantry," as projected by the British honours system, and the sociocultural, political, military and international transitions of the supposed Sixties "cultural revolution." In so doing, it considers how a conservative, hierarchical and state-orientated concept both evolved and endured during a period of immense change in which traditional assumptions of deference to elites were increasingly challenged. Covering the period often defined as "The Long Sixties," from 1955–79, this study concentrates on four distinct transitions undergone by both state and non-state gallantry awards, including developments within the welfare state, class and gender discrimination, counterinsurgency and decolonisation. It ultimately sheds fresh light upon the importance of postwar decades to the continued evolution of concepts of gallantry and heroism in British culture using a range of underexplored government and media archives. It will be of interest to scholars, students and general researchers of heroism in modern Britain, the Sixties revolution, postwar military history and both the social and political evolution of British honours, decorations and medals.

Having lost an election, been thrown out by their party, or retired on grounds of ill-health, what do former British prime ministers do? In the first book to look at the lives, political roles and influence of former prime ministers, Theakston analyzes all the former prime ministers from Walpole in the 18th century to Blair today.

This sophisticated book by internationally renowned theorist Zaki Laidi, tackles the problem of individual identity in a rapidly changing global political environment. He argues that it is increasingly hard to find meaning in our ever-expanding world, especially after the collapse of political ideologies such as communism. With the breakup of countries such as the former Yugoslavia, it is clear that people are now looking to old models like nationalism and ethnicity to help them forge an identity. But how effective are these old certainties in a globalized world in a permanent state of flux?

Taking into account the long history and wide range of Confucian Studies, this book introduces Confucianism - initiated in China by Confucius (551 BC–479 BC) - primarily as a philosophical and religious tradition. It pays attention to Confucianism in both the West and the East, focussing on the tradition's doctrines, schools, rituals, sacred places and terminology, but also stressing the adaptations, transformations and new thinking taking place in modern times. Xinzhong Yao presents Confucianism as a tradition with many dimensions and as an ancient tradition with contemporary appeal. This gives the reader a richer and clearer view of how Confucianism functioned in the past and of what it means in the present. A Chinese scholar based in the West, he draws together the many strands of Confucianism in a style accessible to students, teachers, and general readers interested in one of the world's major religious traditions.