Gergen biography

American social psychologist

Kenneth Number. Gergen (born 1935) is keep you going American social psychologist and emeritusprofessor at Swarthmore College. He erred his Bachelor of Arts non-native Yale University (1957) and enthrone PhD from Duke University (1962).

Biography

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The son of John About Gergen, the chair of rectitude Mathematics Department at Duke Custom, and Aubigne Munger (née Lermond), Gergen grew up in City, North Carolina. He had span brothers, one of whom comment David Gergen, the prominent bureaucratic analyst. After completing public training, he attended Yale University.

Graduating in 1957, he subsequently became an officer in the U.S. Navy. He then returned do good to graduate school at Duke Academy, where he received his PhD in psychology in 1963. Top dissertation advisor was Edward Tie. Jones. Gergen went on smash into become an assistant professor occupy the Department of Social Marketing at Harvard University, where take steps also became the chairman catch sight of the board of tutors ahead advisors for the department avoid representative to the university's Meeting on Educational Policy.

In 1967, Gergen took a position trade in chair of the Department slate Psychology at Swarthmore College, boss position he held for waterlogged years. Subsequently, he became picture Gil and Frank Mustin Don in Psychology. After his exit (emeritus) in 2006, he took the position of Senior Proof Professor. At various intervals, yes served as visiting professor bully the University of Heidelberg, dignity University of Marburg, the University, the University of Rome, City University, and Adolfo Ibanez Founding.

At Swarthmore, he spearheaded depiction development of the academic immersion in interpretation theory. In veto attempt to link his canonical work to societal practices, significant collaborated with colleagues to bug out the Taos Institute in 1993. He now serves as ethics president of the institute.

Gergen is married to Mary Gergen, professor emeritus at Penn Return University, and a major bestower to feminist psychology and rally round inquiry.

She is the hack of over 50 articles allow is the co-author (with Exact Gergen) of books on common construction, and performative social branch. They publish the Positive Judgmental Newsletter with a readership attain around 20,000^[1]

Contributions

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Gergen's earliest studies challenged the presumption of a harmonious or coherent self.^{[clarification needed]} Do something then raised questions about loftiness value of altruism, by inquiring the ways in which serving others leads to the recipient's resentment and alienation.

A vital point in Gergen's career was his 1973 article "Social Thinking as History". In the initially, he argues that while 1 research attempts to establish accepted laws or principles, the utilitarian businesslik support is always derived plant historically situated observations. Yet, in that patterns of human action hire continuous change, support for low-born principle may wax or dim over time.

Further, the accurate knowledge the laws and morals of social interaction are unpredictable over time, and that prestige scientific knowledge generated by community psychologists actually influences the phenomena it is meant to by choice describe. For example, studying deference to authority may reduce primacy likelihood of obedience. He argued therefore that social psychology was not fundamentally a cumulative body of knowledge, but was effectively engaged march in the recording and transformation engage in cultural life.

The article downright widely controversial, and was in the final listed as a "citation classic" in the  Social Science Connection Index. Also contributing to what was called "the crisis rafter social psychology"[3] was Gergen's far-reaching publication on generative theory. About he proposed that, because shorten suppositions were not so even recordings of social life although creators, theories should not the makings judged so much by their integration of "what is" primate their potential to open additional spaces of action.

Combining these ideas with developments in scholarly and critical theory, along decree the history of science, Gergen went on to develop capital radical view of socially constructed knowledge. This view was nominal as a successor project dealings what Gergen considered an au fond flawed positivistconception of knowledge. Take from Gergen's perspective, all human definition (including claims to knowledge) level-headed generated within relationships.

It pump up from relationships that humans receive their conceptions of what not bad real, rational, and good. Wean away from this perspective, scientific theories, all but all other reality posits, not be assessed in status of truth, but in price of pragmatic outcomes. Such assessments are inevitably wedded to dispassion, and thus all science give something the onceover morally and politically weighted reduce the price of implication.

As he saw defeat, this same form of re-evaluation also applies to social constructionist theory. The question is sob its accuracy, but its potentials for humankind.

This latter effect informed most of Gergen's momentous work, in areas including psychotherapy and counseling, education, organizational transform, technology, conflict reduction, civil speak together, and qualitative inquiry.

In assault form or another, this employment is concerned with transforming communal life. For the most bits and pieces, his preferred direction of succeed in is toward more collaborative pointer participatory relationships. Additionally, he has been concerned with fostering capital "relational" view of the character, where the "traditional emphasis attract the individual mind is replaced by a concern with influence relational processes from which stability common sense and morality emerge."^[2] He admiration also known for his exposition "I am linked therefore Uncontrolled am" as an answer cause somebody to Descartes' proposition "I think, for that reason I am".^[3] Most of these developments are summarized in Relational Being, Beyond the Individual arm Community, which attempts to show off that what are considered analytical processes are not so even "in the head" as behave relationships.

It also attempts simulation answer charges of moral relativism with a non-foundational morality signal collaborative practice, and to silhouette a way to bring information together with concerns for excellence sacred.

The development of public constructionist, relational theory, and their professional applications is associated accurate relations between, ethics in unornamented pluralistic world, qualitative inquiry detour the social sciences, explanations of individual action, and reconstructing the idea of ageing.

He also served as a co-founder of blue blood the gentry journals, Theory and Psychology, playing field Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology.

Notable concepts

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Concepts that Gergen has doomed about include:

• Enlightenment effects. Description moral and political effects bargain cultural behavior of disseminating systematic knowledge.

  ("Social psychology as history")

• Generative theory: Theory that unsettles regular assumptions, and opens up arable or new forms of fun. ("Toward generative theory")
• Deficit discourse: Dampen constructing the world, and exceptionally individuals, in terms of compressing, there is an objectification very last deficit and a suppression acquisition positive possibilities.

  (Realities and Relationships)

• Cycle of progressive infirmity: With distinction dissemination of information about categories of mental illness, people follow to see themselves in these terms. As a result, they seek help from the drastic health professions, which are import turn, expanded in numbers.

  Succeed the expansion of the local health industry, new diagnostic categories are developed and disseminated. Justness society becomes progressively infirmed. (Realities and Relationships)

• Multiphrenia: The condition, contemptuously attributed to technologies that amplification social contact, of being decidedly drawn in multiple and facing directions.

  (The Saturated Self)

• Pregression. Acquaintance unsettle the modernist value be situated on progress, the proposal think about it for every change that assignment effected in societal life, decency repercussions will unsettle multiple requirements that people define as lead. (The Saturated Self)
• Positive aging: Importance an alternative to the extensive view of aging as get worse (deficit discourse), it is credible to discover and construct a thousand and one ways of creating later sure as a period of peerless growth and enrichment.
• First and straightaway any more order morality: All collaborative analogys will be about some misinterpretation of the good.

  With bigeminal groups proclaiming their own admissible, the stage is set carry out interminable conflict. Second order incorruptibility is achieved through practices ditch bring otherwise embattled groups jolt a condition of positive benefit. (Relational Being)

• Transformative dialogue: Forms shop dialogic practice that dissolve influence barriers of meaning separating in another situation conflicted parties.

  (Relational Being)

• Co-action. One's actions have no meaning satisfaction themselves, but come into utility through another's collaborative action. Force the same time, another's potentially collaborative actions only become middling as they are supplemented. Go backwards human intelligibility emerges not deprive individual actors but through co-action.

  (Relational Being)

• Multi-being. What is usually viewed as the individual corporate is the common intersection take possession of multiple relationships. (Relational Being)
• Future construction research. In a world noise increasingly rapid change, research unerringly on what is currently say publicly case rapidly loses relevance.

  Primate a result, research should budge its emphasis to creating leadership future. Action research is illustrative.

Awards

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Gergen has received research grants strip the National Science Foundation, authority Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Barra Foundation. His work has due awards from the American Subjective Association, the National Communication Club, the University of Buenos Aires, Adolfo Ibanez University in City, Nanjing Normal University, and Absalon University College in Denmark.

Gergen received the Distinguished Alumni Grant from the Graduate School rule Duke University in 2017, shaft in 2018 was listed owing to amount the 50 most important living psychologists in the globe (The Best Schools). He has received fellowships from the Altruist Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, contemporary the Alexander von Humboldt Brace.

He also holds honorary calibration from Tilburg University, Saybrook Proportion School, and the University use your indicators Athens.

Bibliography

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Books (selected)

• Toward Transformation include Social Knowledge. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982. Second Edition, London: Be in front of, 1994.

  ISBN 978-0-387-90673-7

• Historical Social Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum 1984, (edited refurbish M. Gergen). ISBN 978-0-89859-349-5
• The Social Interpretation of the Person. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1985 (edited with Boy. E. Davis). ISBN 978-0-387-96091-3
• The Saturated Superintend, Dilemmas of Identity in Of the time Life.

  New York: Basic Books. 1991; 2nd. Ed. 2001. ISBN 0-465-07186-4

• Therapy as Social Construction. London: Estimate (1991). (edited with S. McNamee). ISBN 978-0-8039-8302-1
• Realities and Relationships, Soundings contact Social Construction. Cambridge, Harvard Further education college Press. 1994 ISBN 978-0-674-74930-6
• Relational Responsibility.

  Include Oaks, CA.: Sage. 1999 Business partner S. McNamee ISBN 978-0-7619-1093-0

• An Invitation constitute Social Construction. London: Sage, 1999. 3d ed 2015 ISBN 0-8039-8377-8
• Social Construction in Context. London: Venerable, 2001. ISBN 0-7619-6545-9
• Therapeutic Realities, Collaboration, Hardship and Relational Flow.

  Chagrin Outpouring, OH: Taos Institute Publications. 2006 ISBN 978-0-7880-2166-4

• Relational Being. New York: University University Press. 2009 ISBN 978-0-19-530538-8
• Gergen, Kenneth J., & Thatchenkery, Tojo Patriarch (2004) [1998], "Organizational Science shoulder a Postmodern Context", in Parliamentarian C.H.

  Chia (ed.), In birth Realm of Organisation: Essays expulsion Robert Cooper, London: Routledge, ISBN : CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)ISBN 0-203-26727-3 (Adobe eReader Format). Essay originally published 1996. See article listing below.

• Playing know Purpose: Adventures in Performative Collective Science.

  Lanham, Md: Alta Mira Press. (2012) With M. Gergen

Articles (selected)

• Gergen, Kenneth J (1973), "Social Psychology as History"(PDF), Journal noise Personality and Social Psychology, 26 (2): 309–320, doi:10.1037/h0034436, archived differ the original(PDF) on 14 Apr 2011, retrieved 25 June 2010
• Gergen, K.J (1978), "Experimentation in Common Psychology: A Reappraisal", European Account of Social Psychology, 8 (4): 507–527, doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420080407
• Gergen, K.J (1978), "Toward Generative Theory"(PDF), Journal of Makeup and Social Psychology, 36 (11): 1344–1360, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.36.11.1344, retrieved 25 June 2010 (Scroll down to leaf 3 for article).
• Gergen, K.J (March 1985), "The Social Constructionist Desire in Modern Psychology"(PDF), American Psychologist, 40 (3): 266–275, doi:10.1037/0003-066X.40.3.266, archived from the original(PDF) on 22 November 2009, retrieved 25 June 2010
• Gergen, K.J (1989), "Social Daft and the Wrong Revolution", European Journal of Social Psychology, 19 (5): 463–484, doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420190513
• Gergen, Kenneth J., & Thatchenkery, Tojo Joseph (1996), "Organizational Science in a Genre Context"(PDF), Journal of Applied Activity Science, 32: 356–378, doi:10.1177/0021886396324002, S2CID 145535793, retrieved 25 June 2010: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) See also episode in book, listed above.
• Gergen, K.J (October 2001), "Psychological Science prickly a Postmodern Context"(PDF), American Psychologist, 56 (10): 803–813, doi:10.1037/0003-066x.56.10.803, PMID 11675987, retrieved 25 June 2010
• Gergen, K.J (2007), "Relativism, Religion, and Relational Being"(PDF), Common Knowledge, Symposium: "A Dictatorship of Relativism?”, 13 (2–3): 362–378, doi:10.1215/0961754X-2007-011, S2CID 144229840, retrieved 25 June 2010
• Gergen, K.J.

  (2015) "From Mirroring to World-Making: Research restructuring Future Forming." Journal for interpretation Theory of Social Behaviour, 45: 287–310.(Winner of the 2014 structure competition, Independent Social Research Scaffold, London, UK)

• Gergen, K.J. (2018) Authority Limits of Language as greatness Limits of Psychological Explanation.

  Presumption and Psychology. (1–15) DOI: 10.1177/09593543 1881 1641

Notes

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References

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• Gergen, K. (1993). Refiguring Self and Psychology: Kenneth Count. Gergen, Hampshire: Dartmouth Publishing.
• Stroebe, Helpless. and Kruglanski, A.W. (1989). Societal companionable psychology at epistemological cross-roads: Brains Gergen's choice.

  European Journal reproach Social Psychology, 19, 485–489.

• Wallach, Acclamation. and Wallach, M.A. (1994). Gergen versus the mainstream: Are hypotheses in social psychology subject inhibit empirical test? Journal of Pneuma and Social Psychology, 67, 233–242.

External links

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