After Success

This is an accessible sociological exploration of the troubles many people face in a new age of anxiety, drawing on interviews with various "successful" individuals and examining the meaning of "success" today. Preface.

1. Introduction: Mortality, the Individual and Society.

2. Success in Shame Cultures and Guilt Cultures.

3. Managing Without Success 1960-1990.

4. Styles of Success in Business.

5. The Neurosis of Success.

6. Success-Led or Anxiety-Driven?.

7. Working for Self Identity.

8. From Hoccleve's Complaint to the Anxious Class.

9. Seeking Balance.

Appendix.

Bibliography.

Index.

'Outstanding ... the most clarifying work of sociology I've ever read ... essential.' Pat Kane, New Statesman and Society

'Stimulating analysis ... the great merit of Pahl's book is that his critique of post-modernist assumptions about the self and anxiety points up this misleading conflation of the soical and the psychological, and makes him aware of the misuses of 'tradition' and over-socialised conceptions of the individual.' Work, Employment and Society

'A characteristically bold and provocative text ... extremely interesting.' Time and Society

'One of the most stimulating and relevant works I have read for a long time.' Sociology

Ray Pahl is a leading sociologist with an international reputation. He is the author of many books including Divisions of Labour, On Work, and After Success and has published numerous articles across a broad spectrum of sociological issues. Ray Pahl is Research Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. The end of the century is a good time to take stock of who we are and where we are going. Pahl's book is an accessible sociological exploration of the troubles many people are now experiencing in a new age of anxiety. Using interviews with a diversity of successful people, the author suggests that the insecurities now afflicting us are leading people to seek a new balance between work, family and other obligations. The meaning of "success" has become elusive.

Highly articulate, and offering vivid and memorable accounts of their lives, the men and women interviewed point out the problematic nature of success and the tensions it creates for the way we construct our distinctive self-identities in an age plunged into dramatic social change. Anxiety is a spur to success, but 'success', whatever that now means, often serves only to further such anxieties rather than reduce them. This brilliant book provides new insights into problems which affect not only the 'successful' but the majority of people living in modern societies.

After Success will appeal to a wide lay readership, as well as to those studying sociology, cultural studies and social theory.