Journal of Economic Psychology 49 (2015) 205–206
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Journal of Economic Psychology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/joep
Book Review
What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-based Society, Paul Verhaeghe. Scribe, London, UK (2014).
265 pp., €19.50 (pb), ISBN: 978-1922247377 (pb)
In his book What about me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist
Paul Verhaeghe tries to elucidate the link between neo-liberal society, identity, and mental health. Verhaeghe starts from
the observation that our identity is shaped by the norms and rules of the society we live in; in short, ‘‘our self is. . .of external
origin’’ (page 22). What kind of identity do people acquire in modern western society? According to Verhaeghe, a competitive, meritocratic society that is focused on maximizing material consumption confers the ideal of individual success and
perfection on people, combined with an individual responsibility to achieve these goals. In his view, this combination is toxic
for mental health. The rat races that we are exposed to from the earliest school days and throughout our work lives have only
a few winners, but many losers. Moreover, individualized notions of responsibility for success and perfection put the burden
of failure firmly on the individual. In the past, people might have been worse off in many ways, but expectations and interpretations of success in terms of individual effort lead to novel ‘‘disorders,’’ often directly defined in terms of failure to perform according to standards of success (e.g., ‘attention deficit’). Subsequently, as Verhaeghe argues, current ideology
attempts to lift this burden by falsely interpreting many of these disorders in genetic or biological terms. In contrast,
Verhaeghe claims that these disorders display abnormality only from the vantage point of neo-liberal norms of success
and responsibility, which he describes as the new ‘‘Social Darwinism in economic guise’’ (page 119).
While the title of the book suggests some role of market interaction (e.g. in the spirit of Henrich et al., 2005), his main
concerns relate to meritocratic incentive systems in modern workplace organization. In particular, the author points out the
negative effects of performance measurement, competitive evaluation, and financial incentives. The negative aspects identified by Verhaeghe are indeed important issues in managerial economics (e.g. Kräkel, 2012): tournament incentives need to
be carefully calibrated to prevent rat races or sabotage; if certain dimensions of output are measurable while others are not,
incentive systems need to account for undesirable shifts of effort away from unmeasurable to measurable aspects; variablepay contracts are taken up by different people than fixed-wage contracts. However, at times the author fails to put his criticism in a broader context. Is the structure of modern work organization a mere consequence of a neo-liberal doctrine taking
hold of our society, or is it induced by technological advances that lead to more complex organizations and enable more
‘fine-tuned’ measurement and incentivization? If the latter aspect is important, how would organizations in a society that
rejects neo-liberalism make use of these tools? More importantly, much more should be said on how people can potentially
lead better (work) lives in an economy that downplays the importance of meritocratic rewards. Verhaeghe does not fully
develop that side of the argument.
While it is thus not always clearly argued how neo-liberal doctrine and market forces, compared to advances in technology, might have affected modern work organization, it is clear that the meritocratic idea has become a prominent feature in
the allocation of resources. Supposedly, the highest-graded students should get access to university; the best performing
employees should receive the highest wages; the best researchers should receive funding. The benefits of the meritocratic
structure over one that emphasizes gender, race or family background seem often obvious. However, Verhaeghe makes an
important point regarding its potential costs: selection of the ‘‘best’’ creates many losers. The psychological consequences of
understanding oneself as being part of a societally disadvantaged group will be different from the psychological consequences of perceiving oneself as ‘‘not having made it.’’ It is important to mention here – which Verhaeghe only does in passing – that it is in this relationship that the discourse reveals its ideological function: when responsibilities for failure are
individualized in a system that does not live up to its meritocratic premise because structural inequalities persist (e.g.
Jessen, 2015; O’Brien, 2014), it not only has an impact on mental health, but also political functions and consequences.
But when do people indeed perceive a lack of personal success as an individual failure, as their own responsibility? Here
the author makes another important observation. If people are confronted with a meritocratic competitive system, they will
at some point internalize the assumptions of the system. This newly formed identity will be transmitted to their children
(e.g. Khadjavi & Andreas Nicklisch, 2014, for evidence and discussion of intergenerational transmission of competitive attitudes). In consequence, ever stronger extrinsic incentives may become necessary, in ever more domains of life. Because
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Book Review / Journal of Economic Psychology 49 (2015) 205–206
people internalize the performance criteria, and because the meritocratic system automatically leads to many ‘‘losers,’’ life
may therefore become a mental strain for a significant share of society. These aspects add to the potential material consequences for some segments of society, and the resulting problem of inequality (Kiatpongsan & Norton, 2014). And not to
mention the winners: As Lily Tomlin famously stated, ‘‘even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat’’ (as quoted in Shi,
2007: xiii).
One question readers might have is how these disadvantages weigh against the potential benefits provided by modern
workplace organization. An often-discussed example concerns the economic integration of women. Highly educated women
who decide to stay home with their kids are sometimes considered as wasting human capital (page 178). This will lead to a
conflict between their preferences for family life, and their internalized expectations of a successful work life (e.g.,
Schmelcher, 2014), leading to some of the disorders described by Verhaeghe. In contrast, not so long ago, and still in many
places, higher education and a career would not be an option at all for most women. Verhaeghe is correct to look at the full
implications of these newly won freedoms and his benchmarks keep us sharp in the potential search for novel and untested
ideas. But his return to a particular past of fordist, state-run production as the alternative seems unimaginative at best.
In sum, What about me? raises important questions about the endogeneity of preferences and attitudes with respect to
the economic environment in which people grow up and about the trade-off between the potential material benefits and the
mental costs of a meritocratic, competitive society. Unfortunately, it makes few attempts to provide answers to these questions, other than through weakly developed references to autonomy in the work place and to the return of a communal ethos
and an ethics of self-control. For those familiar with social and political theory, the text will read like an amalgam of nuggets
taken from Michel Foucault (1977), Richard Sennett (2005), and Alasdair MacIntyre (2007), all of whom he introduces to
bring home the point that identities and norms cannot be detached from the socio-economic systems from which they
emerge. In economics, in contrast, identity is typically assumed to be determined by exogenous social categories (see
Davis, 2007, for a detailed discussion), even if the role of identity as a motivator has been widely discussed (e.g., Akerlof
& Kranton, 2005; Bidner, 2010, for a review of this line of research in economics). Future work at the intersection of economics and psychology should therefore take his starting point seriously and elucidate the important issues raised by his
book, while also being open to bringing in approaches from social theory where the endogeneity of identity has been theorized in insightful and creative ways.
References
Akerlof, George A., & Kranton, Rachel E. (2005). Identity and the economics of organizations. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19, 9–32.
Bidner, Chris (2010). Book Review: Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-being, by George E. Akerlof and Rachel E.
Kranton. Journal of Economic Psychology, 31, 1061–1063.
Davis, John B. (2007). Akerlof and Kranton on identity in economics: Inverting the analysis. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 31, 349–362.
Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (translated by Alan Sheridan). London: Penguin.
Henrich, Joseph, Boyd, Robert, Bowles, Samuel, Camerer, Colin, Fehr, Ernst, Gintis, Herbert, et al. (2005). ‘‘Economic man’’ in cross-cultural perspective:
Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 795–855.
Jessen, Jens (2015). Karriere ist auch nur Glück. Die Zeit, No. 12, March 19, 2015.
O’Brien, Matt (2014). Poor Kids who do Everything Right don’t do better than Rich Kids who do Everything Wrong. The Washington Post, October 18.
Khadjavi, Menusch, & Nicklisch, Andreas (2014). Parents’ Ambitions and Children’s Competitiveness. Working paper, Hamburg University.
Kiatpongsan, Sorapop, & Norton, Michael I. (2014). How much (more) should CEOs make? A universal desire for more equal pay. Perspectives on
Psychological Science, 9, 587–593.
Kräkel, Matthias (2012). Organisation und management. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck.
MacIntyre, Alasdair (2007). After virtue: A study in moral theory. London: Duckworth.
Schmelcher, Antje (2014). Feindbild mutterglück. Zurich: Orell Füssli.
Sennett, Richard (2005). The culture of the new capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shi, David E. (2007). The simple life: Plain living and high thinking in American culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Benjamin Nienass
Department of Political Science,
CSU San Marcos, CA, USA
Tel.: +1 7607508039.
E-mail address: bnienass@csusm.edu
⇑
Stefan T. Trautmann
Alfred-Weber-Institute for Economics,
University of Heidelberg, Bergheimer Str. 58,
69115 Heidelberg, Germany
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 6221 54 2952.
E-mail address: trautmann@uni-hd.de
Available online 20 June 2015