This chapter describes the role played by literature in human subjectivity and identity under the working conditions of late-capitalism as these affect the well-being of specialist, middle-class and public sector professionals. While stress is recognised as increasing in the workplace, its cause is commonly attributed to job insecurity linked to recessional conditions. Two of the many critics who have looked at the psychological effects of the instabilities of the new economy are Richard Layard and Madeleine Bunting. They have commented on the relationship of professional status for motivation and well-being in the context of public reform. Ian McEwan's novel Saturday is a mainstream creative text that includes a reflection of contemporary cultural issues concerning the experience of the professional at work. By analysing various forms of literature, the attempt has been made to understand how other types of labour counter the experiential difficulties caused by modern work conditions.

This chapter discusses how persuasive and pervasive market influence interpellates the subject, through various forms of corporate communication, including organisational structure, practices and languages, to become a new kind of worker, a new kind of citizen. A corporate priority is to use communications to maintain and manage relationships with various parties (stakeholders) that have an interest in its business. The chapter argues that the public sector alliance with market principles fundamentally alters the culture and diminishes the rewards of proper service on which, in large part, the identity of public servants rests. Corporate empowerment rhetoric urging employees' self-responsibility allows the organisation to externalise any unfortunate outcomes of its actions. This locates the fault in individual weakness in some unnamed and impersonal force outside any control, as we have seen is often the case where management avoids taking responsibility.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of communal deaf social life in post-war north-west England. The most common and popular forms of leisure, entertainment and sporting activity are identified, together with local variations with north-west England and changes that occurred during the fifty years covered by this research. The chapter emphasises the centrality of deaf club activities in the life of the deaf community, with particular attention paid to shared holidays and trips and the ways in which certain sports had a communal significance that went far beyond the sporting events themselves.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that the structural instability and the accelerated pace of life driven by the conditions for 'flexible accumulation' makes meaningful existence and fulfilment in work ever more difficult. It considers the importation of market values to the public sector and their import for the attitudes and behaviours of its middle-class professional employees. The book considers Ian McEwan's novel Saturday to show how story is used to make sense of experience and how coherent identity is constructed by the suppression of contradiction. It looks at the nature of the autobiographic text, drawing on the form's history and contemporary manifestation in migrant travelogues to understand its particular appeal at this time of structural instability and biographical uncertainty.

This chapter examines China’s evolving governance of international marriages through the lens of sovereign concerns, focusing on border stability, population management and national security. It explores how material and affective processes inform the regulations and representations of marriage migration to China. The discussion shows how the Chinese state continually revises its administrative and legal framework for international marriage, and also highlights the historical, racialised and gendered forces embedded in this process. The argument contends that the regulatory framework of marriage migration is shaped by shifting ‘structures of feeling’ that define belonging in Chinese society. These intersecting spheres of state affective and regulatory practices reveal new power dynamics and inequalities in China’s relations with the outside world.

This chapter contextualises the work-based identity insecurity experienced by middle-class professionals in the public sector among the general identity-making problems of postmodernity and other cultural determinants of the group. The problem of achieving a secure identity from among the instabilities of modern life has exercised many contemporary theorists. It is pertinent to question one's capacity for deliberate action when modern life is characterised by an accelerated pace and the ever-changing conditions brought about by the short-termism and quick turnover demands of the new economy. Managing negative emotions requires the development of different strengths of character whose acquisition involves much longer and harder work. In classical psychological theory, an act of narration is required at this point as the means to clarify identity and maintain good mental health.

The digital realm has become a crucial space for foreign women in China to express emotions, explore entrepreneurial ventures, and seek community and support. This chapter discusses the main themes and evolving conversations within several WeChat groups created by post-Soviet wives living in China. The chapter centres on how these women navigate both digital and physical environments while managing racialised and gendered expectations around family life and social interactions under China’s patriarchal immigration policies. I explore how personal experiences and emotions shared in one-on-one conversations echo the collective subjectivities and shared sentiments fostered within these online communities. Additionally, I consider how these online interactions reflect broader geopolitical dynamics, including national borders, racial hierarchies, citizenship laws and broader structures of feeling. These affective, networked, publics form a loosely connected web that offers the women a sense of belonging and solidarity amid the constraints of their lived circumstances.

This chapter considers Ian McEwan's novel Saturday to demonstrate how the influence of the market economy is so pervasive, so culturally embedded, that the themes already identified and their effect on the public sector individual, are captured, reflected and normalised in mainstream artistic production. The institutional attempt to bend employees to its way of thinking and being is part of a well-rehearsed debate of industrial history. Contemporary business methods and processes threaten Henry Perowne's professional identity and undermine both his status and security as he loses control over aspects of his life. With the relentless accumulation of the administrative load, work in the new economy, aided by information technology, replicates the psychic problems of industrial conveyor-belt automation, work needing attention arriving at a rate over which the worker has no control.

Narratives that establish the self as a being that is part of a natural order structured by biological and ecological rhythms sever allegiance to the mainstream economic order and substitute its value set with another. The move away from the 'natural state of things' is a consequence of industrialisation, mechanisation, automation and, lately, computer technology. This shift has been marked also by gravitation from the rural to the urban, and from the agricultural to the corporate. The interest in horticulture and cookery, enacted in both informal (dispersed) and formal (rooted) communities of likeminded individuals, is precisely the effort to deal with the identity problems of postmodern life in the secular context. The Slow Food movement, founded in 1989 as part of a wider slow living ethos counteracting not only fast food, but fast life also promotes food's central role in a new narrative.

This chapter provides a brief history of social and sporting life in north-west England, in order to illustrate the circumstances within which the specific social activities of the area’s deaf clubs were located. This history informs the detailed analysis of deaf club activities in the region which follows in the next chapter. This examination concentrates on outlining the communal nature of much of the leisure activity of working-class people in north-west England and the ways in which this changed during the research period. The range of activities found across the region and the particular local preferences for certain activities – particularly sports - over others are highlighted.