ABSTRACT
Around the world, people are striving to develop extroverted, charismatic, and confident personalities. Many are turning to self-help books and training programmes that teach interpersonal and self-presentation skills. This chapter introduces critical scholarship that has linked self-help psychology, and the personality traits that it promotes, to corporate management, neoliberal economics, and entrepreneurial risk taking. This chapter then outlines additional, postcolonial and psychosocial perspectives on the globalising pursuit of personality. Drawing on two years of ethnographic and textual research on social skills training in China, the chapter outlines how a particular kind of personality derives value from local cultural politics and from projects of governance concerned with education, modernity, and national identity. Finally, the chapter asks what the globalisation of self-help psychology tells us about emerging forms of social suffering. As people seek material success, social support, and to secure their identity in a fragmenting world, many feel that personality goes a long way.
