Life Advice from Below: The Public Role of Self-Help Coaches in Germany and China

Product Description
In Life Advice from Below, Eric C. Hendriks maps the globalization of American-style self-help culture and the controversies surrounding it. He compares the public status of self-help gurus in the US, Germany and China, analyzing their relationship to institutional authorities.
Review
"This witty book charms its way through a very serious sociology of the seriously quirky field of self-help books. Read it for its fascinating pop-culture insights and you'll come away with a deep understanding of contemporary sociological theory. Highly recommended." - Salvatore Babones,
University of Sydney, author of
American Tianxia: Chinese Money, American Power, and the End of History (Policy Press, 2017)

"Hendriks' finding that Germany rather than China is (at least slightly) more resistant to self-help gurus offers a powerful corrective to the assumption in much of the globalization literature that the greatest cultural divide is between the Anglo-Western European sphere and the rest of the globe. Instead, as Hendriks suggests, the most relevant divide may between the (few remaining) social democratic nation-states and neo-liberal (or neo-liberalizing) nation-states, regardless of their geographical location." - Rodney Benson,
New York University, author of
Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

"This is an original, creative piece of work with an enormous ambition to conduct comparative case studies in two foreign cultures simultaneously." - Hartmut Wessler,
University of Mannheim, co-author of
Transnationalization of Public Spheres (Springer, 2008)

About the Author
Eric C. Hendriks, Ph.D., studied at Utrecht, UC Berkeley, Göttingen, the University of Chicago, and Mannheim, and presently works as a postdoc in sociology at Peking University. His research focuses on the politico-cultural regime differences between China and liberal democracies.