Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologists of the Month for August 2025, Daniel Nehring (Swansea University, UK) and Anja Röcke (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany). Their article for Current Sociology Self-optimisation: Conceptual, discursive and historical perspective is Open Access.

Daniel Nehring

Anja Röcke (Credits: © Thorsten Mohr)

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

D. Nehring: I came to my field of study, on therapeutic cultures, while doing fieldwork in Mexico in the early 2000s. I was struck by the large role which religiously motivated narratives of self-help and optimisation played in higher education teaching at certain Mexican universities at the time, and by the impact of these narratives on young people’s experiences of their personal lives. Attempts at a sociological explanation of the compelling cultural power of popular therapeutic narratives have been a focal point of my scholarship since then.

A. Röcke: I am a sociologist with a background in social sciences (political science and sociology). I am specialised in the fields of cultural and political sociology and deal with a broad range of topics, including self-optimisation and therapeutic cultures, Europe and European integration, sociology of borders and of transnationalisation, citizen participation and democratic innovations. I came to the field of self-optimisation and therapeutic cultures through my theoretical and empirical interest in forms of, and challenges to, the everyday “conduct of life” (Weber) in the context of contemporary societies.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Self-optimisation: Conceptual, discursive and historical perspective”?

D. Nehring & A. Röcke: The basic idea of the article was to bring together our respective research expertise, with Daniel having a greater focus on global therapeutic cultures and transformations of self-identity and Anja on the concept and theoretical debates around self-optimisation in cultural sociology. We saw the potential in merging these debates and in so doing provide a general introduction and overview to the topic of self-optimisation. In so doing, we also aimed to propose new themes and lines of inquiry for analysing the broad realm of therapeutic practices and to state the need to move beyond research in the Global Northwest.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

D. Nehring & A. Röcke: In this article, we have introduced self-optimisation as a sociologically significant phenomenon, situated at the intersection of contemporary transformations of self-identity, therapeutic culture, and (neo)liberal capitalism. We have argued that self-optimisation—conceived as a set of discourses and practices oriented towards the continuous enhancement of the self—has so far remained under-conceptualised in sociological research. Drawing on Anja Röcke’s work on the “sociology of self-optimisation” (published in German), our aim has been to establish self-optimisation as a concept for sociological analysis, to map its socio-cultural antecedents, and to examine its emergence as both a salient public discourse and a widespread form of everyday practice. We have located self-optimisation within a longer genealogy of cultural ideas and social developments, including the rise of individualisation, emotional capitalism, and therapeutic modes of subjectivation. We have set out an analytical framework grounded in practice theory to delineate the structure, elements, and dynamics of self-optimising practices, paying particular attention to their open process logic, their orientation towards instrumental self-improvement, and their oscillation between autonomy and heteronomy. At the same time, we have considered the polyvalent political implications of self-optimisation, noting its affinities with the depoliticising effects of therapeutic governance, while also highlighting its potential to engender new forms of sociability and affective engagement. We have proposed that existing critiques of therapeutic culture and self-help, while analytically valuable, must be extended through more differentiated accounts of contemporary practices of self-optimisation. Finally, we have called for a broader research agenda that includes genealogical analysis, empirical studies of the structure and effects of self-optimising practices, and globally comparative research that moves beyond the confines of the Global Northwest. With this, we hope to contribute to the development of a sociology capable of grasping the changing organisation of the self in contemporary societies.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

D. Nehring: As a sociological concept, self-optimisation speaks as much to questions about agency and self-empowerment as to dynamics of power and social control. The concept is therefore not necessarily associated with particular strands of social critique, in the way in which, for example, much extant research on therapeutic cultures has been preoccupied with processes of individualisation, atomisation, and social control under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Contemporary technologies and practices of self-optimisation are not easily summarised in relation to contemporary social climates. Nonetheless, I do believe that there is a considerable risk of these technologies and practices becoming increasingly associated with the authoritarian turn that societies and social institutions are performing today. By way of a pivotal example, consider the ways in which authoritarian narratives and practices of performance management have come to be taken for granted as part and parcel of academic labour in higher education systems around the world today. Then think about how being performance-managed compels you to self-optimise your scholarship in relation to institutional objectives defined top-down, often in economic and political rather than intellectual terms. Finally, do ponder the resulting, rather obvious contradiction between such self-optimisation in the context of institutionalised authoritarianism and higher education’s potential for speaking truth to power, fomenting progressive change, and pursuing knowledge unconstrained by political power.

A. Röcke: In relation to some wider social implications of our research on self-optimisation, I would like to highlight three aspects. The first one refers to the continued importance of processes of quantification and digitization of the self, in a context where authoritarian ideas and regimes flourish across the globe. Practices of counting, digital measurement, and comparison are omnipresent in the everyday lives of many people. The body, psyche, and, in extreme cases, even genetic structure can be measured and manipulated with increasing precision, accuracy, and depth. Behind this not only lie enormous economic interests, with a potential for data misuse, but this data can also be misused for political purposes of authoritarian actors or regimes. Secondly, self-optimization is a timely topic with regard to contemporary debates about raising social inequalities and social polarization. A crucial question in this regard is if, or in how far, self-optimising ideas and practices reinforce existing differences or even cleavages between social groups and classes. This includes the analysis of the moral evaluation and devaluation of individuals and groups, between those who do (want to) optimize themselves and those who do not (want). Third, research on self-optimisation contributes to contemporary discussions about gender, gender roles and gender hierarchies. Does self-optimisation, with its intimate relation to standardized conceptions of beauty that are shared via social media, foster the reproduction of gender stereotypes? In the light of a widely perceived rollback of gender equality and the re-affirmation of traditional gender roles, this is an important question meriting further sociological exploration.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

D. Nehring: The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures (eds. Nehring et al., 2020) provides an introduction to the broader field of research on contemporary therapeutic cultures. In turn, the recent special issue ‘Debating Self-Optimization’ in the journal Historical Social Research engages with the theorisation and empirical analysis of self-optimisation from a broad range of thematic and disciplinary perspectives. Conceptually, an important immediate inspiration for me has been Ole-Jacob Madsen’s book Optimizing the Self (Routledge, 2015). Kenneth Gergen’s The Saturated Self (Basic Books, 1991), Edgar Cabanas’s and Eva Illouz’s Manufacturing Happy Citizens (Polity, 2019), Colin Koopman’s How We Became Our Data (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and Nick Couldry’s and Andreas Hepp’s The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity, 2017) speak to broader themes and theoretical issues that frame contemporary processes of self-optimisation. In turn, I believe that discourses and processes of self-optimisation are deeply implicated in the authoritarian bent in contemporary socio-political developments in the contemporary world. In this regard, Patrick Colm Hogan’s The Culture of Conformism (Duke University Press, 2001) has contributed much to my thinking.

A. Röcke: My book on the Sociology of Self-optimisation, published in German by Suhrkamp as Soziologie der Selbstoptimierung (2021), provides a theoretically and historically grounded analysis of the role and concept of self-optimisation in contemporary societies and explores the profound ambivalences related to this phenomenon. My article on “Self-optimisation” in the Handbook of Valuation Studies (edited by Anne Krüger, Thorsten Peetz, and Hilmar Schaefer, Routledge 2024) shows how deeply processes of optimizing the self are interwoven with processes of valuation and evaluation. The special issue ‘Debating Self-Optimization’ (2024), published with Historical Social Research (co-edited together with Daniel Nehring and Suvi Salmenniemi) discusses self-optimisation in relation to different theoretical perspectives and empirical settings, including papers who retrace the way how people concretely deal or interact with the quest for optimising the self; it also opens up the analysis to areas beyond the global Northwest. The book Lost in Perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche, edited by Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa (Routledge 2019), relates processes of optimisation and of self-optimisation to broader societal developments and has a focus on the potentially pathologic and authoritarian dimensions of (self-)optimising processes. In terms of broader theoretical scholarship, Andreas Reckwitz’ book on The Society of Singularities (Polity, 2020), offers an interpretation of the origins and development “late modern” lifestyles and forms of subjectivity that have an affinity to ideas and practices of self-optimisation. The writings of Alain Ehrenberg (e.g., Le culte de la performance, Calmann-Lévy 1991 or The weariness of the self, McGill-Queen's University Press 2016) offer a sociology of contemporary individualism with its promises and pitfalls.