Rosa Scardigno

Me, myself, and God: Religion as a psychocultural resource of meaning in later life

The present paper addressed the different meanings attached to religion as cultural resource in the course of life. Indeed, abundant cultural research has confirmed that religion could be a powerful symbolic system that shapes people’s beliefs and attitudes. Its significance may depend on contextual factors and may vary over time and place, thus showing different implications across cultures and group cohorts. To better investigate such assumption, this paper involved a group of elderly believers (convinced Catholic believers and converted to Buddhism believers) as to analyze the role played by religion in their life experience. Narrative interview, content, and diatextual analysis helped reconstructing different cultural interpretative repertoires of religion in late life: a source to answer to the essential questions about life, an anchor to face the present and the future, a sociocultural resource for well-being.

Old Roots, New Branches: The Shoots of Diatextual Analysis

The present contribution focuses on the discursive perspective, which finds its roots in the several “turns” that animated the previous century. Besides the “discursive” and the “narrative” turns, the “contextual turn” has highlighted that meanings shape themselves in a context, which could be seen both as a “cotext” (the linguistic around) as well as an extralinguistic frame (Slama-Cazacu 1959/1961). Such perspective allows considering texts as diatexts (Mininni et al. 2008), namely as “efforts after meaning,” aimed at manifesting their dialogical correspondence with a specific “context” (Slama-Cazacu 2007). The cognitive engagement and the affective involvement of the interlocutors during an interaction demand a constant monitoring activity on the need for attunement between intentions and situational bonds.

Subjective Wellbeing Between Organizational Bonds and Cultural Contaminations

Positive Psychology has recently attempted at “enlarging the paradigm,” explaining the understanding of the human experience of the world. By contrast, for Critical Psychology, “enlarging the paradigm” means moving away from an individualist conceptualization of the psychological. The present article aims at “redistributing the Psychological” toward directions already marked by cultural and discursive conceptions of human experience. Within a transdisciplinary frame, labeled as Psycho-semiotics, Diatextual Analysis has been adopted to investigate the rhetorical modes used by socially excluded enunciators (drug users, immigrants, atypical workers, elderly people, and some categories of churchgoer) to elaborate their own experience of well-being through affective labor and self care.

Diatexts at work: The diatextual approach as a psycho-cultural path of critical discourse analysis in the organizational context

Purpose The paper argues that the diatextual analysis could be considered a psycho-cultural path of critical discourse analysis because it stresses the role of hermeneutical procedures in catching the inter-subjective nature of meanings. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these theoretical speculations in light with some empirical evidences coming from a discursive study exploring the construction of organizational identity through socialization practices. Design/methodology/approach Two focus group discussions were conducted, respectively, with retired workers and young workers employed in the same working organization to investigate how workers discursively shape their sense of belonging to the organization. Narratives of past and present membership were analyzed adopting the diatextual perspective, which was precious in tracking down the discursive traces of subjectivity, modality and argumentation emerging from their discourses. Findings Diatextual analysis was a precious tool to explore organizational identity through the different rhetoric that older and young workers used to make sense of it: “enchantment” vs “disenchantment.” Research limitations/implications The study was a case study. It involved few people and results cannot be generalized, but the main aim of the paper was to support qualitative methodology. Practical implications The implication of the study are precious to design formal socialization and human resource management practices better attuned with the need of workers. Social implications The social implications are connected with a wider revision of the organizational policies in terms of HRM. Originality/value The value of this paper is the discursive diatextual approach in organizational research.

The Rhetoric of Conflict Inside and Outside the Stadium: The Case Study of an Italian Football Cheer Group

Since ancient times, sports have played the role of transposing, on a symbolic level, the aggressive behaviors that are built into human sociality. Mostly in their team manifestations, sporting events represent a so-called tame war. The main aim of this study is to show how the cultural psychology of sport might contribute to an understanding of the sense-making dynamics active in human intergroup infighting, though conditioned to a sublimated and ritualized acceptability.

Work Experience As a Discursive Resource for Subjective Well-being

Over recent decades social, economic, and cultural changes (e.g. the process of market globalization, the massive employment of new technologies and the flexibilization of working modalities) have reshaped labor contexts and brought the topic of psychological well-being to the attention of both specialized literature and public opinion (Quinlan, 2007).