Exploring self-loyalty in the context of social acceleration: theorising loyalties as emotions and resistance

Abstract

This article is a theoretical exploration of a layer of loyalty called self-loyalty. We define self-loyalty as an emotion that is channelled through social forms. To show the usage and relevance of the concept we present social acceleration as a contextualisation. Two self-loyalty strategies in relation to acceleration are discussed: a voluntary form based on resistance and an involuntary form based on acceptance and ‘playing the game’.

Keywords:

• Self-loyalty
• loyalty
• acceleration
• emotions
• resistance

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Mona Lilja, Satu Heikkinen, Mikael Baaz and two anonymous referees, for important comments on the paper.

Notes

1. To our knowledge the term self-loyalty is hitherto very seldom used in a scientific context. One exception we have found is the psychodynamic use in Wurmser (2000).

2. See Archer (2000, 2003) for discussions on non-social and pre-social aspects of the self.

3. Another logical possibility that is not considered in this article is that a person can be totally disconnected to other persons or organisations, as in the state of anomie (Durkheim 2002). One characteristic of the state of anomie is the lack of loyalties.

4. There is a similarity here with the social psychologist Mead’s (1934) division of the self in the spontaneous part ‘I’ and the reflecting part ‘me’. In the context of this article, we leave aside further discussions about how Mead fits in and can be linked to our discussions.

5. For a discussion on self-love see Frankfurt (2004).

6. Another interesting discussion is if this can be defined as a rational or irrational resistance, for a discussion on rational or irrational resistance see Lilja et al. (2013).

7. For a discussion about marketing yourself as if you were a company see Persson (2003).