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This chapter discusses the identification of libraries as a national and public issue and the establishment of librarianship as an identifiable profession. The public identity of libraries lay in their collections and how such collections were shared and interpreted. As repositories of history and current knowledge, their principles of selection and presentation denoted national and local aspirations, linked by a scale of values broadly defined as social, to a sense of the past. The chapter also highlights the Public Libraries Act of 1850, also known as the Ewart Act, which gave power to local authorities to levy rates for the development and support of local libraries. This authority given to local authorities meant that all decisions respecting local libraries were subject to notions of public identity.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld's critique has both a general relevance to a period when private acts of reception were used as dress rehearsals for emergence into the public sphere, and a specific application to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who tended to subsume even the minimal element of otherness implied by a select audience into self-cloning constructions of the reader. Barbauld shows herself to be at once sympathetic towards and quizzically detached from the object of her satire. Fifteen years of life as a young woman in this environment gave Barbauld a head start on Coleridge in the difficult task of forging a public identity, and indeed in seeing how domestic life itself might be lived as a form of political praxis. Her very sophisticated negotiation of the intermediate terrain between public and private was apparent from her earliest publication to her last. It shaped a distinctive poetics of reception.

This chapter demonstrates how two competing methods for the presentation of Muslim identity at a time of potential stigma coexisted and sometimes conflicted at the City Mosque. Such internal cultural friction resulted from the fact that these methods for managing stigma were rooted in two distinct models of public Muslim selfhood, one developed by the Legendz through the in-group processes of their small friendship group, and one constructed by the mosque leadership as their ideal model for Muslim American youth. While the mosque leadership method of presenting young Muslim selves centered on leading with and explaining Islam, demonstrating vulnerability to harassment, and developing concern for non-Muslims' perceptions, the method cultivated by the Legendz prioritized the development of a low-key Islamic self, an emphasis on locally valued American teenage behaviors, and the expression of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency. These differing logics of public identity management represented a significant rift between the Legendz and the leadership and sometimes even undermined the boys' faith and trust in the mosque adults. This development was a surprising and emotionally intense experience for the Legendz.

During the Second World War and for a decade after it, secrecy kept nuclear specialists from public view. Popular representations evolved in step with political contexts, from admired ‘atomic scientists’ during the late 1940s to mistrusted and distant scientists during the early Cold War. With the decline of secrecy and the first nuclear power plants came public perceptions of heroic and ingenious engineers during the late 1950s, and seductive popular literature to entertain and inspire the next generation of nuclear experts. But within a decade, nuclear experts were increasingly portrayed as part of secretive and dangerous industries. Their identities were shaped by proxy—often as voiceless participants portrayed by their governments, and buffeted by public criticisms following major accidents such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

It is easy to think of public service organizations in generic terms. However, on the basis of a multidimensional institutional perspective of publicness, which includes authority, funding, and values, one can quickly understand that the publicness of organizations comes in various guises. This institutional perspective not only explains the behavior of these various public service organizations themselves but also the behavior of individuals operating within these institutional boundaries. Key to explaining individual institutional behavior is the concept of identities. Depending on the extent of their internalization, identities influence individual behavior more or less strongly. An important level at which these insights can be harnessed to the benefit of the organization is at the level of management, which is the link between the individual and the organization. The mechanisms of management influence are illustrated by analyzing four different organizational systems (work design, reward, human resources flow, and employee participation) to manage human assets in public service organizations.

St. Joseph's Hope Community, an enterprise in Minneapolis, Minnesota that began as a homeless women's shelter, is a compelling example of some of the new forms that healing is taking in cities—healing, particularly, of neighborhoods whose earlier capacity to sustain a good, if not affluent, life for its residents has declined to a state that is not only lacking in basic necessities but dangerous. Overall, one of the main points of interest in the story of Hope as a generator of healing in the inner city is its constant attention to matters of self-understanding, public identity, and motivation. The community's essential strength is its capacity for candid self-critique that does not deteriorate into paralyzing self-denigration. Staff and neighbors alike are always willing to reassess and go in new directions. Hope wants to heal the traumas and divisions that cause so much suffering by offering hope in the urban core. Hope wants to do all these things for the sake of justice.

When pressure on human resource departments to make government more efficient is increasing, it is of great relevance to understand employees’ motivation and the fit of an employee with their job, as both contribute strongly to service performance. Therefore, this chapter discusses the role of public employees’ motivation and its relationship to individual performance. More specifically, this relationship is examined by focusing on public service motivation (PSM), a stream of research developed during the last three decades stressing the service orientation of public employees’ identity. Theoretically, how the relationship between PSM and individual performance is dependent on institutions is discussed, and an overview of the existing empirical evidence concerning this relationship is provided. The literature review discusses a variety of aspects such as direct vs. indirect effects, type of performance used, how performance is measured, and effect sizes. Finally, several avenues for future research are proposed, including methodological strategies.

This chapter examines the reputation and societal standing of the antebellum merchant family in the antebellum American South. It explains that the business activities that ordered the internal lives of merchant families also helped fashion their public identity. Many white Southerners viewed merchants with suspicion because they believe that merchants love money too much and their sharp business practices violated community standards. However, there are those successful merchants who understood the sundry ways their public behavior could affect profits and made sure they and their families acted accordingly.

This chapter focuses on Aaron Burr's political identity and the dismal turn of his career after 1800. Nicknamed the “little emperor,” Burr, the first presidential candidate tried for treason, was also known for his unquenchable ambition and sexual exploits. The chapter argues that his career reveals the role of gendered, sexualized discourses in creating public identities and destroying political reputations. Burr left a legacy that shows how gender insinuated itself into the vocabulary of treason and created a new definition of party loyalty.

How do people make sense of economic crises? This chapter uses ethnography with groups of people who meet of their own accord in settings in which they regularly gather to investigate. It focuses on the U.S. Midwestern state of Wisconsin, between May 2007 and February 2011. It reveals the split between public and private employees that erupted in protests in Madison, the state capital, and across the state, in February 2011. The results expose the logic of the perspectives through which public employees are to blame for the recession.

This conclusion ponders the question of whether we are really what we drink by reviewing the insights gained from the analysis of the interwoven and constantly interacting identity discourses, among them ethnic identity, gender, class, civic and religious identity, within Minnesota's temperance movement and by reflecting on the repercussions of these insights on our understanding of identity. The temperance movement served as a catalyst of ethnic identity construction and negotiation for both German and Irish Americans. It caused German Americans to invent and Irish Americans to renegotiate their ethnic identities and to reposition themselves in the Anglo-American society. Intense intraethnic debates on the role of liquor and liquor consumption and the many exhortations and appeals of Irish American temperance reformers fractured long-held beliefs that excessive alcohol consumption was respectable and an integral constituent of Irishness. The campaigns for or against liquor also contributed to the construction of a female public identity and influenced the shape of civic identity in Minnesota.

This chapter examines public representations of gay parenthood, with particular emphasis on how gay adoptive fathers manage their multiple, often visible, differences in the context of societal scrutiny and ignorance. It considers the extent to which gay men feel that parenthood makes their sexuality more “visible,” as well as the extent to which those who adopt transracially experience a heightened sense of visibility. It also explores the responses of gay fathers to the increasing visibility of their sexual orientation and family status and shows that gay men often reflect on their public identities as gay fathers. Finally, it discusses presumptions of heterosexuality in relation to assumptions about biological parenthood, along with their implications for gay men's status as adoptive families.

Some of Derek Parfit’s most significant work concerns the non-identity problem. Briefly put, this is the problem of how, morally speaking, we should understand cases in which we can act in one way, and produce persons with sub-optimal lives, or act in another way, and produce different persons with better lives. Discussions of the non-identity problem tend to assume that it is a single problem, raising a single set of moral issues. This chapter seeks to complicate this picture. It introduces ‘Impure Non-Identity Cases’. These are cases in which a policy, or group of acts, is a non-identity case, and so nobody is harmed, or made worse off, by the policy, or group of acts, but some (and maybe even all) of the individual acts within the policy or group are not non-identity cases, and are harmful. The chapter investigates the moral implications of such cases, and the problems and questions they raise, aside from those raised by ‘Pure Non-Identity Cases’.

This chapter critiques the judicial waver—the act of transferring juvenile offenders from juvenile court to criminal court. The act is primarily implemented when the court sees no change in the offender during the rehabilitation. The transfer would mean that offenders will be sentenced in strict proportionality to their offenses and will be placed at risk for long-term incarceration with all the potential attendant harm that may be a byproduct of that legal fate. As such, this waiver is an example of a “successful degradation ceremony” whereby the public identity of the juvenile offender as a child suitable for juvenile court processing is transformed into that of a hardened adult offender beyond the reach and hope of rehabilitation.

This chapter rejects the idea that the history of the archaic polis was defined by the succession of different constitutions and highlights the impact of such an Aristotelian model on the scholarly tradition of ‘constitutional antiquities’. The notion of archaic oligarchies and of oligarchies of fixed number is part and parcel of this tradition, but it is no longer tenable. A thorough investigation of the evidence shows that the Thousand in Colophon, Cyme, Croton, Locri, Rhegium, and Opous, and the Six Hundred in Massalia were assemblies and not councils. They should be seen as political communities organized as numbered groups. Far from being oligarchic regimes, they must have thought of themselves as ‘the many’, and not ‘the few’. The archaic numbered political bodies were truly intrinsic to the processes by which a notion of citizenship took shape.