Assessing and Stimulating a Dialogical Self in Groups, Teams, Cultures, and Organizations (PDF)

Hubert Hermans is emeritus-professor at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the leader of a long-term, international project on the dialogical self. His dissertation (1967) was on Motivation and Achievement and resulted in two psychological tests: The Achievement Motivation Test for Adults (1968; published in English in 1970) and The Achievement Motivation Test for Children (1971). Since then, both tests belong to the most frequently used psychological tests in the Netherlands (more than 4 million copies of the tests were sold over the decades). As a reaction to the static and impersonal nature of psychological tests, he developed a Self-Confrontation Method (SCM; see the book Self-Narratives. New York: Guilford Press, 1995). Application of this method in practice led to the establishment of the Dutch Association for the SCM that counts approximately 250 members in 2015. In the nineties of the last century he and his colleagues developed a Dialogical Self Theory, inspired by the American pragmatism of William James and the dialogical school of the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. Amongst his books are: Dialogical Self Theory: Positioning and Counter-Positioning in a Globalizing world (Cambridge University Press, 2010), co-authored by Agnieszka Hermans-Konopka, and the Handbook of Dialogical Self Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2012), co-authored by Thorsten Gieser. Since 2002 he is president of the International Society for Dialogical Science (ISDS) and since 2006 editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Dialogical Science (IJDS). For his scientific merits for society, he received the decoration of 'Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion' in 2002. For more info see his website www.huberthermans.com or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Hermans.