Michael Morris OP – författare

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR American Psychological Association's Ursula Gielen Global Psychology Book Award Winner • PROSE Award Finalist • Zócalo Book Prize Finalist A revelatory, paradigm-shifting work from a renowned Columbia professor and “one of the great social and cultural psychologists” (Amy Cuddy) that demystifies our tribal instincts and shows us how to use them to create positive change.Tribalism is our most misunderstood buzzword. We’ve all heard pundits bemoan its rise, and it’s been blamed for everything from political polarization to workplace discrimination. But as acclaimed cultural psychologist and Columbia professor Michael Morris argues, our tribal instincts are humanity’s secret weapon. Ours is the only species that lives in tribes: groups glued together by their distinctive cultures that can grow to a scale far beyond clans and bands. Morris argues that our psychology is wired by evolution in three distinctive ways. First, the peer instinct to conform to what most people do. Second, the hero instinct to give to the group and emulate the most respected. And third, the ancestor instinct to follow the ways of prior generations. These tribal instincts enable us to share knowledge and goals and work as a team to transmit the accumulated pool of cultural knowledge onward to the next generation. Countries, churches, political parties, and companies are tribes, and tribal instincts explain our loyalties to them and the hidden ways that they affect our thoughts, actions, and identities. Rather than deriding tribal impulses for their irrationality, we can recognize them as powerful levers that elevate performance, heal rifts, and set off shockwaves of cultural change.Weaving together deep research, current and historical events, and stories from business and politics, Morris cuts across conventional wisdom to completely reframe how we think about our tribes. Bracing and hopeful, Tribal unlocks the deepest secrets of our psychology and gives us the tools to manage our misunderstood superpower.

This book participates in the modern recovery of the memory of the long-forgotten relationship between Scotland and the Caribbean. Drawing on theoretical paradigms of world literature and transnationalism, it argues that Caribbean slavery profoundly shaped Scotland’s economic, social and cultural development, and draws out the implications for current debates on Scotland’s national narratives of identity. Eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Scottish writers are re-examined in this new light. Morris explores the ways that discourses of "improvement" in both Scotland and the Caribbean are mediated by the modes of pastoral and georgic which struggle to explain and contain the labour conditions of agricultural labourers, both free and enslaved. The ambivalent relationship of Scottish writers, including Robert Burns, to questions around abolition allows fresh perspectives on the era. Furthermore, Morris considers the origins of a hybrid Scottish-Creole identity through two nineteenth-century figures - Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. The final chapter moves forward to consider the implications for post-devolution (post-referendum) Scotland. Underpinning this investigation is the conviction that collective memory is a key feature which shapes behaviour and beliefs in the present; the recovery of the memory of slavery is performed here in the interests of social justice in the present.