Culture, Self, and, Motivation

Book excerpt: The authors of the chapters in this volume—past and present collaborators of Marty Maehr, and a few of his former graduate students along the years—are motivational researchers who conduct research using diverse methods and perspectives, and in different parts of the world. All, however, see their intellectual roots in Marty’s theoretical and empirical work. The chapters in this book are divided into two sections: Motivation and Self and Culture and Motivation. Clearly, the distinctions between these two sections are very blurry, as they are in Marty’s work. And yet, when the authors were asked to contribute their chapters, the research questions they addressed seemed to have formed two foci, with personal motivation and socio-cultural processes alternating as the core versus the background in the two sections.