A history of motivational interviewing and what its rise reveals about how cultural forms emerge and spread.

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly spread into a variety of professional fields including corrections, medicine, and sanitation. In Working the Difference, E. Summerson Carr focuses on the training and dissemination of MI to explore how cultural forms—and particularly forms of expertise—emerge and spread. The result is a compelling analysis of the American preoccupations at MI’s core, from democratic autonomy and freedom of speech to Protestant ethics and American pragmatism.

"“An ethnography that is both sweeping and meticulously fine-grained as it follows the remarkable dissemination of MI across fields of professional practice. . . . In Working the Difference, Carr brings together a dazzling array of literatures to speak to audiences across multiple anthropological subfields—linguistic, medical, psychological, and sociocultural—as well as practitioner–researchers like her interlocutors. In speaking directly to this latter audience, the author makes a profound contribution to the anthropology of expertise and ethnographic endeavors to ‘study up’ . . . Despite the author's modest self-deprecation about her own Motivational Interviewing skill, Carr's skill as an ethnographic interviewer is on full display.”" - Linguistic Anthropology