E. Summerson Carr is associate professor of social work and anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety and co-editor of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life.

• List of IllustrationsPrologueIntroduction: Motivating Americans, Defusing DifferenceChapter 1 American Democracy (Or, How to Direct Autonomous Subjects)Chapter 2 American Rhetoric: Therapeutic Performance and the Poetics of Behavior ChangeChapter 3 American Spirit: Presence, Profit, and Professional ReenchantmentChapter 4 American Science: Faith and the Spirited Economy of Evidence-Based PracticeChapter 5 American Pragmatism: Learning to Work the Difference (Or, the Life and Death of MI)Conclusion: Dealing with Difference and the Movement of MethodAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Some Notes on the Study of (In)expertsNotesWorks CitedIndex

“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.”