Publications
Latest works from RC36 fellow colleagues
EMOTION MANAGEMENT AND THE PROFESSIONAL CULTURE OF ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIAL WORKERS IN RUSSIA: COMMON STANDARDS VERSUS THE MORAL MISSION OF SOCIAL CARE, OLGA SIMONOVA, 2017
In this article, I examine emotion work among administrative social workers in Russia, an activity vital to the on-going emergence of their professional culture. This examination focuses on administrative social workers; a particular group of largely office-bound social workers within the profession whose central job is to help people process the required documents needed to receive social assistance and benefits. Firstly, the article offers an overview of existing research on the sociology of emotions and professions, with a special focus on those studies exploring emotion management. The conclusion emerging from this review is that analysing emotion work in the field of social care can lead to a deeper and more complete understanding of its specific character and the ethical rules operating within it. Secondly, an analysis of administrative social worker interview transcripts was conducted as part of a larger research project on the professional culture of this occupation. This analysis was completed with help of NVivo software and reveals that although interviewees are not only clearly aware of emotion work, they do all the same try to reduce emotional expenditure in their communication with clients and strive to standardise how they work with their emotions. Carrying out emotion work has a key function in supporting professional identity among administrative social workers and furthering the development of a professional culture. On the other hand, the emotional expenditures involved and the challenge of 'making the profession worth it' are alleviated by the sense that one’s work fulfils an important 'moral mission' in providing social care and assistance.
Education and Alienation -Towards a Neo-liberal Arbitrariness, Dirk Michel-Schertges, 2019
In modern society the organization of education and economy has always been deeply interconnected. Transitions in the means of production meant an adjustment of (national) education in order to fulfil the socio-economical demands. With the emergence of international competition in the field of education, altered forms of surveillance and control via administrated reason appeared on the agenda. With the rise of the (international) neo-liberal agenda ideologies of competition and performativity play a decisive role, especially within the field of higher education. However, precisely this administrative reason becomes a specific form of alienation propagating (individual) activity and freedom while “producing” the opposite, i.e. passivity and alienation and, thus, furthering in the name of freedom an altered form of alienation. Specific forms of societal arbitrariness, social-ignorance, institutional-arbitrariness and social-indifference are related to present (inter-)national discourses of competition, performativity and accountability and its administered reasoning.
Jane Addams and the Lost Paradigm of Sociology, Vessela Misheva, 2019
The present work is the beginning of a discussion that again addresses the question of Jane Addams’ sociological heritage. That latter is defined as a puzzle which may finally have a solution in that all of the pieces now appear to have been collected. The approach taken to recovering Addams’ identity as a sociologist involves a historico-sociological exploration of the influences upon the formation of her sociological thought, with a focus on Auguste Comte, the Father of Sociology. The article argues that Addams emulated Comte’s scientific mission and took upon herself the task of continuing his project by following another route to the goal. She is thus Comte’s successor, and even rival, insofar as she sought to establish sociology as a science that may be placed in charge of producing knowledge about social life and has the social mission of finding solutions to social problems that politicians proved incapable of tackling. Addams emerges from the discussion as the creator of a sociological paradigm that was dismissed, dismantled, and then lost in the process of the scientific revolution that took place unnoticed after the end of World War I, when the normal period of the scientific development of sociology in America came to an end. The suppression during the 1920s of the type of sociology that Addams developed and adhered to has left sociology in a state of unresolved identity crisis and arrested scientific development.
Expanding Social Interactionist Horizons: Bridging Disciplines and Approaches, Andrew Blasko and Vessela Misheva, 2019
This volume of selected articles is intended to present topics and questions that were discussed at the VIIth Annual Conference of the European Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (EUSSSI), which was held in Topola, Bulgaria, July 04-08 2016. The EUSSSI is a rather young scholarly society that will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2020. It emerged from a conference organized by the University of Pisa in 2010 where, for the first time, efforts to create a permanent transatlantic interaction between American and European scholars working in the symbolic interactionist tradition met with success. Since then, the EUSSSI and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI) have enjoyed close cooperation, including the support of our American colleagues of our efforts to consolidate the European scholarly community promoting symbolic interactionism.