Translating from multiple sources: Labour legislation reform in Turkey

Building upon the recent scholarship on “travelling ideas” and “translation”, the author discusses how ILO and EU labour standards were conveyed to Turkey's political landscape by domestic actors and how those standards were adjusted. The study first analyses the motivations of the Commission that drafted the 2003 Labour Act, and of employer and labour organizations, for choosing to draw on those international standards during the legislative reform process. It then focuses on the institutional outcomes of the reform by examining how domestic actors modified the international standards, while also preserving components of the old labour legislation, as on severance pay.     

Unacceptable forms of work: A multidimensional model

Unacceptable forms of work (UFW) have been identified as an “area of critical importance” for the ILO as it approaches its centenary. Yet there is currently no comprehensive elaboration of the dimensions, causes or manifestations of UFW. This article reports on a research project that has proposed such a framework. The article first investigates and reconceptualizes key discourses on contemporary work to identify their contribution to an analytically rigorous conception of UFW. It then outlines a novel Multidimensional Model that has been designed for use by local policy actors in identifying and targeting UFW in countries across a range of income levels.     

BOOKS

Book reviewed in this article: Recent books: Beder, Sharon. Selling the work ethic: From Puritan pulpit to corporate PR Recent books: Braun Levine, Suzanne. Father courage: What happens when men put family first Recent books: Demo, David H.; Allen, Katherine R.; Fine, Mark A. (eds.). Handbook of family diversity Recent books: Derber, Charles. The pursuit of attention: Power and ego in everyday life Recent books: Levine, David I.; Belman, Dale; Charness, Gary; Groshen, Erica L.; O'Shaughnessy, K. C. How new is the “new employment contract”? Evidence from North American pay practices Recent books: Riger, Stephanie. Transforming psychology: Gender in theory and practice Recent books: Robins, Phillip K.; Spiegelman, Robert G. (eds.). Re‐employment bonuses in the unemployment insurance system: Evidence from three field experiments New ILO publications: International Labour Conference, 90th Session, 2002, Report VI. Decent work and the informal economy New ILO publications: International Labour Conference, 90th Session, 2002, Report IV (2A). Promotion of cooperatives New ILO publications: International Labour Conference, 90th Session, 2002, Report V (2A). Recording and notification of occupational accidents and diseases and ILO list of occupational diseases New ILO publications: A guide to the Tripartite Declaration of Principles concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy: Knowing and using universal guidelines for social responsibility New ILO publications: Actuarial practice in social security . By Pierre Plamondon, Anne Drouin, Gylles Binet, Michael Cichon, Warren R. McGillivray, Michel Bédard, and Hernando Perez‐Montas New ILO publications: HIV/AIDS and the world of work: An ILO code of practice New ILO publications: Labour inspection: A guide to the profession . By Wolfgang von Richthofen New ILO publications: Promoting gender equality: A resource kit for trade unions New ILO publications: Supporting workplace learning for high performance working . By David N. Ashton and Johnny Sung     

Finding a Sociological Voice: The Work of Mirra Komarovsky*

This article offers a biographical sketch of Mirra Komarovsky in the framework of an analysis of her work as a researcher, writer, teacher and feminist. It demonstrates how the cultural conflicts that existed while she was a college student laid the foundation for her later sociological research. It also illustrates the particular dynamics of a woman's career in sociology, especially with regard to the influence of social supports on a woman's sense of “finding her voice.” Her work after retirement suggests that this period may have particular significance in the lives of academic women. The theoretical foundation and methodological characteristics of her work are additional foci of this article.     

Adolescent Residents Negotiate the Construction of Social Problems in a Low-Income Community: Making Claims on the “City of Sadness”

The social constructionist approach to research on social issues provides a conceptual means in understanding how specific problems are generated and handled by institutional claims-makers, including the state and mass media. In neighborhood research, the voice of adolescent residents is seldom heard, let alone the value of their claims in relation to the state's construction. This article endeavors to address this in several steps: by outlining the specific developmental trajectory of low-income community in Hong Kong; by examining the dominant state discourse on the nature and “solution” of community problems; and by analyzing the voice of adolescent residents. Empirically, 54 Chinese adolescents (aged 12 to 17 years) were recruited to participate in eight focus groups to express how they saw community conditions. Furthermore, a random sample of 22 parents of the participants was surveyed as comparison. Finally, the article suggests that adolescents' constructions provide significant opportunities developing more critically informed, “bottom-up” agendas for community revitalization.     

Older transgender women in Thailand: views of service providers

The social and cultural construction of aging and how it is experienced by transgender women in Thailand has been neglected within the academic literature. This qualitative study explored how Thai lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) service providers construct aging transgender women. Fourteen semi-structured in-depth interviews and one focus group were conducted in Thailand between 2016 and 2017 with LGBTI staff members whose roles ranged from volunteer to senior management. This research was a part of a larger doctoral research project. In considering both gender identity and older age, a clearer understanding is established on how notions of “older” for transgender women are constructed by service providers. Thematic analysis was undertaken, which established that there is a lack of heterogeneity and shared understanding of the concepts of “age” and “older transgender women.” This key finding was compounded by the invisibility of older transgender women in the Thai landscape, which limited the extent to which older transgender women have been included in targeted service provision. Older transgender women lack agency and voice and have failed to be involved in the shaping of services that meet their needs.     

Labour is not a commodity: The content and meaning of work in the twenty‐first century

In his valedictory lecture before the Collège de France, Alain Supiot reviews his work on the transformation of labour in the twenty‐first century, highlighting the role of law and institutions in addressing the consequences of the digital revolution and environmental crisis. In his view, the moral, social and environmental bankruptcy of neoliberalism calls for us to reconsider the legal fiction of labour as a commodity and to re‐establish the truly “humane labour regime” envisaged by the preamble to the ILO Constitution, recognizing both the meaning and content of work. He uses the case of scientific research to illustrate his argument.     

The Self as Public Property: Made in Israel

This article examines the connection between state order and self‐understandings in everyday life through a case study of the “Boarding School for Gifted Disadvantaged” in Israel. It includes content analysis of governmental protocols that documented the establishment of the boarding school (governmental constitution of a new self‐concept) and interviews with sixty of its graduates (self‐understandings in everyday life). The findings reveal how the new cultural order invented a new selfhood, “gifted disadvantaged,” previously unknown in Israel. This category is based on structural distinctions between being “naturally” gifted versus the governmental constitution of gifted status. Interviews with graduates indicate that they experience selfhood as a philanthropic gift bestowed on them by the state of Israel and voice their gratitude toward the state. The concluding discussion suggests that the graduates experience their selfhood as “public property.” The self, perceived as having been constructed from outside, is in a continuous dialectic between the presence and the absence of certain personal qualities.     

L’homme et l’automate. L’écologie élargie du travail contemporain

What become of human beings in complex technical environments? The french Sociology of Work inspired by Pierre Naville is a step ahead compared with “distributed cognition”, “situated action” or “regime of familiarity”. By studying how activities related to the supervision of phone streams are distributed, the contributions of this tradition to an ecological approach are documented, in particular the switch from “artefact” to “automaton”. In the world of work, where technical arrangements are not mainly designed as objects to be used, it must be delved into the depths of these arrangements in order to study distributed activities. By broadening an “ecology of activities” to cover automatisms, one better understands how workers try to find bearings in an environment heavily equipped with electronic devices. This analysis can thus reintegrate a vast range of activities, including the circulation of workers to “find their way,” or work as an inquiry.     

Navigating labels,seeking recognition for victimhood: Diaspora activism after mass-atrocities

This article analyses diaspora mobilization for transitional justice as efforts to gain recognition for victim-based identities. Building on research among diaspora groups from Rwanda and Sri Lanka in North America and Europe, the article investigates how diaspora actors in their quest for victimhood recognition navigate, make use of and challenge labels such as “victim”, “perpetrator”, “genocide”, “survivor” and “terrorist”. The article uses Jacoby's theory of victimhood to draw attention to the diasporic space as particularly conducive for recognition struggles, and discuss the different stages through which victim-based identities are constructed. The empirical examples reveal how serveral competing and interrelated processes towards victimhood recognition are simultaneously at work, and how diaspora actors both refute and creatively make use of categories that assign blame or signal victimhood and resilience.     

Negotiating Personal Experience over the Lifetime: Narrative Elasticity as an Analytic Tool

Sociology and neighboring disciplines have produced different analytic tools to examine the dialogical relationship between individuals and society (“narrative work,” “identity work,” “moral career,” “moral breakdown”). However, the question of how individuals negotiate the interpretation of personal experience over their lifetimes in a changing cultural context remains unexplored. This article introduces narrative elasticity as a feature of narrative work and as a time‐sensitive analytic tool for conducting inquiries into processes of temporal retraction and expansion of what storytellers conceive as the normal order of significance. The application of this tool to the analysis of mature and elderly Chileans' life stories shows how cultural change occurs at the individual level, considers factors that motivate and inhibit processes of reinterpretation of personal experience, and identifies different levels at which it operates.     

Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop‐Motion Animation Programmes For Young Children

This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self‐understanding, self‐examination and “self‐work”, and through which the “self qua self” is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as “excellence”, “total quality”, “performance”, “knowledge”, “play at work” and “wellness” in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of “human resourcefulness” as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management’s wider historical–cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term “derecognition of finitude”. It is the modern synthesis — with the “self” at the centre of its system of values — that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organizations use “work” to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self‐expression. Management thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self‐expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realized identity.     

“Live Social Work”: How to Bring Life Back into Social Work

Abstract

In this article I discuss how professional social work can entail critical, reflexive work. This is accomplished by adapting the concept of “live sociology”. It is mainly an exploratory article, trying to raise suggestions that can be adopted and be further developed. I argue that people coming into contact with contemporary social work are sometimes reduced to being “dead” objects, as they are pinned down into static categories. The demand for developing evidence-based social work risks substantiating this tendency even further. In contrast, I claim that social work needs to move away from these kinds of explanations and instead turn towards developing “live social work”; that is to say, social work where everyday life, agency, and what people do in what context needs to be the focus, not what people are.     

Seeing the Unseen: Prospective Loading and Knowledge Forms in Archaeological Discovery

How does an object in the ground become a discovery on the ground? This paper analyzes how archaeologists produce the content and status of a discovery before it is unearthed, a phenomenon I call “prospective loading.” It includes intense social knowledge of the soil, a form of embodied knowledge that I call “dirt sense”. These forces and mechanisms do not always work together harmoniously. Qualitative data from three excavations demonstrate how deep sensory perception thrives alongside sophisticated technology, and is construed as vital to the discovery process. The case has implications for how we think about cultural knowledge in scientific work and theorize the role of nationalism and politics in archaeology.     

Diversity Regimes in Worker Cooperatives: Workplace Inequality under Conditions of Worker Control

Two major shifts in contemporary work organizations—“employee participation” and “diversity management”—have typically been studied in isolation from one another. Building on theoretical work by Acker (2006a,b), we ask how the interaction of these two constructs has affected the pursuit of workplace democracy at two worker cooperatives in Northern California. Using qualitative methods, we find that distinct “diversity regimes” have emerged at these establishments, substantially affecting the configurations of inequality that evolved. We distinguish two types of diversity regimes—“utilitarian” and “communitarian”—which operate either to obscure the workings of inequality or to foster attention to their presence. Our results suggest that how sociodemographic differences are managed has material consequences for the development of egalitarian structures at work.     

“I Help the Ones that Want Help”: Emotion Work and the Victim Advocate Role

Using data gathered from participant observation and 32 individual in-depth interviews, this study examines how victim advocates achieve emotion management in their work with battered women. This research reveals that victim advocates often experience difficulty coping with occupational stress via daily “deep acting” strategies as they work to change their understandings of battered women and the advocate role from the “inside out.” The data reveal that the core of their ability to cope requires victim advocates to redefine their perceived role from “savior” to “options giver” to more accurately define their role interactions with battered women.     

Green collar work: Conceptualizing and exploring an emerging field of work

In this paper, I consider “green collar work,” broadly defined as work intended to counter environmental degradation. I consider what might count as green collar work and compare the greening of work in different sectors, including industrial production, service work, working on “nature,” and expert work. I look also at how organizations affect the “greenness” of work. I stress that “green work” is not consistent across time and place and that it is important to understand the interdependencies between different kinds of work. As this is a new topic in sociology, I draw on research from different social science disciplines.     

Voices in the Adjudication of Compulsory Adoption in Israel: The Hegemonic Voice of the Professional Expert and the Unheard Voice of the Biological Parents

Ambiguity in the definitions of “parental incapability” and “child's best interests” in the Israeli law of adoption allows for different “voices” to determine their meaning. With regard to compulsory adoption, findings from texts of the judicial discourse in Israel portray the voice of the professional expert as hegemonic and that of the biological parents as unheard, revealing the nature of the practices that lead to the deligitimization of the parents’ voice. To bring about a balanced representation of the different voices, the article proposes a moralization of the legal procedure of adoption that stresses its rehabilitative rather than condemnatory character.     

Knowledge Equity is Social Justice: Engaging a Practice Theory Perspective of Knowledge for Rural Transformation

Social inequities are made possible by and compounded by knowledge inequity. Accordingly, new and more vehicles are needed in which different and transformative knowledges can chart new possibilities, practices, and meanings for rural people. One way forward is to work toward an ecology of knowledges in which the need for many types of knowledge is recognized and different knowledges are respected. Drawing on case study and “photo‐voice” research with women in rural Ethiopia, this article uses a practice theory approach to explore the possibilities of knowledge dialogue among different types of knowledge and skill. Recognizing the wide spectrum of deep knowledge and skill employed in local practice, and understanding how all knowledges are rooted in social context, actors can find common ground to dialogue through methods of praxis and narrative.