Narrating Nursing Jurisdiction: “Atrocity Stories” and “Boundary‐Work”

Sociologists have long recognized that the division of labor is, at its root, a process of social interaction. Although “negotiations” figure centrally in symbolic interactionist studies of work, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which the structure of workplace talk contributes to the social constitution of occupations. Drawing on the insights of discourse and conversation analysis, this article examines occupational atrocity stories and considers how they accomplish boundary‐work in the hospital setting. I focus on the stories British nurses told about doctors and use data generated in ethnographic research into the routine accomplishment of nursing jurisdiction. I conclude with some general observations about how the detailed analysis of stories and storytelling can contribute to the wider study of social group formation.     

A Blumerian Approach to Storytelling

Blumer's work on life histories and symbolic interactionism represents an important contribution in the twenty-first century. I join his work with research on storytelling to build a Blumerian approach to storytelling. This approach holds that social actors use stories to construct subjective meanings, stories exist in some social context, stories are told or written for some audience, a wide range of social processes produce stories, the temporal sequence of storytelling audiences is important, social actors use interactional techniques of showing story preferences, and symbolic structures and narrative linkages are the resources social actors use to compose stories. Future research can continue to develop this approach.     

Olfactive frames of remembering: theorizing self,senses and society

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta‐narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial‐bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis‐à‐vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self‐identity and social relations.     

The Politics of Representation: Wire Agencies and Local News Organizations in the Coverage of Darfur

Sociologists are not at the forefront of studying African news organizations’ coverage of atrocity despite having the tools to do so. This article works to remedy that. I investigate how a media field in Africa frames and represents an atrocity unfolding in Darfur. The article relies on content analysis of news reports published in Kenya between 2003 and 2008. To provide more nuanced analysis, I also rely my own interviews with journalists who had covered and traveled to Darfur. The content analysis delineates the article through the use of by‐line accreditation to allow for an analysis between different journalists working for either local news organizations or wire agencies with offices in Nairobi. I find that Kenyan journalists are not central actors in the process of “meaning making” when it comes to the atrocities in Darfur for the Kenyan audience. They are, effectively, silenced from the knowledge‐construction process in Kenya. Consequently, being Kenyan conspires to produce a condition of invisibility and erasure of Kenyan journalists in the global narrative construction.     

Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era

The increasing prevalence of digital social technologies in everyday life affects processes of self and identity in theoretically and empirically interesting ways. Based on face‐to‐face interviews (N = 17) and synchronous text‐based exchanges (N = 32) from a Facebook‐based population, I examine the conditions of identity negotiation in a networked era, and explore how social actors strike a presentational balance between ideal and authentic. I identify three key interaction conditions: fluidity between digital and physical, expectations of accuracy, and overlapping social networks. I argue that social actors accomplish the ideal‐authentic balance through self‐triangulation, presenting a coherent image in multiple arenas and through multiple media. I differentiate between two degrees of triangulation: networked logic and preemptive action.     

“Shifting the Power”: Youth Activists’ Narrative Reframing of the Immigrant Rights Movement

This article explores collective efforts by undocumented youth activists to use storytelling to reframe the debates around immigration reform and discursively position themselves as the rightful leaders of a movement that had been dominated by adult citizen‐advocates. Drawing on 19 months of fieldwork, 37 in‐depth interviews, and hundreds of pages of movement documents, I show how youth activists in the United States worked together to develop stories that: (1) drew into question the legitimacy of adult citizen‐advocates to speak on issues of immigration and (2) cast undocumented immigrant youth as the proper authorities on these matters. I argue that through collective storytelling and character work, the activists were able to subvert adult citizen authority and construct themselves as powerful, new collective actors in the contemporary immigrant rights movement. I conclude by discussing some of the practical implications and limitations of using narrative reframing strategies to advance the social change agendas of marginalized movement factions.     

The uses of social science in the history of dutch social work, 1900–1980

In this paper the author reviews the history of Dutch social work between 1900 and 1980 and tries to shed light on how Dutch social workers enlisted various insights developed by the social sciences to gain jurisdiction in dealing with social problems. He argues against the simplistic idea that scientific knowledge is merely applied in practical settings such as social work. Social workers did not just apply scientific insights; they also used scientific insights strategically to demarcate their position from various opponents both inside and outside the profession. It is useful to differentiate between the reflexive and strategic uses of social sciences: reflexive means that new interpretations of the social world and the nature of social problems are offered which imply different ways of doing social work; strategic means that with these new interpretations new boundaries are created between social work and competing actors in the field of dealing with social problems.     

The Dawn is Too Distant: The Experience of 28 Social Work Graduates Entering the Social Work Field in China

Nurturing new, competent social work professionals requires multilevel preparation extending from school to the workplace. However, not much has been done to understand this school-to-work transition process in countries where the social work profession is still in an early stage of development. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory qualitative study of 28 new social workers in China, where social work is an emerging profession, on how they entered the field and what challenges they encountered. Their stories indicate that what they learned in school did form a foundation for the establishment of their professional identity in the workplace. However, due to workplace politics and to the lack of recognition of their professional status, they experienced an unsettling induction process. Coupled with the challenges of inadequate financial compensation, the careers of these new social workers may face an early end despite the great future for the profession promised by the government. Implications of this study for social work education in China are also discussed.     

Framing the Self

The meaning of a photograph depends on the story we tell about it. In the case of portraits, these narrative frames shape the self we impute to the sitter. The interiority of the portrait subject, the inner character we imagine is revealed in the photograph, is a result of what we know about photographic portraits, about the sitter, about the photographer, and about the context in which the image was made. Likewise in everyday life, the selves we impute to others are infected by similar processes of narrative framing. Who we are known to be depends not only on self‐presentations but on the stories within which those self‐presentations are placed.     

Juggling Models of Masculinity: Russian-Jewish Immigrants in the Israeli Army

The present study addresses the question “What is masculinity?” by exploring how male immigrants interpret local masculinity and the models of masculinity they portray while situating themselves in the male hierarchy of the new society. The study is based on “immigration stories” elicited by in‐depth interviews conducted with 43 university students who immigrated to Israel at the beginning of the 1990s from the former Soviet Union. The analysis of the stories reveals that the immigrants employ four major practices (avoidance, mockery, maneuvering, and provocation) that unfasten the takenfor‐granted link between masculinity and army service in the Israeli society, thereby resisting the hegemonic, military model of masculinity in Israel. The immigrants render meaning to their resistance of the indigenous model (“The Warrior”) via the harnessing of cultural models that they carry with them from their native home—“The Russian Soldier” and “The Jewish Man”—without seeking to alter gender power relations as such. They discursively juggle between the three contesting and competing models of masculinity that together constitute a fluid and elusive “interpretative field” of masculinity. Via their interpretative work, the Russian male immigrants reconstitute their masculine identity, seeking to assert their distinctiveness and to receive social legitimation for their different conception of masculinity.     

Social Work's Legacy: Irreconcilable Differences?

Social Work is under attack, not the least of which comes from within its own ranks. Clinical social work appears to the hardest hit as critics question its fit with social work's historic focus on the poor and the oppressed. In addition, there continues to be ongoing controversy regarding the profession as means of social control. Clinical social work has also been attacked for its reliance on the medical model and the growth in private practice. Do these attacks and criticisms signal the end of clinical social work? Or, could this be viewed as part of a process through which social work analyzes its self in its continuing efforts to remain relevant. Is this the evolutionary path of social work? This paper explores some of these controversies and debates. The profession has grown, evolved, and responded to criticism since its inception. A current model for understanding the fit between clinical social work and social justice is presented as an example of how debate continues to lead the profession forward.     

Embodied Fluidity and the Commitment to Movement: Constructing the Moral Self through Arthritis Narratives

While biomedical research reifies bodily movement in the lives of people with chronic illness as “functional mobility,” our analysis of biographical osteoarthritis narratives uncovers a moral commitment to movement as both a moral imperative and a technique to preserve a self threatened by the limits arthritis places on daily life. A content analysis of twelve interviews with arthritis sufferers shows that, in addition to the practical and emotional challenges of living with arthritis, these actors face the daily challenge of displaying their understanding of embodied fluidity—the timely and fluid movement through time and space—as a virtuous practice. Our informants use the movement mandate—the commitment to move despite the pain it may cause—to produce themselves as competent social and moral actors sacrificing the demands of their bodies to meet social expectations, and they conduct this performance in front of several audiences: the self and specific and generalized others. For these informants, in both private and public realms, the experience and the management of pain and physical limitation are profoundly social and accountable matters, as they affect interactions with others, their own social identities and moral integrity, and their relations with self as they seek to balance their arthritis pain with their past, present, and future self‐concepts.     

Gate‐keeping for professional social work practice

The profession of social work has difficulty terminating students for non‐academic reasons because of an inability to define suitability for the profession and to formulate concrete criteria. Although discerning who is, or is not, personally suitable to practice social work is bound to be challenging, there is a growing realization that this task must be undertaken. This study was undertaken in response to this challenge, and seeks to increase our knowledge base about the personal and professional dimensions of social work, which result in suitable and unsuitable practices among social work students and practicing professional social workers. This article examines data gathered on the subject of professional suitability from a focus group and a series of individual interviews with social work field instructors. The authors attempt to broaden our understanding of personal suitability for the practice of social work and to achieve greater operational specificity to guide decision making for social work educators, as social work educators ultimately must make the critical decision about who should be admitted to the social work profession. It is hoped that this study can serve as a building block for further research. It seems clear that the choices to be explored must meet our obligation to society in general, to social work employers, and especially to clients.     

Real social analytics: A contribution towards a phenomenology of a digital world

This article argues against the assumption that agency and reflexivity disappear in an age of ‘algorithmic power’ (Lash 2007). Following the suggestions of Beer (2009), it proposes that, far from disappearing, new forms of agency and reflexivity around the embedding in everyday practice of not only algorithms but also analytics more broadly are emerging, as social actors continue to pursue their social ends but mediated through digital interfaces: this is the consequence of many social actors now needing their digital presence, regardless of whether they want this, to be measured and counted. The article proposes ‘social analytics’ as a new topic for sociology: the sociological study of social actors’ uses of analytics not for the sake of measurement itself (or to make profit from measurement) but in order to fulfil better their social ends through an enhancement of their digital presence. The article places social analytics in the context of earlier debates about categorization, algorithmic power, and self‐presentation online, and describes in detail a case study with a UK community organization which generated the social analytics approach. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this approach for further sociological fieldwork in a digital world.     

Teaching Critical Perspectives: Analyses of Professional Practice in the Film Ladybird,Ladybird

This article presents three critical analyses of social work practice as depicted in Ken Loach's 1994 film Ladybird, Ladybird. The analyses are intended to serve as a teaching tool in a course on critical perspectives in social work. The tool applies the radical, feminist and postmodern critiques of social work practice to the depiction of the practice in the film. It seeks to contribute to a better understanding of those critical approaches that have developed within the social work profession and, in particular, to emphasize the relevance of these approaches to actual practice. The article explicitly endeavors to arouse debate and reflection on practice among social worker students and to encourage self‐criticism in order to further the development of anti‐oppressive social work practice.     

Awakenings: Autobiography,Memory, and the Social Logic of Personal Discovery

Taking a formal, sociocognitive approach to narrative analysis, I explore autobiographical stories about discovering “truth” in political, psychological, religious, and sexual realms of social life. Despite (1) significant differences in subject matter and (2) conflicting or oppositional notions of truth, individuals in different social environments tell stories that follow the same awakening formula. Analyzing accounts from a wide variety of social and historical contexts, I show how individuals and communities use these autobiographical stories to define salient moral and political concerns and weigh in on cultural and epistemic disputes. Awakening narratives are important mechanisms of mnemonic and autobiographical revision that individuals use to redefine their past experiences and relationships and plot future courses of action while explaining major transformations of worldview. Awakeners use two ideal‐typical vocabularies of liminality to justify traversing the social divide between contentious autobiographical communities. Further, awakeners divide their lives into discrete autobiographical periods and convey a figurative interaction between the split personas of a temporally divided self. Individuals use this autobiographical formula to reject the cognitive and mnemonic norms of one community and embrace those of another. Advancing a “social geometry” of awakening narratives, I illuminate the social logic behind our seemingly personal discoveries of “truth.”     

Do self‐assessment and self‐directed support undermine traditional social work with disabled people?

In recent years, self‐assessment and self‐directed support have become mainstream options within disability services. The Disabled People’s Movement has advocated the need for such change for a long time but this has been persistently resisted by many social workers. In this article, it will be argued that both self‐assessment and self‐directed support undermine traditional social work and that social workers need to begin to work alongside disabled people, rather than ‘for’ disabled people, in order to achieve substantial system change.     

A SWOT analysis of social work education in Canada

This paper draws upon the research carried out for a study of human resource needs of social workers in Canada to make a SWOT analysis of social work education and the profession. Strengths that were identified included a holistic practice orientation; the linkage between theory and practice; regulation and certification; a generalist approach to practice; increased cultural relevance of social work education; high quality social work programs; a continued demand for social workers; and the values of the profession. Weaknesses included a lack of professional identification, or identity crisis; an inability to promote the profession; the diffuse knowledge base of the profession; conflict between the values of social action and social control; a lack of preparation to manage the stress of our work; insufficient aboriginal, visible minority and multicultural members of the profession; and for aboriginal people, that social work can be seen as a residual effect of colonization. Threats to the profession included a trend to neoliberalism; increasing identification of social workers with the bureaucracy; increasing managerialization; increased community responsibility for service delivery; and interdisciplinarity. Opportunities identified included design of cost effective programs which meet service user needs; exercise of responsibility for social advocacy; development of managerial competence in social workers; extension of job opportunities through privatization; and articulation of social work competencies.     

Story, narrative and team work

During the course of this paper I explore some dimensions of talk‐in interaction within the context of social/care work team meetings. Furthermore, I contrast traditional approaches to analysing members stories by illustrating the situated dimension and characteristics of members stories within talk‐in‐interaction. In addition, I address some topics relating to the investigation of social/care team work and briefly consider the story as a mechanism for reducing complexity within the locally accomplished parameters of team work.