Connecting the gendered door: women, violence and doorwork

This paper explores the emerging role of women who work as 'bouncers', or doorstaff, in the night-time economy and examines how the cultural capital of the female bouncer is connected to the methods utilized to control licensed premises. It is drawn from a study that combined ethnographic observations and interviews in five major UK cities which explored a diverse range of issues such as gendered bodies, femininities and violence; the changing needs of the night-time economy in the UK and the experiences of women engaged in 'non-traditional' occupations. In this paper, we draw on interview data with one particular category of female door staff; women who share similar histories of exposure to violence and violent cultures, and we examine how their experiential knowledge of violence equips them with the resources to 'work the doors'. Our attention focuses on this group of women, who we refer to as 'The Connected', and examine how they are 'doing gender' when they negotiate violence 'on the door'     

Hard men, shop boys and others: embodying competence in a masculinist occupation

Emerging studies on private security work in Britain's night‐time economy explore important sociological themes such as masculinities and violence. Contributing rich ethnography to this literature, and in furthering an embodied sociology, this paper describes the gendered construction of competency among ‘bouncers’ or door supervisors within the context of their potentially violent work. Centrally, it explores the door supervisors’ variable bodily capital (comprising body build and acquired techniques of the body) alongside normative limits to their violence. Here physicality is central to the practicalities of doorwork, risk management and the embodiment of dominant and subordinate masculinities. Within doorwork culture, embodied typifications such as ‘hard men’, ‘shop boys’ and others (eg,‘bullies’ and ‘nutters’) are related to assessments of possible violence against doorstaff, the delineation of (flexible) boundaries for their own (in)appropriate violence against ‘problematic’ customers and the construction of competent identity. Besides contributing empirical data to the literature this paper underscores the integrative potential of embodiment for social scientists and urges policy makers to appreciate the degree to which (potential) violence is embodied in the night‐time economy.     

Embodied labour in music work

This paper frames the work of performance as embodied labour in order to understand the contingent production of particular music performances. It is an interdisciplinary account that sits at the intersection of the sociology of work, culture and the body. The concept of embodied labour is developed with reference to the complex account of materiality – of bodies and things – present in Tim Ingold's account of skill. This material account of skill is used to inform use to develop already of well established conceptualizations of body labour: craft, emotional and aesthetic labour through a reading of how these dimensions of embodied labour make possible the work of performance.     

What Is ‘Body Work’? A Review of the Literature

Lyon and Barbalet (1994) , Kang (2003 ), Wolkowitz (2002 , 2006 ), and others have proposed the concept of 'body work' as a means for further developing the sociology of the body. This article gives an overview of the different (although frequently overlapping) forms of body work that have been identified in the sociological literature. These include a notion of body work as (i) the work performed on one's own body, (ii) paid labor carried out on the bodies of others, (iii) the management of embodied emotional experience and display, and (iv) the production or modification of bodies through work. The article concludes with suggestions for the future of research on body work and the sociology of the body.     

The ‘recidivist tongue’: embracing an embodied language of trauma

This article analyses selected excerpts from the writing of Antjie Krog and Yvonne Vera in order to theorise strategies for overcoming the disjuncture between the mind and the body that tends to result from violence. Both authors repeatedly return to the bodies of their characters and they insist that psychic and physical pain and trauma reside in the bodies of survivors as much as in their psyches. Acknowledging this corporeal reality of violence circumvents any opportunity to deny the totality of the impact that violence has on the lives of survivors. This has implications for survivors as well as for those who read or hear about violence. By developing an embodied language of violence and trauma, these authors offer new and more comprehensive ways of dealing with traumatic violations. When survivors reclaim their bodies, they are also able to utilise their bodies’ capacity for healing and comfort. When readers, and society at large, are unable to deny the harm that violence does to bodies, they are compelled to recognise the reality of survivors’ suffering. The article illustrates that the body can speak and that we ignore its voice at our peril.     

Collective violence as social control

Collective violence is often social control: self-help by a group. It typically defines and responds to conduct as deviant. When unilateral and nongovernmental, it appears in four major forms—lynching, rioting, vigilantism, and terrorism—each distinguished by its system of liability (individual or collective) and degree of organization (higher or lower). Following Donald Black's paradigm of pure sociology, the central assumption is that collective violence varies with its location and direction in social space—the conflict structure. I offer ten propositions that predict and explain the likelihood and severity of collective violence in general and the four forms of collective violence in particular. Conflict structures with a high degree of relational distance, cultural distance, functional independence, and inequality between the adversaries are associated with collective violence in general. Each of the four forms depends on the degree of social polarization between the parties as well as the continuity of the deviant behavior to which the violence responds. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 1992, and the Centennial Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, University of Paris (Sorbonne), Paris, June 1993.     

Killing animals: sociology,species relations and institutionalized violence

Influential voices have argued for a sociology which acknowledges the way we are co‐constituted with a range of non‐human species as part of the condition of life on this planet. Despite this, sociology has generally retained a conception of the social that is centred on the human. This paper argues for the inclusion of non‐human animals in sociological agendas, focusing on the emerging field of the sociology of violence. It examines the institutions and processes through which non‐human animals are subjected to different forms of violence, most notably, mass killing. The practice of killing animals is routine, normative, institutionalized and globalized. The scale of killing is historically unprecedented and the numbers killed are enormous. The paper argues that this killing of non‐humans raises questions around inequalities and intersectionality, human relations with other species, the embedding of violence in everyday practices and links between micro and macro analyses. These are questions with which the new sociology of violence might engage.     

Embodying Gender,Work and Organization: Solidarity,Cool Loyalties and Contested Hierarchy in a Masculinist Occupation

Despite a ‘somatic turn’ in the social sciences, there remains a dearth of theoretically informed research on male working bodies, the embodied doings of masculinities independent of biological sex and intra–gendered workplace relations. This is unfortunate because embodiment is thoroughly implicated in major social divisions, including gender domination in institutional contexts. Using an embodied sociological perspective and data generated during an ethnography of British nightclub and pub security work, this article goes some way towards embodying the social study of plural masculinities, work and organization. Exploring worker solidarity, cool loyalties and contested hierarchy in this risky masculinist occupation hopefully makes several contributions to the literature. Furthering the (theoretically informed) empirical study of masculinities and socially embedded bodies, the article sensitizes other researchers to gendered/embodied processes possibly taking a more diluted form in other work settings.     

The Significance of Others in the Thought of Alfred Schultz,G. H. Mead and C. H. Cooley*

This paper makes an initial statement on the importance of the concept of the other in sociology and social psychology and then examines the place this concept plays in the essential thought of Alfred Schutz, G. H. Mead, and C. H. Cooley. It is argued that the concept is not a fundamental part of the thought of Schutz, that it is used merely as a convenient loophole at various strategic moments in the argument, whereas in the work of Mead and Cooley it is conceived as an active and embodied entity that plays a crucial role in their respective theories of socialization and human conduct. The work of the labeling theorists is then taken to illustrate the value of the concept as used by Mead and Cooley, with some changes.     

Institutionalization of a community action program targeting licensed premises in Stockholm, Sweden

The objective of this article is to evaluate the level of institutionalization of a community action program targeting licensed premises in Stockholm. Five key factors were identified for institutionalization: adoption, sustainability, key leader support, structural changes, and compliance. A scale was developed to assess the strength of each factor. The results indicate a high degree of institutionalization (score 13 on a scale from 5 to 15). The authors conclude that the program activities have been sustained at a high level. A written agreement ensures that the participating organizations take responsibility for the continuing work.     

Agricultural body-building: Incorporations of gender,body and work

This paper is concerned with gendered embodiment of agricultural work, particularly the connection between women's gender identity and the body at work. Focussing on how the body enters into relations with the tools of work, four processes are identified by which women's bodies, work and machinery are incorporated into each other and give each other meaning. In the first category women's embodied competences are merged with the qualities of machinery much the same way as men. The second shows how women work to uphold a definition of their bodies as feminine despite the fact that they operate machinery. The third process shows that when machine work is incorporated into farm women's traditional work on the farm, neither the definition of women's bodies nor the tractor change. Finally, when women do not operate machinery as part of their work, the traditional conception of gendered, embodied farm work is maintained. The analysis establishes that there is no one to one relationship between work and the meaning of the embodied self, and highlights the complex and ironic relationship between machinery and femininities.     

THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS OF MEADIAN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY*

Mead's life-long interest in Romanticism is the least studied aspect of his work. As summarized in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Meadian explorations in romantic philosophy and sociology provide a valuable insight into his substantive contributions. The present paper seeks to amplify this insight and explores its relevance to the interactionist tradition in sociology. Special attention is given to the Meadian claim that the modern notion of self first appears in the romantic literature. Mead's emphasis on the interplay between the social structure and the structure of the self is linked to the romantic vision of the self as the microcosm of the social macrocosm. The current controversy over Mead and Chicago sociology is given a new interpretation in light of the dialectical premises inherent in the Meadian and romantic theories of self.     

The Organization of Corrective Demonstrations Using Embodied Action in Sports Coaching Feedback

Focusing on video recordings of coaching sessions in the context of basketball and powerlifting, this paper investigates how the sports coaching process unfolds as situated interactions. The work of sports coaching is pervasively oriented toward teaching athletes the correct forms of motion and play. Correction then is one of the central constitutive practices of sports training sessions. In this paper, we draw on a collection of instances of correction demonstrations from powerlifting and basketball to describe their order. We demonstrate the three phases of these demonstrations: arranging bodies and gaze for visual access, presenting the error visually, and proposing a correction with an embodied demonstration. Findings underscore the management of shared visual access in multi‐party correction demonstrations. In demonstrating how multiple bodies may be involved in embodied reenactments of a correctable problem, and demonstrating that it is seeing an error, more than reenactment per se, that is necessary for correction activities, the study extends existing understandings both of sports coaching processes and of instructional correction in embodied activities.     

Women Elite Leaders Doing Respectable Business Femininity: How Privilege is Conferred,Contested and Defended through the Body

This paper offers a theory of respectable business femininity. Respectable business femininity is theorized as a discursive and relational process that explains tensions women elite leaders experience at the nexus of being both One and Other and sometimes privileged, embedded notions of leadership as masculine and wider expectations of acceptable embodied femininity. Such tensions manifest through a disciplining of women leaders’ bodies and appearance by self‐and‐others, as a means of appraising women as credible elite leaders and respectable women. Through a qualitative study we show how, within sites of ambiguity, embodied leadership and subjectivities are both enabled and constrained. Accounts highlight how privilege is fluid and (de)stabilized in that it is conferred, contested and defended through women's bodies and appearance. We advance understandings of contemporary respectable femininity, privilege at work, and body work, and consider practical implications for women leaders and management education.     

The Classed Body in the Sociological Imagination

Class theorists of embodiment in Sociology point to and illuminate both an over‐ and an under‐exposed body and experience that ultimately mark the bodies of the poor as ideologically, discursively and materially abject. In this essay, I map out theories of the bodies of the poor, including those of Marx, Engels, Elias, Bourdieu, Foucault, Donzelot and Adair. I suggest that an understanding of the ways in which the bodies of the poor are positioned as abject can facilitate a flexible and reflexive heuristic through which we can negotiate epistemic shifts between material and discursive categories, as well as providing us with a template through which we can come to understand even the most profoundly abject bodies, those of poor women in a welfare state, as potential sites of embodied agency and resistance, all central to the ethical and holistic study of sociology.     

Intimate partner violence: prevalence and risk factors for men in Cape Town, South Africa

This study examined the prevalence of and risk factors for intimate partner physical violence against women. Interviews were conducted with a sample of 1,378 men working in Cape Town municipalities. An average of 42.3% (95% CI: 39.6, 44.8) reported physical violence against a partner of the last 10 years, and 8.8% (95% CI: 7.3, 10.3) reported physical violence in the past year. After adjustment for age, occupational group, and race, the factors associated with use of violence against partners of the last 10 years were having no post-school training (OR = 2.10), witnessing parental violence in childhood (OR = 1.87), involvement in fights at work (OR = 2.73) and in communities (OR = 1.54), drug use (OR = 1.99), problem alcohol use (OR = 1.98), perceiving hitting women to be acceptable (OR = 4.54), frequent conflict (OR = 2.40), women's alcohol use (OR = 2.25), conflict about sex (OR = 2.16), and conflict about his infidelity (OR = 2.81). The study shows that ideas supportive of gender inequality and normative use of violence in different settings are major underlying factors for men's violence against partners.     

Economic Migration and Communal Violence in Pakistan

Overseas employment provides multiple socioeconomic benefits for families and communities in sending countries. But communal violence can potentially disrupt these flows, causing lasting damage to local and national economic development. Under what conditions does political violence – and particularly low‐intensity sectarian conflict – increase or decrease economic migration? This article argues that the level of militant control over local political and social institutions conditions whether individuals emigrate for work. Using statistical analysis of Pakistani data on overseas employment and political violence, it finds that attacks by transnational/Islamist militants on local political institutions substantially reduce economic migration. Attacks against non‐political targets have no significant effect, further emphasizing the importance of these bodies.     

Habermas,Activism, and Acquiescence: Reactions to ‘Colonization’ in UK Trade Unions

Habermas's idea of a conflict shift from ‘old’ to ‘new’ social movements has been a point of ongoing contention in the field of sociology. The criticisms aimed at his idea of ‘newness’ are numerous and persuasive. Rather than reiterating these debates, this paper argues that the next logical step is to apply Habermas to an analysis of the contemporary labour movement. In order to do this, I develop the notion of the ‘colonization of the lifeworld at work’, and explore the relationship between colonization and union activism in two cases drawn from the current UK context: the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT). In exploring colonization empirically, I suggest that it is met by a range of responses, from activism to acquiescence.