Integrationspotenziale des Internets für türkische Jugendliche in Wien am Beispiel von Online-Spielen und digitalen Freundschaftsnetzwerken

Based on a cohort of young Austrians of Turkish descent, this paper links the debate on the integration of the second generation (or the lack thereof) with the controversial discourse about the potential usefulness and risks of new media and technologies, specifically the Internet. Various studies have concluded either that the new media and technologies are positive integrative aspects of the society or have devastating impacts on different groups. On the one hand, the Internet allows young people to discover new experiences and gain additional often unorthodox knowledge; on the other hand, observers have warned about the segregating effects of new technologies. A ?digital divide“ has been opened between privileged users and the underprivileged masses, according to these more cautious voices. This divide has caused social deprivation and disintegration amongst the most vulnerable groups, in particular, older people, economically insecure groups and immigrants. Thus, various media life-styles establish a continuum between a media and information elite on the one end and the entertainment under-class on the other. Semi structured interviews with young Turks in Vienna show the positive and negative effects of playing Online Role Playing Games on the Internet in opposition to so-called Social Network Sites such as Netlog.     

Praktiken der Grenzüberschreitung und die Grenzen des Feldparadigmas

So far, the phenomenon of the so-called avant-garde has rarely been the subject of sociological scrutiny. In order to approach the historical avant-garde in sociological terms, Pierre Bourdieu??s field concept is applied. This sheds new light on the avant-garde, which traditionally has been subject to related disciplines. However, Bourdieu??s field theory fails to capture the empirical phenomenon of the historical avant-garde sufficiently. This suggests that sociology ought to regard the principle of the avant-garde as a distinct concept.     

Erwerbszentrierte Lebensführung in der Wiener Kreativwirtschaft zwischen Kunstschaffen und Dienstleistung

This paper presents empirical research on employment in Vienna’s creative industries, with a special focus on self-employment and creative or even artistic work practices. Based on more than 50 in-depth interviews with those employed, ideal types on occupational behaviour and self-images are introduced. Workers that represent patterns of “artistic creation” are described in more detail. Altogether, work oriented lifestyles in creative industries refer to very heterogeneous ways to combine work and life.     

Videoüberwachung von Demonstrationen und die Definitionsmacht der Polizei. Zwischen Objektivitätsfiktion und selektiver Sanktionierung

The paper examines the use of video surveillance in the context of protest policing, drawing on group discussions and expert interviews with the riot police as well as ethnographic fieldwork. The use of video surveillance is legitimised by the police through a promise of objectivity and stringent compliance to the law. The author analyses the use of video surveillance as a contingent process of actively constructing evidence. It consists of a series of decisions in three phases: starting with the determination of the potential to use surveillance to the police oriented application, and finally, the follow up phase, focusing on the developments of results and prosecution. The variety of courses of action to make use of surveillance right up to manipulation of results is considered to be an expression of sociological discretion, in which the police definitional power rests. Especially, the involved technology allows for existing contingencies apparent in every substep to become invisible through material objectifications and abstractions. In this process, the law proves to be only one motive for agency among others. The idea of the police being determined by law becomes visible as a necessary fiction.     

Prosumer der Gefühle

In recent years, “online dating” has become one of the few profitable sectors of the digital economy. The business model is quite distinct: The main “product” of dating platforms are emotional relationships. In practice however, those relationships are produced by the actual users and their emotion work on the platform. As a result, the roles of producers and consumers merge. Users of dating platforms are becoming “prosumers of emotions”. With their emotion work they produce surplus value for the platform while they pay considerable monthly fees as consumers. Based on our own empirical research, we analyze the tensions between love and emotion work in general as well as the specific emotional production regime of dating platforms, which not only tend to spur emotions but also tend to transform them into productive emotional labor. Regarded this way, online dating appears as a current and outstanding example for a general trend in today’s capitalism to intensify the use of emotions as a source of economic value creation.     

Entscheiden und Gestalten für Pflegekräfte: Die „Kür“ der institutionellen Altenarbeit

Limited financial resources and the establishment of standards of care define the work of employees in the care for the elderly. The residents, their family members and the employees share the aim of individual care which exceeds the bottom quality, the priority aim of executive-staff. In order to provide individual care it is essential for nursing-staff to have potential capacities for decision-making and participation. To empirically investigate the situation concerning decision-making and participation, I conducted guided interviews with nursing-staff and executive-staff in a residential home for the elderly in Linz. Amongst others the results show a massive area of conflict, which is based on the different constructions of care work by nursing-staff on the one hand and executive-staff on the other hand.     

Barrieren, Brücken und Balancen

The present paper discusses conceptions of appropriate distance relations in present day service jobs. We show how employees manage their emotions in order to comply with these largely ideological conceptions. In two comparative case studies of a call center and of community care for elderly people we demonstrate that the conceptions of appropriate distance are diametrically opposed to the objective spatial distance of the interactants. Thus, Customer Relations Management suggests an emotionalised relation between customers and call center agents who are located hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away from customers. This emotional closeness supposedly maximises the economic exploitation of the commercial interaction. In the service of elderly care which involves close body contact, however, the conception of a professional relation between carer and client is based on the carer’s ability to distance herself in order not to ‘burn out’. We show that the effects of rationalisation, bureaucratisation and new technologies in service jobs of both capitalist service economies and welfare states create dilemmas between the feeling rules and the working conditions. Service workers try to solve these dilemmas by more or less improvised practices of manipulating their feelings and sensations.     

Gerechtigkeit in der Sozialpolitik – Aufgaben und Befunde einer kritischen Soziologie der Moral

In a modern differentiated society interpretations of social justice occur necessarily manifold; they cannot be derived from an absolute point of reference. The following article takes up this thought of Günther Dux in terms of justice. It is argued—in difference to philosophy—that the strength of sociological justice research lies in the empirical reconstruction of images of social justice. It will be outlined which ideas of social justice in regard to a reform of the welfare state are currently dominating. In social political reform debates it is observable these days that there is no longer a mere normative dispute about justice and moral. The issue is rather finding productivist justice solutions, which enable the concomitance of economic efficiency and fair distribution solution.     

Anwendungsorientierte Forschung und der Wandel der Wissensordnung zu Geschlecht: Konzeptionelle Annäherungen

First, the article is a speech for theoretical ambitious and applied oriented gender research. However, the transfer between scientific knowledge and praxis-oriented knowledge is an independent step, which might be based on gender trainings and gender expertise. Second, the complex processes of knowledge transfer and communication and its impacts on the scientific order of knowledge in the gender arena forms part of the debate. The paper discusses these issues and challenges for scientific gender knowledge from the perspective of gender studies and the sociology of professions, scientific discourses, and sociology of science.     

Der Capability-Ansatz in der Gesundheitsförderung: Ansatzpunkte für eine Neuausrichtung der Ungleichheitsforschung

Health-related well-being is a result of individual or collective agency. Understanding and influencing health-relevant behaviour, however, requires to account for physical and social contexts of agency. Accordingly, the authors suggest a focus in modern health promotion on people’s health-relevant resources and capabilities. This requires a theoretical basis onto which issues of social inequality can be linked to specific approaches of health promotion practice, namely empowerment and participation. To this purpose, the authors present Amartya Sen’s theory-based Capability Approach (CA) and complement it with insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital interaction. Both of these theories shed light on key issues of social inequality and can fruitfully be associated with the guiding principles in health promotion stipulated by the Ottawa Charter. Together, they provide guidelines for new areas of research to analyse the complex interplay between health behaviour and social context.     

Von der imaginierten zur emotional erlebten Nation: Partizipation und Verschmelzung in der Fußballberichterstattung

Not only in a globalized world, our imagination is a space for the construction of all kinds of identity. This was shown e. g. by Anderson (Erfindung der Nation, Zur Karriere eines folgenreichen Konzepts, Frankfurt a. M., Campus, 1996) in his perspective on the nation as an imagined community. This article intends to add arguments from the sociology of emotion and ritual-theory to this mainly cognitive perspective. I will argue that rituals serve to provide an affective experience of the respective imagined community and to actualize its imagined content. In so doing, the nation gains salience compared to other constructions of collective identity. TV-coverage from the FIFA Football-World Cup in 2006 in Germany serves as an empirical example. Besides the interpretative presentation of included images of we-identity (also in discrimination against the identity of ‘the others’) the analysis focuses on showing how the formal, visual and semantic form of the examined broadcast facilitates the experience of collective effervescence by making it easier for the viewers to perceive themselves as participants in the ritual.