1,720,974 research outputs found
Verletzte Ansprüche: Zur Grammatik des politischen Bewusstseins von ArbeiterInnen
Full text linkDer Beitrag nimmt eine Kartierung der alltäglichen Gesellschaftskritik vor, die deutsche ProduktionsarbeiterInnen in informellen Interviewsettings äußern. Er rekonstruiert sieben typische Repertoires der Arbeiterkritik entlang der Gerechtigkeitsdimensionen ökonomischer Umverteilung, symbolischer Anerkennung und politischer Repräsentation. Die Alltagskritik der ArbeiterInnen veranschaulicht zentrale Charakteristika jenes politischen Bewusstseins, das dominierte Gruppen unter den Bedingungen einer demobilisierten Klassengesellschaft entwickeln. Damit ist ein Zustand gemeint, in dem Klassenverhältnisse zwar für objektive Lagen und Alltagserleben prägend bleiben, kulturelle Ausdrucksformen kollektiver Klassenidentität und politische Repräsentationskanäle aber brüchig geworden sind oder gänzlich fehlen. Wie der Artikel in Anknüpfung an Überlegungen Axel Honneths empirisch zeigt, liegt der Kern der Arbeiterkritik unter diesen Umständen in einem Unrechtsbewusstsein, das negativ durch den Bezug auf Übertretungen impliziter Erwartungen und Moralökonomien bestimmt ist. Dieser Zugang ermöglicht ein umfangreicheres und nuancierteres Verständnis der politischen Orientierungen von ArbeiterInnen, als es öffentliche Diskurse um einen vermeintlichen politischen Rechtsdrift der Arbeiterschaft nahelegen.This paper maps forms of everyday social critique among German production workers. From in-depth interviews with manual workers in industry, crafts and construction, it reconstructs seven typical repertoires of workers' critique pertaining to the justice dimensions of redistribution, symbolic recognition and political representation. The everyday social critique of workers elucidates central forms of political consciousness developed by dominated groups under the conditions of a demobilised class society. This refers to a situation in which class relations remain formative for objective positions and everyday experience, but cultural expressions of collective class identity and political channels of representation have become fragmented or are entirely lacking. Taking up theorisations by Axel Honneth, the article shows that the core of workers' critique under these circumstances lies in a sense of injustice attentive to transgressions of implicit moral economies. This approach allows for an understanding of workers' political orientations that is more comprehensive and nuanced than that afforded by an exclusive focus on radical right tendencies among the working class.Cet article entreprend de cartographier la critique sociale exprimée au quotidien par des travailleurs et travailleuses allemands du secteur productif dans le cadre d’entretiens informels. Cet article identifie sept répertoires typiques de cette critique axés sur différentes dimensions de la justice que sont la redistribution économique, la reconnaissance symbolique et la représentation politique. Il apparaît que la critique formulée au quotidien par les travailleurs et les travailleuses illustre certaines caractéristiques centrales de la conscience politique que les groupes dominés développent dans le contexte d’une société de classes démobilisée. Par là il faut entendre un état dans lequel les rapports de classes restent déterminants pour les situations objectives et le vécu quotidien tandis que les formes d’expression culturelles de l’identité collective de classe et les canaux de représentation politique sont fragilisés ou font entièrement défaut. Comme le montre cet article de manière empirique dans le prolongement des réflexions d’Axel Honneth, dans ces conditions la critique formulée par les travailleurs et les travailleuses repose sur une conscience de l’injustice déterminée de manière négative par référence aux violations d’attentes et d’économies morales implicites. Cette approche permet une compréhension plus globale et plus nuancée des orientations politiques des travailleurs et des travailleuses que les discours politiques sur une présumée droitisation de la classe ouvrière
Moral Disapproval: The Political Consciousness of the Demobilized Working Class
No full textThis study maps latent forms of political consciousness in the contemporary working class, moving beyond a narrow focus on far-right leanings among workers. Based on in-depth interviews with German manual workers, we reconstruct how workers criticize injustices of redistribution, recognition, and representation. We show that rather than any systematic political ideology, what dominates workers’ accounts is the moral scandalization of broken promises and violated expectations. The political consciousness of workers is defined by a reactive sense of injustice centered on violations of an implicit social contract. Building on Axel Honneth and Klaus Dörre, we interpret this as symptomatic of the political horizon of “demobilized class societies”. These are societies that continue to be structured by class relations but in which class-based identities and political representation channels have fragmented. Lacking a sense of collective agency, workers retreat to a defensive position centered on warding off the transgressions of groups above (the rich, bosses, and politicians) and below (‘takers’, intruders, and cheats). Politically, the moral grammar of the demobilized working class is ambivalent and contains openings for both right- and left-wing mobilization
Pre-political bases of a new cleavage? : social identities, moral economy, and classed politics in Germany
Full text linkThe thesis takes up debates about emerging ‘cultural class conflicts’ between workers and a left-liberal new middle class. Such conflicts are said to be fought over issues like migration and diversity, law-and-order, or cultural liberalization; and to be rooted in diverging lifestyles and moral intuitions of communitarian, ‘down-to-earth’ workers and cosmopolitan middle class ‘frequent travelers’ (Calhoun 2002). Influential diagnoses describe the conflict of these worldviews as one that pits large sociopolitical groups against one another, not only in the form of ideologically polarized camps, but also on the deeper, more visceral level of social identities. The study interrogates this diagnosis empirically, centering on Germany and using a mixed-method interview- and survey-based design. It reconstructs the contours and sociostructural roots of key ideological divides in the German population, and explores to what extent the social identities of crucial class fractions can be said to polarize along a new set of divides.
Guiding the analysis is the analytically most advanced scientific formulation of some of the core assumptions behind the ‘new cultural class conflict’ discourse: scholarship on the rise of a new cleavage of universalism and particularism (Häusermann and Kriesi 2015). This research tradition centers on a divide over transnationalization, authoritarianism, and welfare deservingness, articulated by New Left and Radical Right parties, whose class bases are said to be found among middle class sociocultural professionals on the one hand, and production workers on the other. The study contextualizes the diagnosis of a new cleavage as one attempt of coming to grips with the reordering of class and politics in postindustrial societies. That problematic is shared by a second tradition drawn on here, Bourdieusian research on new forms of “classed politics” (Jarness, Flemmen, and Rosenlund 2019). Both approaches see a continued salience of social structure in postindustrial ideological alignments, which they identify with similar, multi-dimensional understandings of class. Further, both approaches focalize the mediating position of social identities between social structure and political alignments (Bornschier et al. 2021).
In a two-step empirical study, neo-Bourdieusian and cleavage approaches are brought into conversation on two levels. The first is the spatial reconstruction of correspondences between social structure and ideological polarities. This forms the object of the first part of the analysis, which develops a geometrical reconstruction of the German sociopolitical space, analyzing data from the 2018 General Population Survey ALLBUS, using the technique of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). The goal is a holistic reconstruction of the contemporary linkages between social structure and ideological divides, or what I call the class-political constellation. This reconstruction also serves to interrogate the idea of a rift sorting classes and class fractions into opposing ideological camps. Results confirm that the German political space is “classed”, with considerable correspondences between ideological positionings and social positions. A cartwheel-shaped constellation of four divides – between redistribution and property, universalism and particularism, left and right, and anti-populist ‘high’ and populist ‘low’ politics – structures the German political space. This constellation corresponds to vertical and horizontal social divides based on the volume and composition of capitals. Issues of universalism-particularism form a central divide that separates workers and sociocultural professionals, among other groups, confirming findings of the new cleavage literature.
Putting this framework in dialogue with Bourdieusian political sociology, the MCA also reveals that the class-political constellation does not take the form of Manichaean political camps, but that of a gradational space. Instead of coherent and polarized camps, cleavage poles describe loose clusters connected by family resemblances. Coherent universalists and particularists are minorities, the majority stands in between. Overall, the polarization of the space is limited and there is an ideological center encompassing positions on which very large majorities concur. Sociopolitical divides that are salient are multidimensional and do not align on a single line of conflict. Further, the political space is not only structured by differences in political opinions but also by degrees of exclusion from politics altogether, with lower strata, particularly workers, on the excluded side. This first step of the analysis paints a nuanced picture that refutes central assumptions of ‘cultural class conflict’ discourses, while upholding the centrality of class and inequality for political and ideological alignments.
It also sets the stage for the second, more extensive part of the study, which centers on classed forms of social identity. In cleavage theory, speaking of a full-blown cleavage requires not only the coincidence of social bases and voting tendencies, but also the formation of distinct group identities and modes of normative integration. This sociocultural or identity level of cleavages has largely been neglected in past cleavage scholarship or treated in a reductionist way. The second part of the study aims at this gap, and digs into the pre-political realm of identification and social morality, below and beyond the sphere of party competition. It asks whether and how the divide of universalism-particularism rests on deeper pre-political bases of classed identification, zooming in on the class fractions most distant on the universalism-particularism divide in the quantative analysis: production workers and middle class sociocultural professionals.
Theoretically, this part draws on Bourdieusian cultural class analysis (Savage 2012). It unpacks the elusive concept of identity into three more specific relational components (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). These are a) self-understandings embedded in a sense of social location, expressed relationally through symbolic boundaries; b) moral boundaries and moral economies; and c) relations to politics, i.e. what “politics” is to people and how it relates to who they are. Against intellectualist understandings of public opinion, this approach highlights the non-ideological and pre-reflexive articulation of positionings through embodied, intuitive schemes of categorization which Bourdieu calls habitus. The basic idea is that the regularities of political positionings among ordinary, i.e. non-expert citizens generally do not spring from coherent ideological orientations regarding political conflict, but from basic practical schemes and modes of thought embedded in wider forms of life.
Empirically, this part draws on 50 in-depth interviews with Millenial cohort production workers and sociocultural professionals in Germany. Interviews centered on self-understandings, asking respondents to describe “the type of person you are”. The line of questioning was deliberately kept open, leaving the respondents a lot of space to focalize elements of their self-understanding they wanted to highlight. Cleavage-related issues, and political positionings overall, were deliberately not prompted, leaving open whether they were salient or not. Similarly, the analysis of the interviews, based on techniques of the Documentary Method, reconstructed classed forms of social self-location, morality, and relations to politics in a holistic way, and only then asked for the role that cleavage-related identification played in them.
The results of this second step of the analysis are in-depth portraits of six diverse clusters of sociomoral identities and relations to politics found in the two class fractions. Workers clusters include rural, status quo- and respectability-oriented Working Class Conservatives; Social Populists negotiating a perceived loss of status as manual workers by sharp boundary drawing against both those above and those below; individualized Pragmatic Privatists living by a creed of ‘live and let live’; as well as Alternative Workers whose activism leads them to a disidentication from the working class. Among the sociocultural professionals sample, a cluster of caring, recognition-focused Social Therapists is distinguished from an expertise-centered and socially distinctive cluster of High Liberals. Each of these clusters stands for common entanglements of social location, identity, and morality, entanglements that are also reflected in specific relations to politics and political positionings. What emerges is a panorama of diverse social identities within the two classes, directly mirroring findings of the quantative analysis.
The core of each of the social identity clusters is situated in a specific moral project. These are captured e.g. as the pursuit of embeddedness among Working Class Conservatives, of deservingness among Social Populists, of autonomy among Pragmatic Privatists, of solidarity among Alternative Workers; flourishing among Social Therapists, and expertise among High Liberals. Each moral project is anchored in a specific sense of social location which respondents seek to revaluate. Doing so, they each draw on a specific set of identity categories, demarcations from specific others, distinct forms of occupational and gendered ethos, as well as invocations of implicit social contracts inscribed in the wider moral economy. These pre-political constellations furnish the central categories also for political positionings, and thus mediate between social structure and political ideology. In this way, the study paints a rich picture of social identity processes among two classes central for recent debates of realignment. It is shown that the coherent, ideological, conflictual, and dualistic picture of cleavage conflict does not describe the vernacular in which most people develop their views in everyday life. Instead, the politics of ordinary people is an appendix of pre-political moral projects situated in social structure. To understand the pre-political realm, we need a different vocabulary than that suggested by diagnoses of ideological conflict and ‘culture wars’. Yet, there are specific instances and dynamics by which pre-political identity constellations do provide openings for the formation of a new cleavage. These give important insights into potentials for future realignment. In this sense, the findings of this part of the study are two-fold. On the one hand, it identifies some crucial sites and dynamics by which classed social identities provide a “mobilization potential” for a deeper politicization of the universalism-particularism divide. But at the same time, it shows that as a diagnosis of an existing state of social division, the geological imaginary of a new cleavage rift running through all of the social sphere is misleading.
While discourses about a ‘new cultural class conflict’ are thus rejected, the diagnosis of a new cleavage is confirmed as a description of the structural underpinnings of an important pattern of partisan alignment and, to some degree, partisan identification. The diagnosis is shown to be much less accurate in the realm of pre-political identities, where a new cleavage only exists as a set of more or less diffuse potentials. Is German society ripped into antagonistic halves or thirds by the cultural conflict of a high education, frequent-flying universalist new middle class looking down on a rooted and traditional particularist working class which resents them? The answer this study gives is: no, not really. But political actors who want to make such a conflict reality could draw on a range of distinct potentials and openings
Triggerpunkte: Konsens und Konflikt in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft. Transkripte der Fokusgruppeninterviews
No full textDE: Der im Rahmen des Leibniz-Projekts "Neue Ungleichheiten, neue Spaltungen? Eine politische Soziologie der Gegenwartsgesellschaft" entstandene Datensatz enthält Transkripte von sechs Diskussionsgruppen (sogenannte Fokusgruppen). In Kooperation mit Ipsos wurden im November 2021 in Berlin und im Mai 2022 in Essen jeweils drei Fokusgruppeninterviews durchgeführt, jeweils mit sechs bis neun Teilnehmenden und begleitender Moderation. Mittels eines Rekrutierungsfragebogens wurden in beiden Regionen je drei Fokusgruppen zusammengesetzt: eine mit Angehörigen der unteren Mittelschicht, eine mit Angehörigen der oberen Mittelschicht und eine mit Personen, die gegenläufige Wertorientierungen vertreten (sogenannte KRISIS-Gruppen). Es wurde zudem auf ein möglichst ausgewogenes Verhältnis aus verschiedenen Altersgruppen (16 bis 75 Jahre), Geschlechtern, Wohnorten, Bildungsniveaus und Berufen geachtet. Für die Fokusgruppeninterviews wurden brisante mediale Schlagzeilen als Diskussionsstimuli genutzt, um subjektive Wahrnehmungen und Argumente der Teilnehmenden zu jeweils themenbezogenen Ungleichheitskritiken und -rechtfertigungen zu erfassen. Es wurden zusätzlich demografische Merkmale (Alter, Geschlecht, Wohnort, sozioökonomischer Status etc.) und Werteinstellungen zu den verschiedenen Arenen der Ungleichheit erfasst. Die sechs anonymisierten Transkripte stehen bei Qualiservice zur wissenschaftlichen Nachnutzung in der Forschung und der akademischen Lehre zur Verfügung. Nachnutzungspotenziale bestehen u.a. für die Analyse von politischen Diskursen sowie von Alltagswahrnehmungen und -theorien zu sozialer Ungleichheit, Migrationspolitik, sozialer Diversität und Klimaschutz. Auch für Studien zu moralischen Argumentationsweisen in politischen Debatten, gesellschaftlicher Polarisierung und sozialem Zusammenhalt eignen sich diese Daten. Weitere Nachnutzungspotenziale bietet die Verwendung der zugehörigen Umfragedaten (n=2530), die als quantitativer Teil dieses Datensatzes bei GESIS archiviert sind.
EN: The dataset contains transcripts from six discussion groups (focus group interviews). In cooperation with Ipsos, three discussion groups were conducted in Berlin (Germany) in November 2021 and three in Essen (Germany) in May 2022, each with six to nine people and accompanying moderation. These focus groups were put together using a recruitment questionnaire: In each of the two regions, there was one group with members of the lower class, one with members of the upper middle class and one with people representing opposing value orientations (KRISIS groups). Furthermore it was ensured that the participants represent different age groups (16 to 75 years), genders, places of residence (rural versus urban), educational levels and professions. For the focus group interviews, controversial media headlines were used as discussion stimuli to capture the participants' subjective perceptions and arguments on topic-related criticisms and justifications of social inequality. Additionally, a range of different demographic characteristics (age, gender, place of residence, socio-economic status, etc.) and value orientations was recorded. Six anonymised transcripts are available at Qualiservice for scientific re-use in research and teaching. Potentials for secondary use include analyses of political discourse, everyday-perceptions and theories of social inequality, migration policy, social diversity and climate protection. The data is also suitable for studies on moral argumentation in political debates, polarisation of society and social cohesion. Further potential for secondary use is provided by the possible use of the corresponding survey data (n=2530) archived at GESIS as the quantitative part of this dataset
Mau, Steffen; Lux, Thomas & Westheuser, Linus (2023). Triggerpunkte. Konsens und Konflikt in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. 540 Seiten, ISBN: 978-3-518-02984-8, 25,00 Euro / Mau, Steffen (2024). Ungleich vereint. Warum der Osten anders bleibt, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. 168 Seiten, ISBN: 978-3-518-02989-3, 18,00 Euro
Full text linkSammelrezension: 1) Mau, Steffen; Lux, Thomas & Westheuser, Linus: Triggerpunkte - Konsens und Konflikt in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag 2023. ISBN 978-3-518-02984-8. 2) Mau, Steffen: Ungleich vereint - Warum der Osten anders bleibt. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag 2024. ISBN 978-3-518-02989-3. 3
"Obviously I'm not a dick, right?": positioning masculine identities on the mediated conversational floor of a television game show
Full text link"In this essay the author will look at a group of four male students watching the dating and game show 'Take Me Out' and in this context analyze the construction of masculinities through conversational practice. The theoretical background of this study is provided by the analysis of media consumption as interaction on a 'mediated conversational floor' put forward by Helen Wood, and the positioning approach to gendered identities as developed by Neill Korobov and Micheal Bamberg. Synthesizing both perspectives he will approach the collected data to ask how the participants use the conversational frame of communal TV watching for positioning themselves; and in what way the recourse to masculinity, in relation to other features, becomes a significant object of these positionings. After starting with a further elaboration of this research question in the light of the mentioned theories, he will introduce the context and realization of the study. He will then go on to analyze selected sequences from the obtained data. Concludingly the author will summarize the results and briefly discuss their implications." (author's abstract
The symbolic politics of populism reflects the class alliances it attempts to assemble
No full textLinus Westheuser links the study of populism as a stylistic repertoire with Bourdieu’s class analysis. This repertoire, which draws on symbols of ‘the popular’ produced in non-political fields like food and leisure, is situated in the struggle over the classification of groups
Doing gender
Full text linkDoing Gender gilt als Zentralbegriff der interaktionistischen Geschlechterforschung. Er fokussiert, wie Menschen im Alltag Geschlecht inszenieren, beobachten und relevant machen. Statt Geschlecht als Eigenschaft von Individuen zu begreifen oder den beiden Großgruppen ‚Männer’ und ‚Frauen’ zuzurechnen, wird Geschlecht mithilfe der Doing Gender-Perspektive als Ergebnis einer Vielzahl alltäglicher, situationsspezifischer Unterscheidungen aufgefasst und untersucht
Attentes blessées. La grammaire de la conscience politique des travailleurs et travailleuses
No full textDer Beitrag nimmt eine Kartierung der alltäglichen Gesellschaftskritik vor, die deutsche ProduktionsarbeiterInnen in informellen Interviewsettings äußern. Er rekonstruiert sieben typische Repertoires der Arbeiterkritik entlang der Gerechtigkeitsdimensionen ökonomischer Umverteilung, symbolischer Anerkennung und politischer Repräsentation. Die Alltagskritik der ArbeiterInnen veranschaulicht zentrale Charakteristika jenes politischen Bewusstseins, das dominierte Gruppen unter den Bedingungen einer demobilisierten Klassengesellschaft entwickeln. Damit ist ein Zustand gemeint, in dem Klassenverhältnisse zwar für objektive Lagen und Alltagserleben prägend bleiben, kulturelle Ausdrucksformen kollektiver Klassenidentität und politische Repräsentationskanäle aber brüchig geworden sind oder gänzlich fehlen. Wie der Artikel in Anknüpfung an Überlegungen Axel Honneths empirisch zeigt, liegt der Kern der Arbeiterkritik unter diesen Umständen in einem Unrechtsbewusstsein, das negativ durch den Bezug auf Übertretungen impliziter Erwartungen und Moralökonomien bestimmt ist. Dieser Zugang ermöglicht ein umfangreicheres und nuancierteres Verständnis der politischen Orientierungen von ArbeiterInnen, als es öffentliche Diskurse um einen vermeintlichen politischen Rechtsdrift der Arbeiterschaft nahelegen.This paper maps forms of everyday social critique among German production workers. From in-depth interviews with manual workers in industry, crafts and construction, it reconstructs seven typical repertoires of workers’ critique pertaining to the justice dimensions of redistribution, symbolic recognition and political representation. The everyday social critique of workers elucidates central forms of political consciousness developed by dominated groups under the conditions of a demobilised class society. This refers to a situation in which class relations remain formative for objective positions and everyday experience, but cultural expressions of collective class identity and political channels of representation have become fragmented or are entirely lacking. Taking up theorisations by Axel Honneth, the article shows that the core of workers’ critique under these circumstances lies in a sense of injustice attentive to transgressions of implicit moral economies. This approach allows for an understanding of workers’ political orientations that is more comprehensive and nuanced than that afforded by an exclusive focus on radical right tendencies among the working class.Cet article entreprend de cartographier la critique sociale exprimée au quotidien par des travailleurs et travailleuses allemands du secteur productif dans le cadre d’entretiens informels. Cet article identifie sept répertoires typiques de cette critique axés sur différentes dimensions de la justice que sont la redistribution économique, la reconnaissance symbolique et la représentation politique. Il apparaît que la critique formulée au quotidien par les travailleurs et les travailleuses illustre certaines caractéristiques centrales de la conscience politique que les groupes dominés développent dans le contexte d’une société de classes démobilisée. Par là il faut entendre un état dans lequel les rapports de classes restent déterminants pour les situations objectives et le vécu quotidien tandis que les formes d’expression culturelles de l’identité collective de classe et les canaux de représentation politique sont fragilisés ou font entièrement défaut. Comme le montre cet article de manière empirique dans le prolongement des réflexions d’Axel Honneth, dans ces conditions la critique formulée par les travailleurs et les travailleuses repose sur une conscience de l’injustice déterminée de manière négative par référence aux violations d’attentes et d’économies morales implicites. Cette approche permet une compréhension plus globale et plus nuancée des orientations politiques des travailleurs et des travailleuses que les discours politiques sur une présumée droitisation de la classe ouvrière.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (1018)Peer Reviewe
Männer, Frauen und Stefan Hirschauer: Undoing gender zwischen Praxeologie und rhetorischer Modernisierung
Full text linkStefan Hirschauers Konzept des undoing gender erhebt den Anspruch, durch den systematischen Einbezug der Inaktivierung von Geschlecht die Annahmen der ethnomethodologischen Geschlechtersoziologie zu komplementieren und zu radikalisieren. Der Artikel rekonstruiert diesen Ansatz im Licht der soziologischen Praxeologie und konfrontiert ihn mit empirischen Befunden. Hirschauers Überlegungen liefern interessante Impulse für eine praxeologische Geschlechtersoziologie und eignen sich zur Analyse widersprüchlicher Dynamiken interaktiver Vergeschlechtlichungspraktiken. Seine Annahmen zu institutioneller Einbettung, Wandel und Politik der Geschlechter hingegen erweisen sich als theoretisch und empirisch weniger tragfähig.Stefan Hirschauer's concept of undoing gender claims to complement and radicalize the findings of ethnomethodological gender sociology by systematically taking into account the deactivation of gender. The article reconstructs this approach in the light of sociological praxeology and confronts it with empirical evidence. Hirschauer's propositions offer valuable impulses for a praxeological sociology of gender and are well suited to analyzing contradictory interactional practices of gendering. Assumptions about the institutional embedding, historical change and politics of gender, on the other hand, prove to be theoretically and empirically less sound
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