Introduction to Social Analysis

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Introduction to Social Analysis

• Week 3, Interviewing workers

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What does work do to people?

• One level impacts on their bodies, industrial
  diseases, from miners lung, to RSI.
• On a social level we know it affects how people
  behave, a teacher talks in a loud voice and is
  for ever explaining things to people. Prison
  warders and traffic wardens as a personality
  type.
• Are there more profound social effects? We know
  historically it was difficult to turn rural folk,
  peasants into a reliable efficient industrial
  work force. What about the change impact as
  industrial work changes and disappears.

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What does work do to people?

• How and why is work constitutive of the person?
• How do people internalise or resist social
  stratification and unequal relationships?

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Charlie Chaplin Modern Times
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• Why and how do people get a sense of self worth
  from work?
• Just a cog in the machine
• Work and it meaning has changed over time
• The question Who cleans the toilets? is the
  best question to understand the social
  stratification anywhere.
• How does the person who cleans the toilets
  sustain a positive self identity

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• Studies
• Sennett and Cobb 1972 The Hidden Injuries of
  Class Cambridge University Press 301.44 SEN
• Account of interviews with working men in Boston.

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Sennet and Cobb, Hidden Injuries of Class

• Based around interviews with working men in
  Boston in 1950s.
• These men were materially more affluent than
  their parents and many were second generation
  immigrants. They had experienced post war boom
  with drastic changes in occupational structure,
  in particular the growth of white collar work and
  the drop in industrial occupations.
• But to Sennet and Cobb they seemed angry and
  discontent and ambivalent about their
  circumstances. This discontent was not that they
  were poorer than others but more fundamental and
  difficult to articulate.
• Sennet and Cobb put this down to the consequences
  of class in a meritocractic society. i.e. one in
  which class difference in power and respect is
  legitimated by badges of ability educational
  certification. People are at the top because they
  have demonstrated greater ability (to get to the
  top).

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Sennet and Cobbs book is about the social
psychology of class relationships.

• How do those at the bottom of a society which
  sees its-self as a successful individualistic
  meritocracy deal with this situation?
• Does the manual worker accept that he is
  untalented stupid or how does he reconcile
  himself to his social position?
• Their subjects were aware of the changes to their
  lives associated with the spread of affluence,
  white collar jobs and the decline of the old
  neighbourhoods had caused. These working people
  of Boston are trying find what position they
  occupy in America as a whole and it is not simply
  counted in terms of material wellbeing.
• For the people we interviewed, integration into
  American life meant integration into world with
  different symbols of human respect and courtesy,
  a world in which human capabilities are measured
  in terms profoundly alien to those the prevailed
  in the ethnic enclaves of the childhood.
• Masculinity, strength, manual dexterity,
  toughness, generosity, loyalty, directness . But
  to be middle class is to put on a veneer of
  polite insincerity necessary for white collar
  work, almost to be effeminate. It doesnt produce
  anything valuable only more paper.

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• The change in their lives means more to them
  than a the chance, or failure, to acquire middle
  class things. For them history is challenging
  them and their children to become cultured in
  the intellectuals sense of that word, if they
  want to achieve respect in the new American terms
  and toward that challenge they deeply
  ambivalent..
• They Illustrate this point with the interviews
  with a man Rossarro who they describe as feeling
  illegitimate intruder despite his apparent
  material success with his entrance to the
  middle-class world of neat suburban lawns,
  peaceable families, happy friendships. Despite
  the fact that he gained entree he doesnt believe
  he deserves to be respected even by his better
  educated wife.
• Rossarro sees poverty... as depriving men of the
  capacity to act rationally, to exercise
  self-control. A poor man, therefore, has to want
  upward mobility in order to establish dignity in
  his own life, and dignity means specifically
  moving toward a position in which he deals with
  the world in some controlled, emotionally
  restrained way.

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• Rissarro believes people of a higher class have a
  power to judge him because they seem internally
  more developed human beings and he is afraid
  because they are better armed they will not
  respect him. He feels compelled to justify his
  own position and in his life he has felt
  compelled to put himself up on their level in
  order to earn respect. .- all of this is set
  against a revulsion against the work of educated
  people in the bank and feeling that manual labour
  has more dignity.
• The American Dream for my father is to see his
  kids get a college education, something he never
  had. he never really forced it on us, but we
  know that this was really going to make him happy
  - that we could get a college degree.

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• Sennet suggest people react to power in much more
  complicated ways.
• Working people feel society has limited their
  freedom more than it has limited that of
  middle-class people - by which they mean society
  has limited their freedom to develop powers
  inside themselves not just restricted how much
  money they can make - but they not rebellious in
  the ordinary sense of the word the are both
  angry and ambivalent about their right be angry

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• Sennet and Cobb argue that if we want to make
  sense of these confusing metaphors of self-worth
  we need to recast them as issues of freedom and
  dignity.
• Class is a system for limiting freedom it limits
  the freedom of the powerful in dealing with other
  people, because the strong are constricted within
  the circle of action that maintains their power
  class constricts the weak more obviously in that
  they must obey commands.
• They ask What happens to the dignity men see in
  themselves and in each other when their freedom
  is checked by class?

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• Ability as the badge of an individual - ability
  is the badge of individual worth,
• calculations of ability create an image of few
  individual standing out from the mass,
• that to be an individual by virtue of ability is
  to have the right to transcend ones social
  origins.
• These are the basic supposition of a society that
  produces feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy
  in the lives of people like Rissarro, Kartides
  and James three of their informants.
• To connect the ideology and the people we need to
  understand what happens to people when they wear
  badges of ability.
• Whom shall I marry? I choose, but the secret
  question more destructive, am I the kind of
  person worth loving?
• Leaves the necessity of proving oneself in a
  meritocratic society.

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• An authority judges freedom and dignity
• What values society spawns to legitimise the few
  come to control the lives of many convince the
  worker that he ought to submit his labour to the
  will of others.
• This idea of legitimacy is rather more complex
  than it first appears. If a man feels he obeys
  someone he ought to obey what happens to his own
  self-image? The foreman tells a worker he will
  have to work extra hours if he wants to keep his
  job. During an economic depression the workers
  freedom is in this way diminished, of course. But
  if the worker feels the foreman has the right to
  take away his freedom, how can the man feel he
  has any rights, how can he respect himself?
• Where power becomes legitimate, whatever dignity
  a man accord to this rule, he must necessarily
  deny himself.
• Now the badge of ability seems the perfect tool
  to legitimise power.
• this concept of human potential says that the few
  are more richly endowed than the many. Having
  demonstrated more ability and gained more
  dignity by virtue of greater personal power, it
  is logical that they ought to rule the many.
• the more they /the masses/ surrender their own
  freedom to the few the less chance they have of
  respecting themselves as people with any
  countervailing rights.

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sacrifice

• If you feel inadequate and unfulfilled in
  demonstrating your worth, it helps to be doing it
  for the good of someone-else / the kids/. If
  wearing a badge of ability is alienating, wear it
  so that the rewards will give a person whom you
  love a better life. .
• But that material calculation is not enough.
  Sacrifice as an attempt to redeem the traumas in
  a persons life, become divided into unequal
  classes of experience. By this we mean that a
  working class person has less chance than a
  middle class person of sacrificing successfully.
  Class definitions intrude to derail him from a
  sense that he has made an effective gift of his
  own struggles to someone else. To understand the
  inability of a working class person to sacrifice
  successfully we should start by looking at an
  unspoken social contract demanded by sacrificial
  acts.
• I have worked hard for you - you must do what I
  want. Sacrifice and fear of betrayal leads to
  competitiveness in childrens achievements. the
  tragedy of the loving sacrifice is that those who
  are pushed to feel grateful cannot
• The sacrificer feels anger and betrayal at the
  those who dont sacrifice - welfare scroungers
  the shameless who get good sex, relaxation, fun
  time.
• Sacrifice then legitimises a person view of
  himself as an individual with the right to feel
  anger. That is anger of peculiar focused sort in
  setting you off as an individual, a virtuous
  person compared to less forceful others,
  self-denial makes possible the ultimate
  perversion of love, it permits you to practice
  that most insidious and devastating form of
  self-righteousness where you, oppressed, in your
  anger turn on others who are also oppressed
  rather than on those intangible, impersonal
  forces that have made you all vulnerable.

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• The striving to become a developed and therefore
  respect-able person is an incentive that keeps
  men consuming and working hard.
• As we have argued throughout this book, the
  power of class today is not that it makes
  individual psychology reflect the behaviour of
  the system - we reject for instance Marcuses
  idea that people on the bottom have tastes
  similar to those on the top and therefore keep
  the Establishment alive. Rather the way in which
  people try to keep free of the emotional grip of
  the social structure, unintentionally
  systematically in aggregate keeps the class order
  going.

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.

• Next week
• Pei-Chia Lan 2006 Global Cinderellas Migrant
  Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan Duke
  University Press.

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• Lamont, Michele, 2000 The dignity of working men
  morality and the boundaries of race, class, and
  immigration New York Russell Sage Foundation,
  Harvard University Press,
• Contrasts French and American perspectives on
  race and class and the way people construct
  valued identities. A key difference being that is
  France but not the US, race is constructed as a
  badge of foreign or immigrant status.

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• Arlie Hochschilde (1983) The Managed Heart
• A study of emotional work, flight attendants (air
  hostesses) and debt collectors.

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• Links to Goffman, who ideas we explore next week,
  through a discussion of acting.
• She distinguished surface acting, being able to
  give the impression of emotion through control of
  facial muscles and imitative action which is
  fragile and limited in sustainability
• from method acting, in which through
  imaginatively thinking into a situation real
  emotions are felt which thus expressed in their
  full, complex and more sustainable manner

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Emotion as signal

• One model of emotion as simply a biological
  reponses felt in as a consequence of particular
  stimulii.
• But emotion is felt as an interaction between the
  body and the conscious brain and active subject.
• People can conjure up emotions, feel them and
  change them by conscious thought people try and
  manipulate their mood and feelings.
• Emotions give a signal as to feelings and
  behaviour which are not governed by rational or
  calculative decisions. We wouldnt be human
  without emotion. How emotions are labelled and
  interpreted is cultural

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• Training schools
• Advice on how to maintain commercially desirable
  attitudes and behaviour towards passengers and
  clients.
• Displacement, think positively, think of the
  drunk with the wandering hands as a child, think
  that his wife has just died

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• Gendered division of emotional labour
• As a result of this status effect, flight
  attending is one sort of job for a woman and
  another sort of job for a man. For a man the
  principal hidden task is to maintain his identity
  as a man in a womans occupation and
  occasionally to cope with tough passengers for
  female flight attendants. For a woman, the
  principle hidden task is to deal with the status
  effect the absence of a social shield against
  the displaced anger and frustration of
  passengers.
• Male authority and willingness of others to obey
• Hostess sexual and domestic (food)
  availability. Female mothering nurturing role
• Male aggression as required for debt collecting

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• Last chapter is called the search for
  authenticity
• The human costs of emotional labour
• Acting and knowing ones true self
• Those who perform emotional labor in the course
  of giving service are like those who perform
  physical labor in the course of making things
  both are subject to the rules of mass production.
  But when the product- the thing to be engineered,
  mass-produced, and subjected to speed up and
  slowdown is a smile, a mood, a feeling, or a
  relationship, it come to belong more to the
  organization and less to the self. And so in the
  country that most publicly celebrates the
  individual, more people privately wonder, without
  tracing the questions to its deepest social root
  What do I really feel?