Vol. 17/2024
No. 1. (Neu-)Verhandlungen der Erwerbsarbeitsnorm in Zeiten gesellschaftlicher Transformation
Karim, Sarah; Manstetten, Ruth [Publishing editor]
Content
Scientific article
Editorial: (Neu-)Verhandlungen der Erwerbsarbeitsnorm in Zeiten gesellschaftlicher Transformation / Karim, Sarah [Autor:in] … – 2024
Karim, Sarah; Manstetten, Ruth
Pages: 1-11
Scientific article
Real existing postwork society? weakening and perpetuating the wage norm in rural peripheries
Boemke, Laura; Laufenberg, Mike
Abstract:
The debate about the shortage of skilled workers in Germany obscures the broader issue of diminished labour demand in industrialized societies, which is reflected in underemployment, hidden unemployment and state-subsidized employment in addition to the consolidation of long-term unemployment. This article considers these developments as expressions of long-term structural changes in the labour market. They illustrate an increasing decoupling of global economic and employment trends and materialize disparately across geographical regions. By examining four structurally weak regions in Germany, the article explores the declining livelihood security and social integration through waged labour in rural peripheries. Local labour market policies respond to this crisis of social reproduction through contradictory „fixes“. On the one hand, they seem to adhere to the wage norm, while on the other hand, they reorganize work in ways that weaken traditional forms of employed/waged labour. In this pendulum movement between softening and restoring the employment norm, the local welfare state itself becomes the co-producer of a post-wage-work society. The article shows how new forms of post wage work, under current conditions, go hand in hand with precarisation and impoverishment, while the contradictory approaches of local labour market policies simultaneously enable subversive and critical reinterpretations of wage labour. The latter, as this article concludes, should serve as the reference point for any future social policy aiming to enforce and realize the emancipatory potentials of a post-work society.
Pages: 12-23
Scientific article
Distributive labour and active dependencies : outlines of a sociology of distribution beyond the wage-labour norm
Manstetten, Ruth
Abstract:
Sociological research on poverty and unemployment is often based on employment-normative typologies, which can lead to misleading representations of the jobless as passive and dependent. In contrast, the concept of ‚distributive labour‘ developed by Ferguson (2015) in the South African context breaks with the association of non-work with dependency and passivity by describing activities as ‚labour‘ that transfer resources from the richer to the poorer, often building on relationships of ‚active dependency‘. Against this background, this article discusses the terminological and empirical potential of the term ‚distributive labour‘ in the German context. Based on 25 interviews with people excluded from wage labour, the findings raise questions about the success and failure of distributive labour linked to local social policies and the wage-labour norm. The contribution highlights the empirical benefits as well as the terminological weaknesses of notions of distributive labour in the context of highly fragile livelihood practices.
Pages: 24-40
Scientific article
The social positioning of solo self-employed during the corona pandemic : negotiations of solidarity
Schürmann, Lena
Abstract:
This paper investigates the relationship between solidarity and the norm to be employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on emergency aid for solo self-employed workers. It adopts a discourse-analytical perspective, examining the governmental strategies involved and the subject norms and formations that affect them. This financial aid offered collective compensation for loss of earnings for self-employed workers who operate outside the solidarity community created by social insurance. The study queries whether this support is a unique act of solidarity or aligns with neoliberal rationalities. A subjectivation analysis explores the workers' position-making. It regards the interplay between assigned and taken subject positions, employing documents from political discourse and qualitative interviews with self-employed workers as empirical data. The analysis identifies the central justifications for financial aid and the subject norms attributed to the solo self-employed. Findings suggest that the moral sentiments expressed by the solo self-employed reflect the ambivalences discussed by Simmel (1908) regarding social aid. The temporary recognition of the solo self-employed as system-relevant underscores their importance in the capitalist infrastructure, at the same time, it does not eliminate the social stigma associated with neediness.
Pages: 41-56
Scientific article
The activated generation
Rottgardt, Nils; Ullrich, Carsten G.
Abstract:
With the return of unemployment in Germany in the 1980s the (political) need for research on this social problem arose. Two studies conducted in the mid-1980s came to the same conclusion: the dominant patterns of interpretation within German society regarding unemployment centre around structural explanations such as undesirable economic developments or a wrong economic policy. Since then, the political and economic conditions as well as the societal discourse regarding the labour market and unemployment have changed, which also suggests a change in said patterns of interpretations. Our research shows that especially young people tend to have individualized interpretations of unemployment that are based on the gainful employment norm. Two case studies will illustrate these patterns of interpretations. They will show, that in contrast to the early studies, there are almost no legitimate temporal ‚excuses‘ to not comply with the gainful employment norm.
Pages: 57-72
Scientific article
Trans* lives and wage labour : on gender regulations and micrological class struggles
Steinsberger, Zoe*
Abstract:
In this article, I critically analyse contemporary trans* labour politics in the Global North-West. Focusing on the inclusion of trans* people into the labour market and avoiding a critique of capital, I argue, they reproduce the hegemonic regulation of trans* and gender-non-conforming lives. This regulation is based on participation in wage labour, as I demonstrate. To lay out this argument, I first trace the constitution of recognizable trans* subjectivities vis-à-vis Fordist and neoliberal social and labour market policies in Austria and Germany. Against this background, I analyse contemporary trans* politics aiming the inclusion of trans* people in recognized wage work. I contrast these politics with a trans*feminist critique of the wage labour norm in an interview with a trans*feminine worker and activist. I show how this approach not only addresses trans* precarity on the terrain of recognition, but is also resistant to the regime of neoliberal wage labour.
Pages: 73-88
Scientific article
Meaningful activities and the paid labour norm: work for persons with complex disabilities between inclusion, commodification and normalisation
Karim, Sarah
Abstract:
Since the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities proclaimed the right of persons with disabilities to work, inclusive employment has become a human rights issue. While efforts to include persons with disabilities in paid labour are evident, some remain excluded. In particular, persons with complex disabilities are excluded from the general labour market as well as from sheltered workplaces. Surprisingly, while analyses about disabled persons’ positions in capitalist production processes are predestined to highlight ambivalences of the employment regime, the problematic conditions faced by persons with disabilities are not part of critical debates about the future of employment. This article contributes to the discussion of the paid labour norm by conducting an interdiscourse analysis about efforts to include persons with complex disabilities in employment-like settings. Whereas anthropological arguments about the human desire to work are made, critical perspectives on possible futures beyond labour market participation are scarce.
Pages: 89-103
Gruppeninterview: Die Erwerbsarbeitsnorm in der Kritik: Diagnosen, Kämpfe & Utopien : eine Diskussion mit Aktivist:innen aus dem Umfeld der Erwerbslosenbewegung / Manstetten, Ruth [Bearbeiter:in] … – 2024
Manstetten, Ruth; Rein, Harald; Garms, Hinrich; Animento, Stefania; Manstetten, Ruth
Pages: 104-114
Scientific article
Spontaneous volunteers as a communisation of the resilient self? : an ethnographic tracing in the wake of the "century flood 2021"
Richterich, Nils
Abstract:
The ‚Flood of the Century 2021‘ in the Ahr Valley, large parts of Western Germany, and neighbouring European countries has initiated a series of security policy discussions, generating new impulses regarding questions of resilience. In this context, my field research examined civil protection conferences – considered as apparatuses for the governance of ‚natural‘ disasters – focusing on this flood. By combining a Foucauldian and ethnomethodological understanding of problems, I investigate three conferencing practices (categorisation, integration and technicisation) in order to reconstruct the development of a communitised-resilient self. Within these practices, I use the concept of the ‚Spontanhelfende‘ (spontaneous volunteers), which is anchored in German disaster management, to show how a specific synthesis of individual and communalised resilience thinking leads to the emergence of this self. Simultaneously, this accompanying perspective provides a heuristic for examining subject positions in their emergence, further development and entanglement based on concrete governance practices.
Pages: 115-132
Scientific article
[Rezension von: Katharina Bluhm, Russland und der Westen: Ideologie, Ökonomie und Politik seit dem Ende der Sowjetunion] / [Pseudonym], Firs [Autor:in] – 2024
[Pseudonym], Firs
Pages: 133-137
Review
[Rezension von: Leonie Hunter, Tragischer Liberalismus] / Klug, Bastian [Autor:in] – 2024
Klug, Bastian
Pages: 138-140
Review
[Rezension von: Brendan Simms, Die Rückkehr des Großraums?] / Potsch, Lukas [Autor:in] – 2024
Potsch, Lukas
Pages: 141-143