Conclusions: Understanding the Implications of a Social-Symbolic Work Perspective for Scholars, Change-Makers, and Citizens

2019 ◽  
pp. 289-320
Author(s):  
Thomas B. Lawrence ◽  
Nelson Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Work Organization ◽  
Social World ◽  
Potential Importance ◽  
Institutional Work ◽  
Organizational Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

This book has introduced the social-symbolic work perspective, which revolves around the relationship between social-symbolic work and social-symbolic objects. To explore this relationship, it examined three broad forms of social-symbolic work—self work, organization work, institutional work—and prominent streams of management and organizational research associated with each. This concluding chapter moves on to a broader set of questions concerning the potential importance of a social-symbolic work perspective for different communities. In particular, it explores the implications of the social-symbolic work perspective for scholars analyzing the social world, change-makers trying to make it better, and citizens trying to understand and cope with its roaring currents of change.

Constructing Organizational Life

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas B. Lawrence ◽  
Nelson Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Work Organization ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Institutional Work ◽  
Work Identity ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Forms Of Work

Across the social sciences, scholars are showing how people “work” on facets of social life that were once thought to be beyond human intervention. Facets of social life once considered to be embedded in human nature, dictated by God, or shaped by macro‐level social forces beyond human control, are now widely understood as socially constructed – made and given meaning by people through social interaction, and consequently the focus of efforts to change them. Studies of these efforts have explored new forms of work including emotion work, identity work, boundary work, strategy work, institutional work, and a host of other kinds of work. Missing in these conversations, however, is a recognition that these forms work are all part of a broader phenomenon driven by historical shifts that began with modernity and dramatically accelerated through the twentieth century. This book explores that broader phenomenon: we propose a perspective that integrates diverse streams of research to examine how people purposefully work to construct organizational life. We refer to these efforts as social‐symbolic work and introduce three forms – self work, organization work, and institutional work – that are particularly useful in understanding how actors construct organizational life. The social‐symbolic work perspective highlights the purposeful, reflexive efforts of individuals, collective actors, and networks of actors to construct the social world, and focuses attention on the motivations, practices, resources, and effects of those efforts. Thus, the social-symbolic work perspective brings actors back into explanations of the social world, and balances approaches that emphasize social structure at the expense of action or describe social processes without explaining the role of actors.

A collective ethnographer: fieldwork experience in the Brazilian Northeast

2008 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lygia Sigaud
Keyword(s):  
Research Group ◽  
Seasonal Variations ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Brazilian Northeast ◽  
The Relationship

The article examines a 30-year experience of collective ethnography in the sugarcane plantations of Brazil's Northeast. Over this period, the research group has worked in different temporal and spatial contexts, continually exchanging its findings. The author draws on her experience as part of the research group in order to focus on the conditions of entering the field, the seasonal variations and geographic displacements, the research group's morphology and the overall implications for anthropological knowledge. Debates over ethnography have neglected the relationship between the social conditions in which anthropologists carry out their work and what they are able to write about the social world. This article sets out to fill this gap.

Institutionalizing passion in world politics: fear and empathy

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neta C. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

Emotions are a ubiquitous intersubjective element of world politics. Yet, passions are often treated as fleeting, private, reactive, and not amenable to systematic analysis. Institutionalization links the private and individual to the collective and political. Passions may become enduring through institutionalization, and thus, as much as characterizing private reactions to external phenomena, emotions structure the social world. To illustrate this argument, I describe how fear and empathy may be institutionalized, discuss the relationship between these emotions, and suggest how empathy may be both a mirror and potential antidote to individual and institutionalized fear.

scholarly journals What Do ‘We’ Know That ‘They’ Don’t? Sociologists’ versus Non-Sociologists’ Knowledge

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-696 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mesny
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Public Sociology ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Embedded Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Critical Policy ◽  
The Relationship

This paper attempts to clarify or to reposition some of the controversies generated by Burawoy’s defense of public sociology and by his vision of the mutually stimulating relationship between the different forms of sociology. Before arguing if, why, and how, sociology should or could be more ‘public’, it might be useful to reflect upon what it is we think we, as sociologists, know that ‘lay people’ do not. This paper thus explores the public sociology debate’s epistemological core, namely the issue of the relationship between sociologists’ and non-sociologists’ knowledge of the social world. Four positions regarding the status of sociologists’ knowledge versus lay people’s knowledge are explored: superiority (sociologists’ knowledge of the social world is more accurate, objective and reflexive than lay people’s knowledge, thanks to science’s methods and norms), homology (when they are made explicit, lay theories about the social world often parallel social scientists’ theories), complementarity (lay people’s and social scientists’ knowledge complement one another. The former’s local, embedded knowledge is essential to the latter’s general, disembedded knowledge), and circularity (sociologists’ knowledge continuously infuses commonsensical knowledge, and scientific knowledge about the social world is itself rooted in common sense knowledge. Each form of knowledge feeds the other). For each of these positions, implications are drawn regarding the terms, possibilities and conditions of a dialogue between sociologists and their publics, especially if we are to take the circularity thesis seriously. Conclusions point to the accountability we face towards the people we study, and to the idea that sociology is always performative, a point that has, to some extent, been obscured by Burawoy’s distinctions between professional, critical, policy and public sociologies.

Direct Action, Dramatic Action: Theatre and Situationist Theory

1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (36) ◽  
pp. 329-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham White
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Social World ◽  
King's College ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
Dramatic Action ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Relationship

In exploring the relationship between situationist theory and theatre in the period of the ‘counter-culture’ in Britain, the following article seeks to provide an account of the ‘spectacularization’ of political action through the language and forms of drama. The relatively neglected work of Raoul Vaneigem is examined for its treatment of theatricality as one of the organizing discourses of the spectacle, and the suggestion that ‘drama’ is a constant choreographic presence in the social world is explored alongside related ideas concerning the dramatization of everyday life in the work of Raymond Williams and Aida Hozic. Attempts to ‘disrupt the spectacle’ through political action during the period of the counter-culture are discussed in relation to this material. Graham White is Lecturer in English at King's College, University of London, and has been Literary Manager of the Finborough Theatre since 1990.

From paradise to brand

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-135
Author(s):  
Rainer Hülsse
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Image ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Considerable Body

Metaphors construct social reality, including the actors which populate the social world. A considerable body of research has explored this reality-constituting role of metaphors, yet little attention has been paid to the attempts of social actors to influence the metaphorical structure by which they are constituted. The present article conceptualises the relationship between actor and metaphorical structure as one of mutual constitution. Empirically, it analyses how until the late 1990s Liechtenstein was constructed as an attractive financial centre by metaphors such as haven and paradise, how then a metaphorical shift constituted the country more negatively, before Liechtenstein finally fought back: with the help of the new brand-metaphor and also a professional image campaign the country tried to repair its international image.

scholarly journals PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE DE LA CONSCIENCE NORMATIVE

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (20) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro M. S. Alves
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Social World ◽  
Classical Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Normative Judgments

Discussing from a phenomenological stance the distinction between hyletic and expressive conceptions of norms, I stress that phenomenology is able to develop an analysis of nomothetic intentionality that can surmount the opposition presented by Alchourrón and Bulygin. However, this entails a revision of the Husserlian analysis of the relationship between judgments and norms, namely of his thesis concerning the foundation of every intentional act in objectifying acts. I highlight the specificity of normative intentionality, its non-dependence on objectifying acts, and I propose to name the quality of normative acts as “ductive force”. Then, I take distance to the classical analysis of normative judgments as having the ought-form, outlining a more detailed analysis of them, namely stressing that the juridical propositions must have a richer content in order to describe norms. Then, I propose my own account based on the concept of “ductive force”. I affirm that the ductive force of norms cannot be identified only with coercion. I show that there is, even inside the juridical sphere, a variety of ductive forces, going from sheer coercion to council and recommendation. Finally, I stress the centrality of the concept of “ductive force” for a phenomenology of the social world.

scholarly journals Space and War, Constants and Change from a Historical Perspective

Geografie ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 117 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kofroň
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Relationship

This article highlights an understudied phenomenon: the relationship between space and war. War has been waged in space and over space; hence this relationship constitutes an important, yet, among geographers, rather neglected issue. The broader significance of war is evident in the fact that war has formed important features of the modern political and social world. The relationship between war and space is presented at two main levels, tactical and strategic. It is argued that despite many changes in relations between war and space, physical space remains a key issue in any war and, as such, geographers should examine it. Such an examination cannot be limited to critical approaches or geographers will fall short in competition with scholars from other fields of the social sciences.

The Social-Symbolic Work Perspective

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-52
Author(s):  
Thomas B. Lawrence ◽  
Nelson Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Work Organization ◽  
Institutional Work ◽  
Historical Changes ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Dimensions

This chapter develops the arguments that underpin the rest of the book and introduces the three forms of social-symbolic work explored in greater detail in subsequent chapters. It begins by exploring how the possibility of social-symbolic work is rooted in the historical changes associated with the transitions to modernity and postmodernity. It then develops the concept of social-symbolic work, explaining its roots in studies of social structure and agency, identifying its three key dimensions—discursive, relational, and material—and introducing three key forms of social-symbolic work (self work, organization work, institutional work). Finally, it presents a process model of social-symbolic work that guides the analysis of the different forms of social-symbolic work.

Reflexive dis/embedding: Personal narratives, empowerment and the emotional dynamics of interstitial events

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trish Ruebottom ◽  
Ellen R. Auster
Keyword(s):  
Social Bonds ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Social World ◽  
Institutional Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Emotional Dynamics

Reflexivity is required for institutional work, yet we know very little about the mechanisms for generating such understandings of the social world. We explore this gap through a case study of an interstitial event that aims to create a community of ‘change-makers’. The findings suggest that such events can generate reflexive dis/embedding through two complementary mechanisms. Specifically, personal narratives of injustice and action and individual-collective empowering generate emotional dynamics that disembed actors from their given attachments and embed them within new social bonds. Through these mechanisms, the event in the case study was able to challenge audience members’ conceptions of self and others and change their worldview. This research advances our understanding of how reflexivity can be developed by uncovering the emotional dynamics crucial to the dis/embedding of actors.

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