Dirty Work

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-168
Author(s):  
Richard Martin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Dirty Work ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Junior Officers ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Routine Work ◽  
Regulatory Standard ◽  
Everyday Work ◽  
Occupational Settings

The PSNI have promoted human rights as a central and enduring hallmark of con-temporary policing, proffering to junior officers what Ravasi and Schultz (2006: 435) describe as ‘legitimate and consistent narratives that allow them to construct a collective sense of self’. The focus of this chapter’s analysis is on how junior officers performing routine work internalized human rights, with sensemaking providing the process through which this took place. Sensemaking is a situated practice, taking place amidst individuals’ working lives and occupational settings and drawing on resources from each. In this chapter, the focus is on the Tactical Support Group. Drawing on Hughes’ (1958) concept of ‘dirty work’, this chapter introduces the occupational context within which TSG officers were making sense of human rights as a vernacular of police work. With this conceptual scaffolding in place, the chapter proceeds to identify and examine a series of counter-narratives officers attached to human rights as a normative vision for policing and a regulatory standard in their everyday work. This entailed officers re-interpreting and modifying the official rights narrative in various ways, such that the content of the narrative varied even if it served similar sensemaking goals to the official narrative: making the complex orderly, fostering self-esteem and maintaining self-legitimacy.

“Scrap-Heap Storiesˮ: Oral Narratives of Labour and Loss in Scottish Mining and Manufacturing

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-2018) ◽  
pp. 8-21
Author(s):  
Arthur McIvor
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Job Loss ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Oral Narratives ◽  
Industrial Work ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Plant Closures ◽  
The Impact

This article is an attempt to comprehend deindustrialisation and the impact of plant downsizing and closures in Scotland since the 1970s through listening to the voices of workers and reflecting on their ways of telling, whilst making some observations on how an oral history methodology can add to our understanding. It draws upon a rich bounty of oral history projects and collections undertaken in Scotland over recent decades. The lush description and often intense articulated emotion help us as academic “outsidersˮ to better understand how lives were profoundly affected by plant closures, getting us beyond statistical body counts and overly sentimentalised and nostalgic representations of industrial work to more nuanced understandings of the meanings and impacts of job loss. In recalling their lived experience of plant run-downs and closures, narrators are informing and interpreting; projecting a sense of self in the process and drawing meaning from their working lives. My argument here is that we need to listen attentively and learn from those who bore witness and try to make sense of these diverse, different and sometimes contradictory stories. We should take cognisance of silences and transgressing voices as well as dominant, hegemonic narratives if we are to deepen the conversation and understand the complex but profound impacts that deindustrialisation had on traditional working-class communities in Scotland, as well as elsewhere.

scholarly journals Making Sense of Our Working Lives: The concept of the career imagination

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 263178772110046
Author(s):  
Laurie Cohen ◽  
Joanne Duberley
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Concept ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Key Dimensions ◽  
Short Termism

This essay considers how the traditional concept of career retains its power in an age of contingency, short-termism and gig work. To answer this question, it introduces and explicates the concept of the ‘career imagination’. This concept has three key dimensions: perceptions of enablement and constraint, time and identity. Situated in the nexus of structure and agency, it is through our career imagination that we envisage and evaluate the progress of our working lives. Encapsulating continuity and change, our career imagination helps us to understand the enduring legitimacy of the traditional career as a yardstick by which to measure success, and the emergence of new possibilities.

The Hardest Part: Creating a Right of Secession

2020 ◽  
pp. 219-241
Author(s):  
Timothy William Waters
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal Rule ◽  
The State ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Legal Right

This chapter explores strategies to achieve acceptance of a right to secede, whether as a legal rule or as a model for individual states. Secession is a hard sell, and the principal battleground is moral and political. A shift in attitudes must precede the legal project; only then will people see doctrinal arguments lining up and making sense. And, after all, the goal is not a new legal right for its own sake, but a change in how societies and states behave. The chapter then considers why a formal right of secession is implausible, and what that implies about the best strategies to adopt—the narrow but real possibilities that exist. The path is indirect: It relies on transnational diffusion of norms, and for this people can draw lessons from once-improbable projects that have become orthodoxies, such as decolonization and human rights; also, recent secession attempts suggest that constitutional projects could serve as models. The path leads through many small changes, rather than a single, quixotic swerve toward a new legal rule. But because the existing global norm limits the ability to create change within states, people cannot abandon the idea of a new rule: Advocates of secession need a point of triangulation outside the state to advance their cause, and that point will be found in international law.

scholarly journals Making Sense of an Unknown Terrain

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas D. Hughes ◽  
Louise Locock ◽  
Sue Simkin ◽  
Anne Stewart ◽  
Anne E. Ferrey ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Narrative Interviews ◽  
Considerable Effort ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Self Harm ◽  
The Impact

Self-harm is common in young people, and can have profound effects on parents and other family members. We conducted narrative interviews with 41 parents and other family members of 38 young people, aged up to 25, who had self-harmed. Most of the participants were parents but included one sibling and one spouse. This article reports experiences of the parent participants. A cross-case thematic analysis showed that most participants were bewildered by self-harm. The disruption to their worldview brought about by self-harm prompted many to undergo a process of “sense-making”—by ruminative introspection, looking for information, and building a new way of seeing—to understand and come to terms with self-harm. Most participants appeared to have been successful in making sense of self-harm, though not without considerable effort and emotional struggle. Our findings provide grounds for a deeper socio-cultural understanding of the impact of self-harm on parents.

Noisy Places, Noisy People

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Ferzacca
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Gathering Place

Making noise in a basement corner of an ageing mall in Singapore affords a small community of musicians, family and friends a gathering place to meet, eat, drink, smoke and jam loud amplified music. The Doghouse is a ‘device of saturation’, a way of making sense of self and others: it exists so that this sonic community can exact possibilities and creative potential within the limits of official use of public space. Bodily scales are realized in cosmopolitan spaces where local and global interrogations in dialogue, in space, and among things, make trouble and meaning. And so some noisy people have, for now, found a playground where their urban dreams and aspirations are imagined and realized.

‘Arrest, Arrest, Arrest’

2021 ◽  
pp. 283-315
Author(s):  
Richard Martin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
High Court ◽  
Legal Standards ◽  
Everyday Work ◽  
The Face ◽  
Court Of Appeal ◽  
Police Practices

The focus of the empirical account of human rights in Part IV is on the suspect’s right to liberty in the context of police custody. In keeping with the style adopted in Part III, the discussion that follows seeks to closely analyse how particular aspects of police practices and decision-making interact with human rights law standards. The aim in this chapter is to explore how the three statutory safeguards established in PACE to protect the suspect’s right to liberty have fared in the face of organizational pressure to detect and ‘clear up’ crime. Using the three due process safeguards established in PACE to form a framework for this chapter’s analysis, the chapter explores how officers apply, dismiss, interpret and reconstruct each of these safeguards in their everyday work. Once again, the richness of this analysis, specifically its appreciation for how law and practice do (or do not) interact, is enhanced by paying close attention to the development of lines of authority in the case law that have, it is argued, watered down the legal standards officers must apply. This analysis of the case law is based on recent judgments from the High Court and Divisional Court of Northern Ireland, as well as from the Court of Appeal in England and Wales.

scholarly journals Can Dirty Work be Satisfying? A Mixed Method Study of Workers Doing Dirty Jobs

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Deery ◽  
Deanna Kolar ◽  
Janet Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Method ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Job Quality ◽  
Mixed Method Study ◽  
Dirty Work ◽  
Self Worth ◽  
The Usa ◽  
High Crime ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Method Approach

It has been argued in this journal that sociologists can make an important contribution to the understanding of why workers report feeling satisfied with their work, particularly where job quality is poor. Utilising a mixed method approach, this article explores how employees derive satisfaction from dirty work. The term ‘dirty work’ refers to tasks and occupations that are perceived as disgusting, distasteful or degrading. The research was conducted among workers specialising in the cleaning of abandoned social or public housing apartments in high crime areas in the UK and the USA. The study identifies a number of different mechanisms through which workers are able to make work both more satisfying and establish a sense of self-worth from the tasks they perform, even though dirt and physical taint are central to the job.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document