scholarly journals Identity and help in calls to Victim Support

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma Tennent

<p>The link between identity and action is a fundamental topic across the social sciences. A key site to investigate this relationship is social interaction, where identities and social relations are built and used to accomplish action. In this thesis, I used discursive psychology to analyse the relationship between identity and the action of help in recorded calls to a victim support helpline. Victim is a contentious identity, with feminists and other critical scholars pointing to the politics involved when certain people are categorised as victims and others are overlooked. The name of the organisation that was the setting for my research, ‘Victim Support,’ explicitly links a victim identity with rights to access the help the service offers. Drawing on concepts in discursive psychology and using conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, I examined how participants oriented to the contentious questions of who victims are and how they should be helped. Drawing on contemporary interactional research which theorises the epistemic, deontic, and affective basis of human social relations, I examined how participants used self-other relations as a resource to build and interpret actions as help.  The findings provide evidence for the mutually constitutive relationship between identity and action. Counter-intuitively, most callers did not explicitly categorise themselves as victims when asking for help. My analyses show how call-takers understood callers’ identities as victims even when they did not say so directly. The act of asking for help from Victim Support constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities rendered their requests accountable.  Call-takers on the victim helpline act as gate-keepers, determining callers’ eligibility before providing help. I analysed how call-takers denied callers’ requests by implicitly or explicitly disavowing their identities as victims. Conversely, I showed that offers of help constituted callers as legitimate victims. Yet even once participants had accomplished joint understanding of callers as victims, they negotiated their respective epistemic and deontic rights to determine what help was needed and how it should be provided.  The negotiation of how victims should be helped was particularly salient when callers sought help on behalf of others. Participants negotiated whether the moral obligation to help victims was associated with friends and family members, or institutions. The emotional support and practical advice offered by Victim Support is delivered by volunteer support workers, reflecting a common-sense assumption that these forms of help are normatively available to any competent person. My analyses attend to the dilemmas involved when callers sought help for others rather than providing it themselves.  The findings contribute to three main areas of research: conversation analytic study of help as social action; membership categorisation analysis research on categorically organised rights and obligations; and the re-specification of psychological phenomenon as interactional objects within discursive psychology. The mutually constitutive link between identity and help is consequential, as the provision or withholding support can have material effects when callers are highly distressed or in fear for their lives. Thus, studying real-life interaction demonstrates the practical ways identity matters for seeking help.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma Tennent

<p>The link between identity and action is a fundamental topic across the social sciences. A key site to investigate this relationship is social interaction, where identities and social relations are built and used to accomplish action. In this thesis, I used discursive psychology to analyse the relationship between identity and the action of help in recorded calls to a victim support helpline. Victim is a contentious identity, with feminists and other critical scholars pointing to the politics involved when certain people are categorised as victims and others are overlooked. The name of the organisation that was the setting for my research, ‘Victim Support,’ explicitly links a victim identity with rights to access the help the service offers. Drawing on concepts in discursive psychology and using conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, I examined how participants oriented to the contentious questions of who victims are and how they should be helped. Drawing on contemporary interactional research which theorises the epistemic, deontic, and affective basis of human social relations, I examined how participants used self-other relations as a resource to build and interpret actions as help.  The findings provide evidence for the mutually constitutive relationship between identity and action. Counter-intuitively, most callers did not explicitly categorise themselves as victims when asking for help. My analyses show how call-takers understood callers’ identities as victims even when they did not say so directly. The act of asking for help from Victim Support constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities rendered their requests accountable.  Call-takers on the victim helpline act as gate-keepers, determining callers’ eligibility before providing help. I analysed how call-takers denied callers’ requests by implicitly or explicitly disavowing their identities as victims. Conversely, I showed that offers of help constituted callers as legitimate victims. Yet even once participants had accomplished joint understanding of callers as victims, they negotiated their respective epistemic and deontic rights to determine what help was needed and how it should be provided.  The negotiation of how victims should be helped was particularly salient when callers sought help on behalf of others. Participants negotiated whether the moral obligation to help victims was associated with friends and family members, or institutions. The emotional support and practical advice offered by Victim Support is delivered by volunteer support workers, reflecting a common-sense assumption that these forms of help are normatively available to any competent person. My analyses attend to the dilemmas involved when callers sought help for others rather than providing it themselves.  The findings contribute to three main areas of research: conversation analytic study of help as social action; membership categorisation analysis research on categorically organised rights and obligations; and the re-specification of psychological phenomenon as interactional objects within discursive psychology. The mutually constitutive link between identity and help is consequential, as the provision or withholding support can have material effects when callers are highly distressed or in fear for their lives. Thus, studying real-life interaction demonstrates the practical ways identity matters for seeking help.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-272
Author(s):  
Venelin Terziev ◽  
Preslava Dimitrova

The social policy of a country is a set of specific activities aimed at regulating the social relations between different in their social status subjects. This approach to clarifying social policy is also called functional and essentially addresses social policy as an activity to regulate the relationship of equality or inequality in society. It provides an opportunity to look for inequalities in the economic positions of individuals in relation to ownership, labor and working conditions, distribution of income and consumption, social security and health, to look for the sources of these inequalities and their social justification or undue application.The modern state takes on social functions that seek to regulate imbalances, to protect weak social positions and prevent the disintegration of the social system. It regulates the processes in society by harmonizing interests and opposing marginalization. Every modern country develops social activities that reflect the specifics of a particular society, correspond to its economic, political and cultural status. They are the result of political decisions aimed at directing and regulating the process of adaptation of the national society to the transformations of the market environment. Social policy is at the heart of the development and governance of each country. Despite the fact that too many factors and problems affect it, it largely determines the physical and mental state of the population as well as the relationships and interrelationships between people. On the other hand, social policy allows for a more global study and solving of vital social problems of civil society. On the basis of the programs and actions of political parties and state bodies, the guidelines for the development of society are outlined. Social policy should be seen as an activity to regulate the relationship of equality or inequality between different individuals and social groups in society. Its importance is determined by the possibility of establishing on the basis of the complex approach: the economic positions of the different social groups and individuals, by determining the differences between them in terms of income, consumption, working conditions, health, etc .; to explain the causes of inequality; to look for concrete and specific measures to overcome the emerging social disparities.


Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-407
Author(s):  
Mladen Lazić ◽  
Jelena Pešić

AbstractBased on research data from 2003, 2012, and 2018, the authors examine the extent to which capitalist social relations in Serbia have determined liberal value orientations. The change of the social order in Serbia after 1990 brought about a radical change of the basis upon which values are constituted. To interpret the relationship between structural and value changes, the authors employ the theory of normative-value dissonance. Special attention in the analysis is paid to the interpretation of value changes based on the distinction between intra- and inter-systemic normative-value dissonance. In the first part of their study, the authors examine changes in the acceptance of liberal values over the period of consolidation of capitalism in Serbia, while in the second part they focus on the 2018 data and specific predictors of political and economic liberalism.


Harmoni ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-240
Author(s):  
M. Alie Humaedi

The relationship between Islam and Christianity in various regions is often confronted with situations caused by external factors. They no longer debate the theological aspect, but are based on the political economy and social culture aspects. In the Dieng village, the economic resources are mostly dominated by Christians as early Christianized product as the process of Kiai Sadrach's chronicle. Economic mastery was not originally as the main trigger of the conflict. However, as the political map post 1965, in which many Muslims affiliated to the Indonesian Communist Party convert to Christianity, the relationship between Islam and Christianity is heating up. The question of the dominance of political economic resources of Christians is questionable. This research to explore the socio cultural and religious impact of the conversion of PKI to Christian in rural Dieng and Slamet Pekalongan and Banjarnegara. This qualitative research data was extracted by in-depth interviews, observations and supported by data from Dutch archives, National Archives and Christian Synod of Salatiga. Research has found the conversion of the PKI to Christianity has sparked hostility and deepened the social relations of Muslims and Christians in Kasimpar, Petungkriono and Karangkobar. The culprit widened by involving the network of Wonopringgo Islamic Boarding. It is often seen that existing conflicts are no longer latent, but lead to a form of manifest conflict that decomposes in the practice of social life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 119 ◽  
pp. 01007
Author(s):  
Ilham Sadoqi

This paper seeks to investigate the potentials of youth agency in the margin of society and understand the prospects for social action or “Hirak” as an ongoing sweeping protest wave of a marginalized population. Based on a national qualitative study about youth and marginality in Morocco, this paper will focus on three moments. First, it will examine youth perception, their representation of their subjectivities, and how the realities and experiences of exclusion and “Hogra” manifested in inequalities, injustice, and systematic violence have shaped their beliefs and desire to act. The second moment brings to the fore their apprehension of the hegemonic powers of state institutions and social actors to determine their motivations and initiatives to articulate their actions locally and nationally under conditions of domination. The third moment will shed light on the dynamics of youth agency and the nature of their actions, be it individual or collective, subjective or rational. Similarly, it will also consider the structural limitations impinging on the social, political, cultural life, and gender relations. This paper examines the relationship between youth agency in the margin and the emergence of a new quest for social action “Hirak” in different regions of Morocco and how this might pave the way towards renegotiating the existing social contract between society and state.


2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (2_suppl) ◽  
pp. 10-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Shilling

The sociology of emotions is an established specialism within the discipline and its products have become increasingly visible parts of the sociological landscape since the late 1970s. This specialism has also demonstrated, at least to its own satisfaction, the importance of emotions for social action and order, and for those related moral issues concerned with self-determined and other-oriented action. Paradoxically, however, the relationship between the sociology of emotions and mainstream sociology remains relatively cool. Emotional issues are still portrayed in many general accounts of the discipline as a luxurious curiosity that properly resides on the outer reaches of the sociological imagination. Just as unfortunately, certain sociologists of emotions have accused the foundations of the discipline of neglecting emotional issues, and have sometimes excluded classical theorists from their discussions. This chapter argues that emotional phenomena occupy an important place in sociology's heritage which has yet to be explicated fully by the sub-discipline. The subject of emotions, like the closely related subject of the body, may fade from various classical writings. Nevertheless, the major traditions of sociological theory developed particular orientations towards the social and moral dimensions of emotional phenomena. I begin by examining the relevance of emotions to the context out of which the discipline emerged, and then focus on how the major theorists of order (Comte and Durkheim) and (inter)action (Simmel and Weber) conceptualized emotional phenomena. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of Parsons's contribution, and suggests that his analysis of the religious foundations of instrumental activism provides a provocative account of the relationship between values, emotions and personality that can usefully be built on.


2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.


2020 ◽  
pp. 174997552094942
Author(s):  
Andrew Smith ◽  
Bridget Byrne ◽  
Lindsey Garratt ◽  
Bethan Harries

In this essay we reflect on the relationship between aesthetic practices and racialised conceptions of belonging. In particular, we explore attributions of beauty and ugliness, order and disorder, as these are made in relation to local space, and we consider how these attributions can be linked to proprietorial claims about who is welcome in those spaces. Our focus is thus on the everyday aesthetics of location: the ways in which aesthetic judgements are tied to the inhabitation of space and, in this case, the exclusionary potential of ‘ways of looking’ at such spaces and at the social relations which exist within them. Drawing on data from qualitative research in two adjoining neighbourhoods in Glasgow’s Southside, we make three analytical contributions. First, we consider the racialising potential of everyday aesthetic responses to local space. Second, we explore the ways in which local social relations themselves can be aesthetically interpreted. Third, we reflect on forms of everyday aesthetic resistance.


Comunicar ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (31) ◽  
pp. 159-166
Author(s):  
Tania Jiménez-Palacio ◽  
María José Revuelta-Bayod

A new debate has arrived to the Education System. It deals with the need of an alternative teaching, an education that exceeds the academic traditions and studies the social relations, such as the relationship between media and society. Citizens must access an audiovisual teaching, because it is important to unders-tand how television, radio stations, newspapers, etc., work when they inform us, show us the culture or even build our dreams. People must know about the media’s economic and political interests, and also how the audience could make use of communication mass media.En el sistema educativo se ha abierto un debate acerca de la importancia de alfabetizar en otros sentidos que sobrepasan la tradición académica y que se adentran en el análisis de relaciones sociales contextualizadas, como puede ser la relación medios de comunicación-sociedad. Las autoras defienden que es importante que los ciudadanos accedan a una alfabetización audiovisual que les permita contar con recursos para entender el funcionamiento de los medios informativos y culturales como fabricantes de sueños, conocer sus intereses como empresas y poderes fácticos que son, captar sus estrategias de manipulación y persuasión, y comprender cómo nosotros, receptores, podemos utilizarlos.


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