Programme full

Thursday 16 April 2014 13:30 - 15:00
PAPER SESSION 5
‘Are You Feeling Me?’ Understanding Long-Term Unemployment Better
Bednarek-Gilland, A.
(Social Sciences Institute of the Evangelical Church in Germany)
Long-term unemployment poses a difficult problem to policy makers because they are ideologically hindered in terms
of how they understand unemployment. This leads to viewing those affected by long-term unemployment as irrational.
In this paper I want to focus on how we can better understand long-term unemployed persons. I want to argue, firstly,
that we need to consider long- unemployed persons as structurally placed in precarious circumstances – Castel's 'the
zone of precariousness' – which hold crises in store at all times. I am going to refer to health statistics and present
material to illustrate this claim from an on-going qualitative study on the everyday lives of long-term unemployed
persons in Germany. Secondly, I am going to argue that in order to fully appreciate unemployed persons' ways of
dealing with these repeated crisis situations we need to attend to the emotional dimension of their everyday lives.
Here, I am going to apply a sociology of emotions lens on unemployment. I will focus on experiences of shame and
disrespect in particular, arguing, inspired mainly by Andrew Sayer's work on the topic, that the diverse rationalities of
long-term unemployed persons are shaped by emotional experiences which lastingly affect their well-being both
positively and negatively. Albeit organisation scholars have long appreciated the important connection between
emotions and work experience, the same has not been done with unemployment. The main aim of my paper is to
show that his new focus would contribute richly to our understanding of unemployment.
Emotional, Aesthetic, Body, and Sex Work: A Critical Analysis of Conceptual and Empirical Intersection
Cohen, R.
(City University London)
With growth in the interactive service sector has come expansion in the conceptual categories used to depict such
work, for example: emotional labour, aesthetic labour, sex work, body work, intimate labour. This paper suggests that
while addressing related phenomenon there are differences in the logics underpinning these conceptualisations, and,
even, different authors' use of the same concept. A key point difference is the referent of the conceptualisation, with
conceptual categories variously focusing on:
• workers' attributes and behaviours: how workers feel, how they transform their appearance, their varying
sexual capital;
• the commodity produced: a customer's emotional response, a patient's bodily transformation, client's sexual
stimulation;
• the interaction itself: the embodied, intimate or caring worker-client relationship.
Since these different focuses are rarely explicit, conceptual conflation between product, producer and interaction is
common. Consequently, discussion of bodies, emotions, aesthetics and sexuality too often presumes a correlation
between workers' behaviours and customers' experiences. For instance, that emotional responses are produced by
emotional inputs.
Conversely, analytically separating product, producer and interaction enables better exploration of the relationship
between these – when they are and when they are not associated. Additionally, different facets of interactive labour
(emotional, aesthetic, bodily and sexual) and their inter-relationship can be specified. For example to explore work that
requires both emotional and body labour, or that involves aesthetic, but little emotional labour. The paper concludes
by exploring several of these particular intersections. It proposes that this provides a useful approach, for instance to
understanding the gendering of occupational niches.
Work, Employment and Economic Life 2
W823, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
Exploitation or Empowerment: The case of Bangladeshi Garment Workers
Raeside, R., Gayen, K., Choudhury, Z.
(Edinburgh Napier University)
Following the collapse of the garment factory Rana Plazza in Bangladesh one of the world's worst industrial disasters
much attention has been directed to the working conditions and well-being of women in the Bangladesh Ready Made
Garments (RMG) Sector. Explored in this paper is the debate over exploitation or empowerment with respect to the
position of women in developing countries. This paper reports on an investigation of the well-being of female workers
BSA Annual Conference 2015 192
Glasgow Caledonian University