/pdf/the-precariat-the-new-dangerous-class-3tq7b7h7fg.pdf

The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

The moral significance of class

With the unprecedented rise in the use of visuals, and its undeniable omnipresence in organizational contexts, as well as in the individual's everyday life, organization and management science has recently started to pay closer attention to the to date under-theorized “visual mode” of discourse and meaning construction. Building primarily on insights from the phenomenological tradition in organization theory and from social semiotics, this article sets out to consolidate previous scholarly efforts and to sketch a fertile future research agenda. After briefly exploring the workings of visuals, we introduce the methodological and theoretical “roots” of visual studies in a number of disciplines that have a long-standing tradition of incorporating the visual. We then continue by extensively reviewing work in the field of organization and management studies: More specifically, we present five distinct approaches to feature visuals in research designs and to include the visual dimension in scholarly inquiry. Su...

The Visual Dimension in Organizing, Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas, Current Developments, and Promising Avenues

This article takes recent critiques of the conceptualisation of ‘youth as transition’ and explores the extent to which ‘generation’ offers a more effective way of conceptualising youth. There is an identifiable convergence of evidence for a ‘post-1970’ generation who have shaped a ‘new adulthood’. Yet current approaches inevitably identify education, work and family patterns of young people's lives as evidence of their faulty, failed transitions, measured against the standard of the previous generation. A focus on generation shifts the emphasis from the assumption of linear development in which youth is a phase towards adulthood, to locate young people within the political, economic and cultural processes that both frame and shape their generation, and the meaning and experience of ‘youth’ in distinctive and enduring ways. In addition to traditional measures of patterns of life, we argue that young people's subjectivities provide an insight into their active participation in and shaping of change processe...

Generation, Youth and Social Change in Australia

There is an increasing literature on visual methodologies in which images are generated by participants as part of the research, as distinct from the analysis of existing images or images taken by the researcher. Although there are growing numbers of publications that present frameworks for analysing images and their meaning, this is an area requiring further deliberation and consolidation. Our contribution is to give serious attention to the processes of image production in participant-generated visual methodologies. We examine methodological and ethical considerations that arise before, during and after image production. Our work is in health research and we focus specifically on two methods: first, a combination of photovoice and photo-elicitation, in particular with young people; and second, drawings as research method. Based on examples using these two methods, we pose questions of process for image production and submit this for interrogation for reasons of methodological, analytical and ethical rigour.

Questions of process in participant-generated visual methodologies

Visual methods such as photography are under-used in the active process of sociological research. As rare as visual methods are, it is even rarer for the resultant images to be made by rather than of research participants. Primarily, the paper explores the challenges and contradictions of using photography within a multi-method approach. We consider processes for analysing visual data, different ways of utilising visual methods in sociological research, and the use of primary and secondary data, or, simple illustration versus active visual exploration of the social. The question of triangulation of visual data against text and testimony versus a stand-alone approach is explored in depth.

/pdf/picture-this-researching-child-workers-3ntf0qw7st.pdf

Picture this: researching child workers

This paper considers the agency of children moving to the streets of Accra, Ghana's capital city. A much used but largely unexamined concept, agency is nevertheless commonly deployed in childhood studies as a means to stress the capacity of children to choose to do things. In the literature on street and working children, and a cognate area of study concerned with children's independent migration, this has involved accounts of children's agency made meaningful by reference to theories of rational choice or to the normative force of childhood. It is our argument that both approaches leave unanswered important questions and to counter these omissions we draw upon the arguments of social realists and, in particular, the stress they place on vulnerability as the basis for human agency. We develop this argument further by reference to our research with street children. By drawing upon the children's accounts of leaving their households and heading for Accra's streets, it is our contention that these children do frame their departures as matters of individual choice and self-determination, and that in doing so they speak of a considerable capacity for action. Nevertheless, a deeper reading of their testimonies also points to the children's understandings of their own vulnerability. By examining what we see as their inability to be dependent upon family and kin, we stress the importance of the children's perceptions of their vulnerability, frailty and need as the basis for a fuller understanding of their agency in leaving their households. © 2013 The Author. The Sociological Review Â© 2013 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review.

Agency as vulnerability: accounting for children's movement to the streets of Accra

This article considers friendship among street children in Accra. Drawing upon the findings of a three-year qualitative research project, the article argues that friendship is a neglected element of research yet cooperation, mutuality and exchange between friends are essential to street children's survival. Living within the extremities of the urban informal sector, the article considers the existence of a strong ethos of 'help' between friends and how street children go about the (re) creation of friendship around those aspects of their lives essential for their daily survival. © The Author(s) 2010.

Asking, giving, receiving: friendship as survival strategy among Accra's street children

The recognition that the majority of British children are involved in paid employment at some time before the minimum school leaving age has not been accompanied by comparable analytical advances. Large numbers work in areas beyond those traditionally identified with `children's work' and are to be found in marginal, flexible, service sector jobs, defined by unskilled and low paid manual labour. The efforts of US researchers to link `adolescent work' to child development and socialisation merely pathologises children's involvement in work, while the greater sensitivity of British researchers to the possible connections between work and changes to children's social lives provides only limited insight. It is demonstrated here that children's involvement in work is closely related to employers' increased demand for part-time student labour and that children are making themselves available for work in response to both the changing distribution of family income and the commodification of their leisure time.

School age workers: the paid employment of children in britain

This paper argues that youth studies should return to the political. It does so through emphasizing the importance of age in youth to the state and to the political management of capitalist social relations. Through a process of critique, this paper argues that the neglect of age to contemporary orthodox youth studies is a consequence of its misplaced and unsustainable concern with youth as a process of 'growing up'; and that where connections are made between the state, age and youth, these remain incoherent and poorly developed. By way of mapping out the basis for an alternative, this paper advocates the need to derive age and youth from their broader significance to the political management of the social relations of production and, more specifically, to the changing form of the capitalist state.

Phillip Mizen

Papers

Picture this: researching child workers

Agency as vulnerability: accounting for children's movement to the streets of Accra

Asking, giving, receiving: friendship as survival strategy among Accra's street children

School age workers: the paid employment of children in britain

Putting the Politics Back into Youth Studies: Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Changing State of Youth