Situated Self Research Articles

Local orders and global chaos in social work

We live, supposedly, in a run away global world that ispermeated with risk, disaster and uncertainty. Social work, at leastat the level of policy and research, has been seen to be respondingto the globalization discourse. Its tendency is to try and deepenits own institutional reflexivity with a growing awareness of itsown place within the new information age and neo-liberal moral order.In this paper it is suggested that social work has at best a minimal roleto play with any new global order, should such an order exist. Thereare developments within social work that could have global significance,for instance, the spread of actuarial technologies and risk management.However, information networks and the universalization of expertsystems hardly support claims for a ‘global social work’. This paper attempts to clear the logjam of the increasinglyunproductive debates about globalization and social work. Thesedebates both set an allegedly beneficial ethical welfarism againstthe impersonal forces of globalization and thereby wish to enlargethe ethical purchase of social work; or present globalization asan inevitable phenomenon that has deleterious effects on socialwork and therefore ought to be resisted. Social work is therebyreformulated and extended as a potential solution to some of theills of an alienating and immoral global force. Against a prospectof social work movements being individually and structurally transformativeon a global level, it is argued that local cultural orders of reflexivityare the ground from which to properly understand the purpose andremit of its practices. It is claimed that any notion of a globalor transnational social work is little more than a vanity. Localculture orders of reflexivity—concentrating as they doon the raw stuff of interactions, plans, interventions and ethics—recognizethe need for a shared culture of depth understanding that comeswith being native to that culture as a language user and agent ofthe kinesics and proxemics of ‘being-here’. Neitherthe nation-state nor irredentism provide a basis for a perfect matchbetween culture and successful practice, but without either of thesewithin whose borders each of us lives, the idea of social work asculturally sensitive to the lives of others with whom we are workingbecomes increasingly distant and difficult. This position relieson a strong conception of the ‘encumbered self’ usedin communitarian political theory. This paper argues that by ignoringthe communitarian encumbered self the literature on globalizationand social work is insufficiently sensitive to the importance oflanguage and culture and ignores the role social work plays in maintaininglocal cultural diversity. Some kinds of social or political practice do not needa high degree of cultural literacy as does social work and thereforecan engage in promoting a neo-liberal fantasy of a ‘globalthis or that’. The realities of front-line practice letalone the actual economic constraints on social welfare spendingrather insist that we set our sights at the level of the nation-stateas the basic unit of administrative responsibility for social care.It also insists that the thick stuff of social interactions is onlyunderstandable in terms of a situated self. This paper is thus anargument for the situated and embodied knowledge of social workand against various forms of unlocatable global knowledge claims.Within certain literature on globalization and social work there isa premium on establishing the capacity to see the wider picturefrom the peripheries and the depths, with the occidental socialworker looking in from the outside. But here lies a serious dangerof romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of say the lesspowerful while claiming to see things from their position.

Theorizing the Good Society: Hermeneutic, Normative and Empirical Discourses

Abstract: This paper examines two fundamentally different ways that recent philosophical thinkers have theorized the good society and demonstrates that each tradition has engaged in revisionist efforts that brings it toward its rival tradition. Rawls and Habermas represent the of this contemporary effort, establishing neo-Kantian positions in the sixties and seventies that represent an initial effort at theorizing the good society in terms of an historically unsituated, free floating universalism. The contemporary versions of the hermeneutic, communitarian approaches emerge in response, with thinkers like Walzer, Boltanski and Thevenot, Taylor, and Young arguing for the situated self, community based standards, cultural specificity, and relativism. It is demonstrated, however, that within each of these works there is a decisive space that is, or must be, given to some more universalizing sphere of justice. Responding to this possibility, against these communitarian and hermeneutic approaches, there developed internal revisions of the neo-Kantian, externalist approach, beginning with the large shift manifest in the Rawls of Political Liberalism. Similar changes are demonstrated in the works of thinkers like Benhabib, Honneth, and even in Habermas himself. Just as the communitarians move back, with difficulty, toward universalism, so do these universalists seek to move back, with difficulty, to particularism. In the concluding section of this paper, I argue that if we look empirically at the actual nature of the discourses about the good society that circulate in Western societies, we will see both of these discourses, the universalist and the particular, acting side by side. I try to explain how they actual intertwine in a systematic way, as what I call a binary discourse of civil society. Resume: Ce document examine deux manieres fondamentalement differentes que les philosophes d'aujourd'hui utilisent pour elaborer des theories sur la societe ideale. Ce document demontre aussi que chaque tradition a adopte des vues revisionnistes qui la rapproche de sa rivale traditionnelle. Rawls et Habermans representent la base de cet effort contemporain quia jete les assises des positions neo-kantiennes dans les annees soixante et soixante-dix, marquant un premier effort de theories sur la societe ideale dans le cadre d'un universalisme libre et non situe dans l'histoire. Des versions contemporaines de cette demarche hermeneutique et communautarienne surgissent alors avec des penseurs tels que Walzer, Boltanski et Thevenot, de meme que Taylor et Young qui defendent le sol localise, les normes axees sur les collectivites, la specificite culturelle et le relativisme. On prouve par ailleurs que dans chacun de ces travaux, il existe un espace decisif qui doit, ou devrait, etre laisse a une justice plus universelle. Reagissant a cette possibilite, a l'encontre des demarches communautariennes et hermeneutiques, des revisions internes de la demarche externaliste neo-kantienne sont apparues en commencant par le manifeste radical du Everywhere we look today, certainly in philosophy and even in a great deal of social science, we see a decided turn to ethical and moral concerns, not only as an empirical object but as a practical goal towards which empirical and theoretical investigations aim. It has not always been so. In the two decades after World War II, it was widely believed that morality -- value orientation in Weber's influential formulation -- did not need to, and should not be allowed to, play a direct role in social science or even in much of philosophy. In social science, it seemed possible to uphold this position because the moral seemed imminent to the progressively unfolding historical progress that functionalists called modernization and Marxists called socialism or the welfare state. In the decades preceding the Second World War, of course, this optimism would have seemed totally absurd. In the unstable and threatening time between the two world wars, philosophers and sociological theorists struggled to expand their understandings of action and order so that notions of moral responsibility could become more central and the relation of theorizing to political action more concrete. …

Rights and the Gift in Sartre's Notebooks for An Ethics

The concept of (legal) right has been the source of some particularly knotty problems for theorists following Marx.(l) If Marx's assessment, that rights are peculiar to capitalist society, is correct, one might be led to wonder: what would social mediation take in a post-capitalist society? Current debate in theory reflects a high degree of uncertainty with regard to this question. the one hand, many in the Critical Legal Studies movement (the crits) advocate the abandonment of rights discourse as essentially oppressive, while on the other hand many critical race theorists defend that discourse on the pragmatic grounds that it still serves a liberatory function, whatever its theoretical deficiencies.(2) The disagreement between these theorists may simply reflect an assessment of timing; rights have been particularly useful for the oppressed in the U.S., especially in the last few decades, while the crits are, for the most part, white academics in positions of privilege, and hence do not, perhaps, experience rights talk as a positive of discourse. At any rate, without some account of the form(s) of social mediation which might replace rights, I think we should be nervous about rejecting them as tools for social change. In this connection Sartre's discussion and criticism of rights in the posthumously published Notebooksfor an Ethics deserves attention. Sartre develops a notion of social mediation through generosity and the gift, which, I argue, has some interesting programmatic implications for the search for an alternative to rights. In this essay, then, after a brief look at Marx's comments on rights in On the Question as background, I examine and interpret Sartre's extension of Marx's position and synthesize Sartre's somewhat fragmented (and fragmentary) remarks in the Notebooks, with an eye toward developing some of those programmatic implications. Marx's On the Question In his well-known essay On the Question, Marx criticizes Bruno Bauer's nearsighted view of emancipation.(3) Bauer sought a solution to the Jewish problem--really the problem of oppression--in political rather than emancipation. Political or the elimination of discrimination (here on the basis of religion) represents a great progress . . . a real, practical emancipation, but is not the form of emancipation; rather it is the final the framework of the prevailing social order.(4) Mere political emancipation leaves intact a contradiction between the political state and civil society, or as we would say today, the public and private spheres. This split is further reflected in a separation of the self into two aspects. First is the person conceived as a legal subject, the autonomous, abstracted and universal contractual self, which enters into relations with other similarly abstracted, universal contractual selves.(5) These relations are relations of contract, in which disagreements over substantive issues are mediated through rights discourse, at the level of ideology. Second, is what we might call the concrete, person, the individual taken within the web of real relations with others, with concrete needs and desires which are only partially and imperfectly translatable into rights discourse. Marx aims at the closure of these two selves the collapse of the subject into the real, situated self, since without overcoming the split. real human emancipation cannot be achieved. Hence emancipation takes place: when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this power from himself as political power.(6) Note, then, that according to Marx there are two moments or types of political and human, each of which can be understood as operating through certain mechanisms. …

Self-Monitoring and the Regulation of Social Experience: A Control-Process Model

An application of Carver and Scheier's (1981; Scheier & Carver, 1988) control-process model of behavior is proposed that portrays the social-psychological construct of self-monitoring as a set of self-referent cognitive processes that contribute to the regulation of human social experience. The model posits that high- and low-self-monitoring persons differ according to the nature of their self-referent analysis of social situations, the standards that guide their self-evaluation, and the manner by which they maintain self-control. According to the model, high-self-monitoring persons routinely reference the public self when analyzing social situations, evaluate the situated self against social standards, and enact behaviors aimed at bringing the self into line with the environment

Citizenship and Ontology in the Liberal State

Charles Taylor has developed a powerful critique of neo-Kantian liberalism and its ontological presupposition, the unencumbered self. According to Taylor, the trouble with deontological liberalism is that its neutral state is incapable of promoting the patriotic virtue that is necessary for the maintenance of liberty. This article responds to Taylor's critique by showing how the citizens of an ideal liberal state acquire a ready willingness to meet their public responsibilities in the absence of a government that promotes patriotism as a good for everyone. In particular, it draws upon Rawls's theory of justice to suggest how liberal citizens naturally develop a deep attachment to the political institutions of their community and to their fellow citizens. The concluding section of the article returns to the relationship between politics and ontology, arguing that unencumbered and situated selves are better understood as alternate moments in the life of the liberal citizen than as mutually exclusive ontological possibilities.

The Social Nature of Autonomy

Critics of liberalism and even some liberal theorists themselves have criticized a liberal emphasis on autonomy, because they associate autonomy with self sufficiency. That association reinforces the worst aspects of atomistic individualism: social isolation, insulation from the views of others, and a rejection of society's values and interests. But the association of autonomy with self-sufficiency is uncalled for; those who see that association are mistaken, for self-sufficiency represents not a fulfillment of autonomy but the abandonment of it. Autonomy, it is argued, has a social nature: It not only develops through sociality, but it also requires sociality for its exercise. In short, to be autonomous one must know one is autonomous; to know one is autonomous requires giving an account to others of the reasons for a decision or action. The social nature of autonomy may incline theorists to see persons as communitarian or socially situated selves. But communitarians such as Charles Taylor find the self defined in part by communal boundaries and thus see them as context-dependent. Autonomy is bounded by language, not community. It is both context-free and context-related, but not context-dependent. Liberal theorists who champion autonomy should therefore abandon any notions of selves as social atoms or isolates and build liberalism on the implications of autonomy's social nature. Part of those implications is that social institutions that foster and exercise autonomy must involve dialogue or communicative exchange. The most important and effective institutions of that kind are those of direct democracy.

Authentic/Inauthentic Identities in the Prison Visiting Room

The observations reported here demonstrate ways in which some incarcerated prison convicts use available materials, i.e., people, objects, and the physical setting of the prison visiting room to (a) violate rules, in order to (b) construct a situated identity based on self‐autonomy and freedom from constraints. Sometimes the actions of guards and staff are to allow, within the context of the visiting room and within limits, for these situated social identities to be objectified even though these identities may have little currency in other prison contexts, and this situated self contradicts the intention of the prison regimen. The situated self found in the visiting room is considered to have beneficial influences on the inmate and is important for achieving desired, future outcomes related to treatment. When certain limits are breached, there will be attempts to suppress these identities. Several symbolic interactionist concepts, including awareness contexts and authentic/inauthentic identities, are employed to explain the behaviors of inmates, guards, and visitors and to point to treatment programs that would be most effective.

Safe Conduct: Women, Crime, and Self in Public Places

In this essay, I paint a portrait of women in public places and their concerns with crime prevention, based on a survey of the literature and in-depth interviews with women. I argue that there is a situationally appropriate self that crime-prevention advice literature suggests women adopt and that women attempt to adopt. This situated self, however, is sometimes constrained by the general character of public places and by the particular character of the belief system that women have and that the literature recommends with regard to crime prevention. In particular, I view normative beliefs about crime prevention as a “rhetoric” that involves negative contingencies for the woman's situated self in public, including frequent reliance on others, self-profanation, and lengthy or consuming preparations.

Liberalism and the Communitarian Critique

Liberalism and the Communitarian Critique