Habitusbildung im Studium der Sozialpädagogik

Habitusbildung im Studium der Sozialpädagogik. Eine explorative Studie zur Strukturtypik studentischer Professionalisierungsprozesse Die qualitativ-empirische Studie untersucht die als studentischen und pädagogischen Habitus bezeichnete pädagogische Professionalisierung im Studium. Das zugrunde gelegte strukturtheoretische Modell einer professionalisierten sozialpädagogischen Praxis ist eine widersprüchliche Einheit von Theorie- und Fallverstehen. Schütze (1996) analysiert das im Kern paradoxale Verhältnis zwischen Professionellen und Klientel, die widersprüchliche Handlungslogik der Profession und die Konsequenzen ihrer herrschaftlicher Kontexte. In Oevermanns Skizze einer revidierten Theorie professionalisierten Handelns (1996) werden wissenschaftliches Verstehen und hermeneutisches Fallverstehen zur Grundlage des professionalisierten Handelns. Von besonderer Bedeutung ist Oevermanns Konzeption der stellvertretenden Deutung, der Deutung des latenten Sinns einer Interaktion, einer Handlung, einer latenten Sinnstrukur. Aus objektiv-hermeneutischer Sicht sind die Handlungsspielräume einer je konkreten Lebenspraxis durch Regeln gesetzt, bereits die Welt sozialer Regeln bestimmt Möglichkeiten und Folgen einer Handlung, nicht erst die Lebenspraxis. Die Kontrastierung von vier Fallrekonstruktionen mündet in der Formulierung zweier Strukturtypen. Beim Strukturtyp 1, „Scheitern der Habitusformation durch Verweigerung von Emergenz“, wird eine auf ein, maximal zwei sozialpädagogische Handlungsfelder gerichtete Berufskonzeption ausgeformt. Neue Inhalte, die sich nicht widerspruchsfrei in dieses minimalistische Konzept sozialer Praxis integrieren lassen, werden abgewehrt. Das Strukturpotential, das in dieser krisenhaften Übergangssituation angesprochen wird mit dem Anspruch, neue perzeptions- und handlungsleitende Sinnstrukturen zu bilden, stagniert in biografisch bewährten Bearbeitungsstrategien. Für die Fallstrukturgesetzlichkeit des Strukturtyps 2, „Krisenbearbeitung und Transformation biografietypischer Strukturen“, ist ein hohes Potential, in einem Prozess der Emergenz Krisen durch neue Handlungs- und Sinnstrukturen zu lösen, signifikant. Die gelingende Habitusformation vollzieht sich dort, wo diese emergenten Strukturen in die Vermitteltheit einer professionalisierten Routine überführt werden. Die Rückbindung der Strukturtypen an die Studienmodelle des „wissenschaftlich gebildeten Praktikers“ und des fallrekonstruktiven Modells fundiert die These, dass der durch die Einsozialisation in ein hermeneutisches Fallverstehen eröffnete Bildungsprozess vertiefte Kenntnisse um Lebensgesetzlichkeiten, Regelkenntnisse und eine entmystifizierte Haltung zur Theorie als einer „verwissenschaftlichten Rationalität“ vermittelt.

The discretionary role of the line manager in inspiring work engagement and innovative behaviour:a study of social exchange and job resources in the public sector

This thesis is about the discretionary role of the line manager in inspiring the work engagement of staff and their resulting innovative behaviour examined through the lens of Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964) and the Job Demands-Resources theory (Bakker, Demerouti, Nachreiner & Schaufeli, 2001). The study is focused on a large British Public Sector organisation undergoing a major organisational shift in the way in which they operate as part of the public sector. It is often claimed that people do not leave organisations; they leave line managers (Kozlowski & Doherty, 1989). Regardless of the knowledge in the literature concerning the importance of the line manager in organisations (Purcell, 2003), the engagement literature in particular is lacking in the consideration of such a fundamental figure in organisational life. Further, the understanding of the black box of managerial discretion and its relationship to employee and organisation related outcomes would benefit from greater exploration (Purcell, 2003; Gerhart, 2005; Scott, et al, 2009). The purpose of this research is to address these gaps with relation to the innovative behaviour of employees in the public sector – an area that is not typically associated with the public sector (Bhatta, 2003; McGuire, Stoner & Mylona, 2008; Hughes, Moore & Kataria, 2011). The study is a CASE Award PhD thesis, requiring academic and practical elements to the research. The study is of one case organisation, focusing on one service characterised by a high level of adoption of Strategic Human Resource Management activities and operating in a rather unique manner for the public sector, having private sector competition for work. The study involved a mixed methods approach to data collection. Preliminary focus groups with 45 participants were conducted, followed by an ethnographic period of five months embedded into the service conducting interviews and observations. This culminated in a quantitative survey delivered within the wider directorate to approximately 500 staff members. The study used aspects of the Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) approach to analyse the data and developed results that highlight the importance of the line manager in an area characterised by SHRM and organisational change for engaging employees and encouraging innovative behaviour. This survey was completed on behalf of the organisation and the findings of this are presented in appendix 1, in order to keep the focus of the PhD on theory development. Implications for theory and practice are discussed alongside the core finding. Line managers’ discretion surrounding the provision of job resources (in particular trust, autonomy and implementation and interpretation of combined bundles of SHRM policies and procedures) influenced the exchange process by which employees responded with work engagement and innovative behaviour. Limitations to the research are the limitations commonly attributed to cross-sectional data collection methods and those surrounding generalisability of the qualitative findings outside of the contextual factors characterising the service area. Suggestions for future research involve addressing these limitations and further exploration of the discretionary role with regards to extending our understanding of line manager discretion.

Monetary channels of social inclusion: a case study of basic income and the Caixa Econômica Federal in Brazil

This article reports evidence of new monetary channels for social inclusion involving basic income policies and the Caixa Econômica Federal, a Brazilian government savings bank. Since the Plano Real (Brazilian currency) and the liberalization of banking in the 1990s, the realization of competitive advantages by the Caixa as social policy agent and the importance of citizenship cards differ from existing theories of bank change, financial inclusion and monetary policy. Multi-method research reveals the importance of 1) political theories of basic income, 2) conceptions of citizenship and social justice, and 3) a back to the future modernization of government banking. This provides alternatives to contemporary market-based banking theory, neo-liberal policies, private and non-governmental microfinance strategies, and theories in political economy about fiscal constraints to social policies. New monetary channels of change also suggest that zero sum theories about politics, monetary authority and social inclusion are amiss.

Semiotic Analysis in the Study of Social Work

Research and professional practices have the joint aim of re-structuring the preconceived notions of reality. They both want to gain the understanding about social reality. Social workers use their professional competence in order to grasp the reality of their clients, while researchers’ pursuit is to open the secrecies of the research material. Development and research are now so intertwined and inherent in almost all professional practices that making distinctions between practising, developing and researching has become difficult and in many aspects irrelevant. Moving towards research-based practices is possible and it is easily applied within the framework of the qualitative research approach (Dominelli 2005, 235; Humphries 2005, 280). Social work can be understood as acts and speech acts crisscrossing between social workers and clients. When trying to catch the verbal and non-verbal hints of each others’ behaviour, the actors have to do a lot of interpretations in a more or less uncertain mental landscape. Our point of departure is the idea that the study of social work practices requires tools which effectively reveal the internal complexity of social work (see, for example, Adams & Dominelli & Payne 2005, 294 – 295). The boom of qualitative research methodologies in recent decades is associated with much profound the rupture in humanities, which is called the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). The idea that language is not transparently mediating our perceptions and thoughts about reality, but on the contrary it constitutes it was new and even confusing to many social scientists. Nowadays we have got used to read research reports which have applied different branches of discursive analyses or narratologic or semiotic approaches. Although differences are sophisticated between those orientations they share the idea of the predominance of language. Despite the lively research work of today’s social work and the research-minded atmosphere of social work practice, semiotics has rarely applied in social work research. However, social work as a communicative practice concerns symbols, metaphors and all kinds of the representative structures of language. Those items are at the core of semiotics, the science of signs, and the science which examines people using signs in their mutual interaction and their endeavours to make the sense of the world they live in, their semiosis. When thinking of the practice of social work and doing the research of it, a number of interpretational levels ought to be passed before reaching the research phase in social work. First of all, social workers have to interpret their clients’ situations, which will be recorded in the files. In some very rare cases those past situations will be reflected in discussions or perhaps interviews or put under the scrutiny of some researcher in the future. Each and every new observation adds its own flavour to the mixture of meanings. Social workers have combined their observations with previous experience and professional knowledge, furthermore, the situation on hand also influences the reactions. In addition, the interpretations made by social workers over the course of their daily working routines are never limited to being part of the personal process of the social worker, but are also always inherently cultural. The work aiming at social change is defined by the presence of an initial situation, a specific goal, and the means and ways of achieving it, which are – or which should be – agreed upon by the social worker and the client in situation which is unique and at the same time socially-driven. Because of the inherent plot-based nature of social work, the practices related to it can be analysed as stories (see Dominelli 2005, 234), given, of course, that they are signifying and told by someone. The research of the practices is concentrating on impressions, perceptions, judgements, accounts, documents etc. All these multifarious elements can be scrutinized as textual corpora, but not whatever textual material. In semiotic analysis, the material studied is characterised as verbal or textual and loaded with meanings. We present a contribution of research methodology, semiotic analysis, which has to our mind at least implicitly references to the social work practices. Our examples of semiotic interpretation have been picked up from our dissertations (Laine 2005; Saurama 2002). The data are official documents from the archives of a child welfare agency and transcriptions of the interviews of shelter employees. These data can be defined as stories told by the social workers of what they have seen and felt. The official documents present only fragmentations and they are often written in passive form. (Saurama 2002, 70.) The interviews carried out in the shelters can be described as stories where the narrators are more familiar and known. The material is characterised by the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. The levels of the story and the telling of the story become apparent when interviews or documents are examined with the use of semiotic tools. The roots of semiotic interpretation can be found in three different branches; the American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics in Paris and the so called formalism in Moscow and Tartu; however in this paper we are engaged with the so called Parisian School of semiology which prominent figure was A. J. Greimas. The Finnish sociologists Pekka Sulkunen and Jukka Törrönen (1997a; 1997b) have further developed the ideas of Greimas in their studies on socio-semiotics, and we lean on their ideas. In semiotics social reality is conceived as a relationship between subjects, observations, and interpretations and it is seen mediated by natural language which is the most common sign system among human beings (Mounin 1985; de Saussure 2006; Sebeok 1986). Signification is an act of associating an abstract context (signified) to some physical instrument (signifier). These two elements together form the basic concept, the “sign”, which never constitutes any kind of meaning alone. The meaning will be comprised in a distinction process where signs are being related to other signs. In this chain of signs, the meaning becomes diverged from reality. (Greimas 1980, 28; Potter 1996, 70; de Saussure 2006, 46-48.) One interpretative tool is to think of speech as a surface under which deep structures – i.e. values and norms – exist (Greimas & Courtes 1982; Greimas 1987). To our mind semiotics is very much about playing with two different levels of text: the syntagmatic surface which is more or less faithful to the grammar, and the paradigmatic, semantic structure of values and norms hidden in the deeper meanings of interpretations. Semiotic analysis deals precisely with the level of meaning which exists under the surface, but the only way to reach those meanings is through the textual level, the written or spoken text. That is why the tools are needed. In our studies, we have used the semiotic square and the actant analysis. The former is based on the distinctions and the categorisations of meanings, and the latter on opening the plotting of narratives in order to reach the value structures.

National Study of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Workers, Work, and Organizational Contexts; Working Papers

Mode of access: Internet.

[almost An Autobiography: A Study Of Social Scientists In Health Based On The Lattes Curriculum].

Among the various ways of adopting the biographical approach, we used the curriculum vitaes (CVs) of Brazilian researchers who work as social scientists in health as our research material. These CVs are part of the Lattes Platform of CNPq - the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, which includes Research and Institutional Directories. We analyzed 238 CVs for this study. The CVs contain, among other things, the following information: professional qualifications, activities and projects, academic production, participation in panels for the evaluation of theses and dissertations, research centers and laboratories and a summarized autobiography. In this work there is a brief review of the importance of autobiography for the social sciences, emphasizing the CV as a form of autobiographical practice. We highlight some results, such as it being a group consisting predominantly of women, graduates in social sciences, anthropology, sociology or political science, with postgraduate degrees. The highest concentration of social scientists is located in Brazil's southern and southeastern regions. In some institutions the main activities of social scientists are as teachers and researchers with great thematic diversity in research.

Lo-Fi matchmaking: A study of social pairing for backpackers

It is technically feasible for mobile social software such as pairing or ‘matchmaking’ systems to introduce people to others and assist information exchange. However, little is known about the social structure of many mobile communities or why they would want such pairing systems. While engaged in other work determining requirements for a mobile travel assistant we saw a potentially useful application for a pairing system to facilitate the exchange of travel information between backpackers. To explore this area, we designed two studies involving usage of a low-fidelity role prototype of a social pairing system for backpackers. Backpackers rated the utility of different pairing types, and provided feedback on the social implications of being paired based on travel histories. Practical usage of the social network pairing activity and the implications of broader societal usage are discussed.

A conceptual model to approach the scaling process of social entreprises: The case of Cozinha com Alma

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

On the pragmatics of social theory. The case of Elias's "On the Process of Civilization"

This paper proposes a new approach to the study of sociological classics. This approach is pragmatic in character. It draws upon the social pragmatism of G.H. Mead and the sociology of texts of D.F. McKenzie. Our object of study is Norbert Elias’s On the Process of Civilization. The pragmatic genealogy of this book reveals the importance of taking materiality seriously. By documenting the successive entanglements between human agency and non-human factors, we discuss the origins of the book in the 1930s, how it was forgotten for thirty years, and how in the mid-1970s it became a sociological classic. We explain canonization as a matter of fusion between book’s material form and its content, in the context of the paperback revolution of the 1960s, the events of May 1968, and the demise of Parsons’ structural functionalism, and how this provided Elias with an opportunity to advance his model of sociology.

Lo-Fi matchmaking: A study of social pairing for backpackers 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp 2006

It is technically feasible for mobile social software such as pairing or ‘matchmaking’ systems to introduce people to others and assist information exchange. However, little is known about the social structure of many mobile communities or why they would want such pairing systems. While engaged in other work determining requirements for a mobile travel assistant we saw a potentially useful application for a pairing system to facilitate the exchange of travel information between backpackers. To explore this area, we designed two studies involving usage of a low-fidelity role prototype of a social pairing system for backpackers. Backpackers rated the utility of different pairing types, and provided feedback on the social implications of being paired based on travel histories. Practical usage of the social network pairing activity and the implications of broader societal usage are discussed.

Efectos de Territorio y Estrategias Familiares de Reproducción Social. El caso del Barrio Las playas de la ciudad de Villa María - Córdoba. Effects of Land and family strategies of social reproduction. The case of the neighborhood ´Las Playas´ in the city of Villa María - Córdoba.

Nuestro proyecto plantea analizar los recursos materiales y simbólicos que ponen en juego las familias pobres, en el marco de su reproducción social, a fin de evaluar en qué medida sus estrategias contribuyen a superar o reproducir las condiciones de pobreza hipotetizando que las prácticas sociales de las agentes en situación de pobreza, incluyen limitaciones conformadas por la estructura patrimonial disponible, como potencialidades inscriptas en la trayectoria colectiva y el estado de los instrumentos de reproducción del barrio, considerado como parte del sistema de estrategias de reproducción de sus unidades domésticas. En ese sentido la comprensión de las estrategias materiales y simbólicas que ponen en juego las familias pobres, nos ofrecerá una comprensión acabada de la problemática en cuestión a los efectos de lograr una incidencia mayor a la hora de la implementación de políticas públicas destinadas a este grupo poblacional, y grupos poblacionales similares. La inteligibilidad de este escenario social, puede ser aprehendida fundamentalmente, desde las posibilidades abiertas por las herramientas de tipo cualitativas, sin embargo la metodología utilizada en este proyecto de investigación considera la triangulación de inter-metodológica como recurso fundamental a fin de dar cuenta tanto de la dimensión explicativa como comprensiva de los problemas sociales a estudiar. La muestra es teórica intencional, sus alcances se definen por criterio de saturación teórica. Unidades de recolección: unidades familiares en situación de pobreza que viven en el barrio Las Playas, instituciones formales y no formales que conforman los instrumentos de reproducción social. En el trabajo de campo se profundizarán las estrategias de: 1- Observación a partir de la construcción de guías para la mayor precisión de un registro de tipo etnográfico; 2- Entrevistas semi-estructuradas y abiertas a diferentes familias del barrio seleccionadas a partir de la técnica denominada "Bola de Nieve" la cual provee un alcance exhaustivo en el territorio determinado; 3- Entrevista a informantes clave relacionados con ONGs e Instituciones Estatales actuantes en el barrio, referentes barriales y sindicales, punteros políticos, etc. Los datos obtenidos en el trabajo de campo deben relevar información que garantice el registro de las diversas miradas de los participantes y controlar la diferenciación entre los datos originales y las propias interpretaciones (Mendizábal, 2006). por lo cual la triangulación inter-metodológica, posibilitará articular reflexivamente los resultados cuantitavos y cualitativos. Se prevé la transferencia de resultados a través de publicaciones individuales o colectivas sobre los resultados obtenidos así como la presentación preliminar de los mismos en congresos y conferencias. Asimismo, se organizarán seminarios con los sectores de la sociedad civil que se trabaje en los que se espera discutir los resultados obtenidos.