Manstetten / Positionings Towards the ‘Work-Dogma’ from the Margins
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on those classified as unemployed via an activation paradigm that supposedly increases their willingness to work
(Dingeldey, 2007; Dörre, 2014; Senghaas et al., 2019; Traue et al., 2019).
The wage-labor norm is also visible as a symbolic-discursive order that strikes a clear division between allegedly
active, independent, moral and hardworking employees and the allegedly passive, dependent, immoral and lazy
unemployed. In media and daily life, such discriminatory attributions are often reproduced as defamatory social
caricatures like the ‘social parasite’, the ‘poverty immigrant’ or the ‘welfare queen’, all of whom are portrayed as
abusers of the welfare state (Oschmiansky, 2003; Lehnert, 2009; Romano, 2018). Thus, unemployment often leads
to stigma, exclusion and material deprivation, placing many of those affected in a particularly vulnerable and
marginalized position (Gurr and Jungbauer-Gans, 2013: 339).
Nevertheless, positionings of people outside of wage labor are not homogeneous, but are often connected to
institutionalized and discursive ‘deservingness-criteria’ that provide an answer to the question ‘who should get
what and why’ (van Oorschot, 2000). This leads to non-working people being confronted with the norm of
employment in different ways, based on assumptions about their health, gender, affiliation, neediness, etc.
Against this background, the question arises to what extent the unemployed affirm or challenge the wage-labor
norm and its associated institutionalized orders. As ‘deviants from the norm’, it seems likely that they have a certain
interest in articulating a critique of it. However, the very effectiveness of the work-dogma could also suggest that
they seek an affirmative relationship with it in order to avoid further social exclusion.
When I began to search for answers to this question, based on 25 qualitative interviews from my PhD research
with the unemployed, I realized that forms of resistance and compliance with the wage-labor norm appeared not
only in interviewees’ responses to my questions but also in their interactions with me. I assumed that this might
have something to do with the fact that the research situation could also be understood as an encounter between
a person who conforms to the labor norm (the researcher) and a person who deviates from it (the participant).
From this perspective, the participants seemed to follow very different ways of dealing with their positions as
‘deviant’ from the norm of wage labor in the interview situation, including hiding, revealing or negotiating
vulnerabilities, inequalities or power imbalances. The present paper demonstrates how the analysis of interview
dynamics and the relationship between interviewer and research participant can provide insights into different
ways of affirming, challenging or critiquing the wage-labor norm from the margins.
This approach is inspired by previous methodological contributions that have shown how the social interaction
in research settings is often affected by social inequalities and the negotiation of hierarchies and power dynamics
(see, e.g., Davies, 2007; Berger, 2015; Hamilton, 2020; Frers and Meier, 2022). Instead of asking how these
inequalities impact the co-construction of knowledge as it is often discussed, I explore this epistemic tension by
understanding the research situation itself as worthy of analysis. In doing so, my contribution follows Frers and
Meier (2022: 656) who claim ‘that a critical reflection of inequalities in research relations can also be a contribution
to research on social inequalities in general’. Methodologically, the present paper develops its own heuristic,
inspired by Situational Analysis (Clarke, 2005) and Interpretative Subjectivation Analysis (Bosančić, 2021), paying
particular attention to practices of mutual forms of address between researcher and interviewee and exploring
different ways of self-positioning in the research situation.
Previous studies in the German context have highlighted that the wage-labor norm is rarely questioned from
the margins (Bescherer et al., 2009; Englert et al., 2012; Dörre, 2014). These studies provide valuable insights but
focus primarily on the statements and narrations of unemployed people. My research aims to complement them
by exploring how normative orientations can also become visible in actions, affects and ways of dealing with
vulnerabilities in practice. By shedding light on the way in which research participants interpret and appropriate
the research situation itself and how they address me, I demonstrate how different ways of self-positioning can
also be understood as affirmation or critique of the wage-labor norm and how they correspond with verbalized
critiques.
With this approach, this article also presents empirical material relevant to broader epistemological debates in
the fields of critical sociology and standpoint theories about whether people ‘on the margins’ of society or
occupying specific oppressed or subaltern positions are epistemically privileged or disadvantaged by their specific
social standpoint and, therefore, more or less capable of criticism (see, e.g., Haraway, 1988; Harding, 2003; Hill
Collins, 2009; Fricker, 2010; Celikates, 2019; Hilscher et al., 2020).
Historically, marginalized groups of poor and unemployed people were often seen in one of two ways. They
were either viewed as possible revolutionary subjects, for example, by famous scholars such as Marcuse (1998), Fanon
(1963) and various anarchist thinkers, or they were defamed as the so-called
lumpenproletariat following accounts of
scholars like Marx and Engels, who contrasted them with the working class and portrayed them mostly as amoral,
passive and incapable of critical actions (Bescherer, 2013; Barrow, 2020). These attributions were also taken up in
later research on the unemployed, for example, when they were portrayed as passive and lethargic in the famous
study on Marienthal (Jahoda et al., 2021) or when thinkers like Bourdieu (1999) or Castel (2017) were skeptical
about the critical potential of the unemployed in their work on the precariat. However, this prompts the question