Coping and Pulling Through

Action Processes in Vulnerable Situations

Vivianne Châtel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351161022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 2004. Exclusion is a popular area of sociological research, with much analysis pointing towards survival practices and inclusion mechanisms as ways to cope with and confront exclusion. However, the question of what it means to act and how it is possible to do so from a vulnerable situation has yet to be properly addressed. This resourceful volume takes on this challenge, examining how to react and the measures to employ in instances of material and symbolic deprivation. It analyzes whether alliances can be formed and their potential benefit, and discusses which supports are available despite structural inequality and no opportunity for reciprocation. Drawing together illustrative case studies from across Europe, the contributors consider in depth how a community or individual can take support from a spoiled identity and transform both it and the physical situation. This illuminating volume also includes discussions of living without support, security of living conditions and dignity, claims for citizenship, collective action, continuity and survival. It proposes an innovative and groundbreaking theory for 'weak' action.

Chapter 1

Acting in a Situation of Social Vulnerability: Constructing the Problem

Vivianne Châtel

To situate this attempt at a problematisation, I would like to set it in the context of a story, a commonplace story like one of those stories that we all know, the only difference being, perhaps, that this one is not about people who are excluded – as per the usual categories – or people with a disability, or about (multiple) drug-addicts, in other words, it is not about any of the categories usually understood as being vulnerable. It concerns a highly-qualified female person, employed in a state-owned company. After years of official employment and services rendered, this person was not given a permanent appointment for purely extra-professional reasons. The reason being, a fact which was, moreover, common knowledge well before she took up her post, a long-term relationship with another member of the work group. What is it that makes this situation interesting, given that it is, after all, banal in the face of the recent and future redundancies made by large companies?

Simply because it is a fairly good presentation of the mechanisms of vulnerability and of the way that action mechanisms are weakened as a result, but also because it concerns social categories a priori considered as non-vulnerable and thus forgotten by the fields of analysis. Additionally this, especially, within the framework of our contemporary societies where work tends to retain a place of major importance, that it gives identity.

This story enables us to highlight several issues, notably that of trust, that of the contradiction internal to economic discourse and that of the capability of acting, issues which should allow us to outline the question of acting in a situation of vulnerability and especially to distinguish the prerequisites.

The first issue then is that of being placed in a situation of vulnerability by negation of the trust placed in the company. To understand this negation, it is important to return to the organisational principles of contemporary society. Many analyses have appeared over recent years concerning the place of work in the present-day world. They all agree on acknowledging the essential place that work occupies, an essential place that prompts us to wonder about the employee / place of work relationship (where the place of work refers to any place of work, be it in a public institution, a small, medium, large or very large company). The requirements of the world of the place of work aim to establish a relationship of trust. In this trust means that the person places his/her future in the hands of the company. Trust, also means the internalisation of the principles which guide the professional act in the current work context. This tends to accentuate the concern for an appropriateness between the values of the employee and that of the company, an appropriateness between official rules and unofficial rules from which no place of work can escape. Trust also, inasmuch that is guided by implicit knowledge and socialised into certain work codes, the person invests himself/herself in a relationship which is intrinsic to a history which gives him/her a meaning and an end (permanency in the job, mobility or something else). Finally, trust, when in the normative professional world, investment as loyalty are both recognised and approved criteria. In the example evoked, which will serve as our main thread, trust placed in the professional sphere turns out to be profoundly affected, even betrayed. The criteria that are generally effective are not functioning. For one face, one name, one history, investment and loyalty are not acknowledged.

Trust has only recently been studied by sociology, despite the fact that it is a key issue in social relations. It is essential insofar as it is independent of, or is a substitute for, contracts and other co-operation agreements which have a juridical basis. There is no need for a written or oral promise, or for a legal contract. Trusting Others, is as it were, thinking, though without being completely sure, that Others will keep their commitments, even, and especially, if these are implicit, which of course has consequences for the situation or the action context. In other words, if I trust Others, I act in reference to the fact that Others are supposed to keep their commitments, commitments which are not necessarily explicit promises, but which take into account the action context and the behaviour expectations. Here we encounter the acquisitions of Weberian sociology where social activity and typification (to use the terminology of Alfred Schütz) are inextricably linked. Thus trust is inherently a weakening, because it is partly based on official rules but also on implicit knowledge. Trust supposes not only an analysis of the interests of the various parties involved, but also an inevitable risk, that of betrayal. Hence, our idea of a weakening, insofar as it is difficult to count on the idea of a reputation to defend in a socio-cultural world where, finally, only individual performance is what matters. In the contemporary perspective of social relations which are guided by individual success and indifference to the future of Others, trust becomes dependence. Somewhat in the logic of the economic contract denounced by Emile Durkheim as incapable of creating social cohesion, simply because today’s ally would be tomorrow’s enemy. Trust and dependence are thus linked because everything hangs on protagonists who connect their actions to the degree of capability that they assign to their allies of keeping their unspoken commitments, of respecting a word that is also unspoken, but which is embedded in customs, or perhaps in interpretable official codes. Each action situation is a situation of interpretation, inherently dependant on the real-life world of the participants. The values and ways of being of some do not completely tally with the values and ways of being of others, and this is true even within a same social group. Unfortunate experiences during holidays shared with best friends are just one testimony to the distress caused by promises not being kept and trust being betrayed.

Therefore, besides the issue of knowing whether trust today still constitutes a transmitted and internalised value, or more exactly whether its near equivalent, respect of commitments and codes, is still a recognised and reasserted social practice, it is important to understand that dependence, which stems from trust, is not a reciprocal principle. In fact, the idea of trust conceals the idea of power and especially of power over (to take Paul Ricceur’s phrase), knowing that:

It is difficult to imagine situations of interaction in which one individual does not exert a power over another by the very fact of acting. (Ricœur, 1992, 220)

In other words, it conceals the idea that there is never an exact equivalence between the power of Others and the power over Others. Trust is abused when this fundamental Kantian distinction between a person as an end in himself/herself and a person as a means disappears, leaving the way free for power over to exert itself, without any possible reciprocity, even without risk. Basically, the idea of trust, especially in a world of the fundamental differentiation of social positions and thus in a world of social inequalities (whether visible or not), takes us back to the idea of social justice and even more so to the application of moral criteria. It is particularly based on the idea that power over will not be exerted in a way that breaches fundamental freedoms, or more exactly the social codes and practices that govern a given institution.

Now, in our example, power over is exerted in opposition to the established codes and practices. Trust being a category which drives social relations in their entirety, it is a particular motor of professional relations. In the world of work, which is subject to the imperatives of profitability and competitiveness, trust proves to be essentially dependent and subject to, the (non) application of moral imperatives, insofar as it cannot merely be reduced to the idea of the evaluation of risks. This reduction would then mean that the person who gives their trust has the power to not give it. But to what extent can power over be subsumed under ethico-juridical considerations, particularly in a world where the media of Power and Money dominate? To what extent, in such a world, is trust reduced to nothingness, which, moreover, seems to be the status accorded it by the juridical proceedings of our societies, in which the search for a perpetrator is ever more intensified. The consequence is the creation ‘of a society of victims, everyone seeking to appear to be one so as to benefit from compensation’ (Engel, 1995, 17).¹ Trust then is relative. In such a societal context, it is particularly subordinate to the capability of the participants to not be totally dominated by the possible gains resulting from a lawsuit should an injury be incurred, especially because the activity is freely agreed (in which each participant is aware of the risks that he/she is taking in the activity).

If, as a result, trust is approached as being a mainstay of social cohesion, it merits all our attention. In our story, the breaching of trust is a breach of the capability to act. Simply put, it weakens the power to do of the actor who, while being the author of his/her acts, no longer has control over the consequences. Anyone in a position of subordination, unless they have the capacity to harm, is weakened when the aims of the protagonists differ. In order to face this, self-esteem which Paul Ricœur likens to ‘the dignity attached to the moral status of the human person’ hardly counterbalances the logic of interest (Ricœur, 2000, 138). Indeed, this self-esteem is denied as a skill or as vehicle for the idea of the subject. Consequently, trust betrayed, leads to low self-esteem rather than to the acknowledgement of a Self-subject-capable of imputation.

The second issue actualised by our story concerns the contradictions inherent to the discourse of the economic world. In the past, it was obligatory:

not only to work, but to work within the framework of traditional structures, accepting a wage which was also unalterably fixed; and not only idleness, begging and itinerancy were condemned, but also any attempts to negotiate the wage or to seek another job with better conditions. (Castel, 1989, 12-13)

Today, it is still obligatory to work, but more, especially, to be flexible. Idleness, begging and itinerancy are still condemned – some politicians do not hesitate to take anti-begging measures. But it is the ways in which job legislation is regularly undermined which particularly deserve our attention (e.g. the transfer of manufacturing to a developing country). In fact, over the last few years, identification, mobility and flexibility have become essential and dominating values. The economic world effectively has the habit of suggesting that a career is (or will be) divided between several posts – different jobs, different places, different social positions. This claim brings into play one of the elements of the economic and financial sphere, without concern for the people involved, even without concern for the world – to repeat the fears of the advocates of sustainable development. Flexibility, like work time, subject only to the requirements of the company and without any other criteria being taken into consideration, and mobility within the sphere of employment, are dominant values in the economic world. They form the point where the organisation of contemporary society pauses, as though the latter were completely conquered by, or had sworn allegiance to economic demands.

In a recent, rather polemic work, Pierre-André Taguieff wonders, not irrelevantly about le bougisme (unsettledeness) or what he also calls le mouvementisme (shifting), as a mark of contemporary society (Taguieff, 2001). Within this perspective, the economic sphere calls for mobility, flexibility, constant adaptation, for a kind of constant movement, but also for permanent availability. Employees of all types must continually be the best, the most capable, the most competent, the most competitive, the most driven… In order to ‘go with the flow’, to take the terminology of advertising or the media, you have to move, have drive, go for it. But to go where? Living in the world certainly presupposes adapting oneself, but adapting oneself to what, in the end, and according to which norms?

We are seeing the appearance, alongside the gulf that is forming between rich countries and poor countries, alongside the environmental issues, a split at the very heart of the western world. This split between two worlds, vis-à-vis this new requirement for flexibility and mobility, is characterised by two aspects. On the one hand, there are those who surf this wave of mobility, so fervently demanded by the economic sphere. On the other, there are those who are uneasy, not with regard to investment in work, but with regard to permanent geographic mobility, or an imposed flexibility, who consequently become victims of this pliability of the frameworks, flexibility which becomes insecurity, which is undermining. Furthermore, this split rests on two other contradictions, one internal to the very discourse of large companies with this demand for total flexibility/mobility, and at the same time, the demand for the identification of the employee with the company. The other is internal to the political world which condemns the failure of parents to take responsibility for the education of their children and simultaneously, does not call into question this flexibility, which is translated into elastic working hours rarely compatible with parental responsibility. It does not ask any questions about the minimum social conditions necessary for the exercise of this parental responsibility.²

In other words, to return to the first contradiction, the economic sphere suggests, and demands, a near-total identification of the person with his/her place of work. However, it does not hesitate to call this investment and this identification into question and to deny it all relevance. This demand of the economic world for total flexibility/mobility seems to forget the social and normative background which guides and defines the work relationship of thousands of people, while several ways of imagining the work relationship are identifiable, such as the mobility model and the professional model (Francfort, Osty, Sainsaulieu and Uhalde, 1995).³

The first model reflects an over-deteimination of the personal trajectory in the implication of the individual in the place of work. It is not the values of the company that validate this implication, but primarily the idea of amassing experience, accumulating skills, gathering professional reflections and observations; it is, to use current terminology, improving one’s ‘employability’ by a diversification of lived experiences. Mobility is, in this sense, an asset laid claim to and perfectly well-assumed. In other words, there are no qualms about the company. What guides the acts of the employees who fit this schema is only defined by the knowledge or the new skills that they can acquire, or by the positive experience for their own curriculum vitae, or an interest may be purely personal (financial, symbolic, cultural). No consideration is given to the fact that the employee is not attached to the company and can get a high price (when there is no economic crisis of course) for his/her skills, his/her experience, or his/her know-how. In this sense, the employee perfectly fits the ‘unsettledness’ era. Free of all attachments, free of all constraints. Free, or rather detached, in the sense of having no attachments, but also without real ties, apart from potential ones.

To return to the strategies of the actor, this perspective cannot be shared by everybody. In fact, a certain number of considerations – social, familial and cultural – must be taken into account to explain the strategies of the actors at this level. Thus, family obligations often put a stop to this demand for mobility, to this call for ‘unsettledness’, together with life histories, experience, illusions and disillusions, or commitments. This mobility strategy concerns in fine a very small part of the population which is easily identified.⁴ Whether a person is young without attachments, married with child(ren) at school and has a spouse who works in a responsible job with a high lev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Acting in a Situation of Social Vulnerability: Constructing the Problem
• 2 Capital Thinking and Social Vulnerability: The Effects of Flexible Assignation
• 3 Individuals without Supports
• 4 Is the Juridical Establishment of the Principle of the Respect of Human Dignity Effective?
• 5 Reconstructive Ethics, Political Justice and Social Vulnerability
• 6 Exclusion and Assertion of Citizenship
• 7 Occupational Precariousness and Political Mobilisation
• 8 Continuity of Identity and Survival
• 9 Social Action and Domination
• 10 Facing Social Vulnerability and Coming Through: Towards a Theory of Weak Acting
• Index