On Vulnerability

A Critical Introduction

Patrick Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367366612
• eBook ISBN: 9781000400298
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

On Vulnerability maps out an array of perspectives for critically examining the nature of vulnerability, its unequal patterning across different social groups, alongside the everyday social processes that render us vulnerable – interactions, identity and group dynamics.

Each chapter equips the reader with a particular sensitising framework for navigating and questioning what it means to be vulnerable or how people cope amid vulnerability. From deviance, stigma and the spoiling or fracturing of identity, to perspectives such as intersectionality, risk, emotions and the vulnerable body, the book traces the theoretical roots of these different analytical lenses, before applying these through illuminating examples and case studies.

Drawing on scholarship across more interpretative, analytic and critical traditions, the chapters combine into a multi-dimensional toolkit which will enable the study of the cultural meanings of vulnerability, the political-economic factors that shape its patterning, with a critical sensibility for 'unlearning' many assumptions, therefore challenging our sense of who is, or who can be, vulnerable. This book is designed to equip undergraduate and post-graduate students and researchers across the social, health and human sciences, aiding them as they study and question the experiences and structures of vulnerability in our social world.

1

Vulnerability as deviance and stigma

Introduction – context is everything

Christopher, the boy who we met in the Introduction chapter, could be seen as ‘vulnerable’; however, I argued that his vulnerability was neither constant nor intrinsic. Instead, we explored how specific features of his social context, in terms of time, space and social norms, alongside his limited understanding of these rules, combined to render Christopher vulnerable in particular moments. In understanding vulnerability as situational and contingent on specific demands placed upon us, we began to see that vulnerability results from the workings of everyday social processes. In this chapter we will map out some underlying features of these social processes before we move on to consider how the very functioning of ‘the social’ – that is, processes which are fundamental to our sociality and to the very existence of social groups – is key to grasping why some of us may become vulnerable at some moments and in some places.

In starting to unpack all this, I like to show my students a YouTube clip where a Dutch footballer, Dennis Bergkamp, scored a goal against Argentina in the World Cup finals in France in 1998. The build-up to the goal is well worked and the finish beautiful, clinical, but what is even more striking about this clip¹ is the Dutch commentary by Jack van Gelder, though you do not need to speak Dutch to grasp its meaning. When I ask the students whether van Gelder’s reaction is normal or deviant, or even unhinged, some have replied that under no circumstances could this behaviour be considered the response of ‘normal’ man. Others say that the historic rivalry between these two teams, the poor performances of the Dutch national team in preceding tournaments, the 90th minute timing of the goal and so on mean that van Gelder’s level of excitement is more reasonable. Some students have further educated me as to van Gelder’s well-established quirky persona as a media personality and that he was commentating on radio and so was seeking to bring the moment to life in a more vivid manner, suggesting that this adds further legitimacy to his form of ‘speaking’. In all these senses, while if the person sitting next to you on the number 5 tram were to start yelling, almost yodelling, the words ‘Dennis Bergkamp, Dennis Bergkamp …’ repeatedly, then it would be odd, the more we know about the context of this moment, the more van Gelder’s actions seem fairly ‘normal’.

In these senses, the context, the history and the implicit rules by which we interact make all the difference between whether we find van Gelder a likeable entertainer or a worrying, troubling misfit. Understanding the social processes that shape these contextual dynamics is therefore important to grasping how some of us become vulnerable at some moments and, moreover, why some are more likely than others to become vulnerable. We can analyse these processes at the micro-level, in terms of how individuals interact with each other, but I will start at the macro-level, in terms of how society functions as a whole.

Studying fundamental social processes and their role in shaping deviance

Before we move to understand deviance as an inevitable consequence of fundamental social processes, it is useful to journey back to grasp how we might best grasp these social processes in the first place.

The basic problem of social order has been a defining theme of political theory, philosophy and theology for two millennia. Indeed, for most of this period these three academic traditions were one and the same, importantly shaped by Augustine of Hippo’s (ad 426) work On the City of God against the Pagans which grappled with questions of how to maintain social order given the inherent depravity and sinful nature of human beings. Augustine’s ([426] 1998) writings fundamentally oriented theories of the state for centuries with his doctrine of original sin – and the related need for a strong state – still importantly reflected in Thomas Hobbes’s (1651) assertion that ‘without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man’ (sic. Chapter XIII). From this perspective, human beings are so selfish and self-serving that social order and (relative) peace are only possible through the threat and coercion of a powerful state.

Yet this enduring understanding gradually came to be challenged. From John Locke – Hobbes’s most well-known critic – through the work of Emile Durkheim, Herbert Simon, Talcott Parsons and Jürgen Habermas, a number of social theorists have argued that we cannot explain social order, structure and apparently diminishing levels of violence purely through the threat of a strong coercive state. Durkheim points to the role of a ‘collective conscience’ and the feeling of ‘elan’ one experiences when helping others and acting in the common good (see Parsons 1967: 6–7). This is far more than instrumental self-serving behaviour, instead we are socialised into a set of norms that become deeply internalised and that help coordinate our actions and motivations in line with those of the common good (Parsons 1949; and see especially Habermas 1987: 204–234 for a beautiful summary of the historical development of these understandings).

Norbert Elias develops a particularly sophisticated understanding of the relationship between behaviours and emotions towards others as these interweave with wider changes in the structures of social groups. In his classic work The Civilising Process, Elias (2000) traces connections between changes in the overarching social, political and economic structures of society and changes in how we feel and behave towards others – with these two processes feeding back on one another over time. For Elias, the role of a strong state that monopolised violence was important, but more in helping form a much broader set of processes, such as the increased viability and flourishing of trade and wider economic activity, which the state acted to ensure and protect.

For individuals to profit from these new trading possibilities, they needed to better understand the ‘others’ – people from different regions, countries or different class groups – with which they were doing business or who they employed. What began as a more instrumental need to understand those from different groups, to better profit from interactions with them (Flores 2009: 45), gradually over generations and increasing amounts of contact and exchange, develops into empathy and, eventually, a feeling and care for other groups, wider communities and many animals. The result of this ‘civilising’ process is an ‘emerging habitus … characterized by a widening of “circles of concern” and empathy for others (de Swaan 1995), and a related greater attentiveness to one’s conduct in the presence of others’ (Brown et al. 2020: 131).

At the heart of this process by which the social and the psychological mutually shape one another is, according to Elias, one key mechanism:

No society can survive without a channelling of individual drives and effects, without a very specific control of individual behaviour. No such control is possible unless people exert constraints on one another, and all constraint is converted in the person on whom it is imposed into fear of one kind or another. We should not deceive ourselves: the constant production and reproduction of human fears by people is inevitable and indispensable wherever people live together, wherever the desires and actions of a number of people interact, whether at work, in leisure or in love-making.

(Elias 2000: 443)

For Elias, the social coordination of emotions of fear and shame (see also Scheff 2004) is integral to how societies work.

In this sense Elias’s work reflects earlier arguments by Freud, among others, that the social processes that stop civilisation from imploding in a self-serving orgy of sex and violence are the very same social processes that leave us repressed and unhappy (see especially Freud’s 1961 Civilization and Its Discontents). These thinkers thus show us how vulnerable emotions – of guilt, fear and shame – are what make it possible for us to co-exist among others. If humans attain the good life by living in sociality with others (as Aristotle argued), then an inescapable part of that life is feeling vulnerable to those around us through the processes of guilt, shame and fear that keep our darker sides in check.²

At this point, I would like to become a little more specific still in terms of thinking through three fundamental social processes and the ways these make us vulnerable – order, solidarity and trust:

Order

Norms and rules of interacting and of permissible behaviour are vital parts of our everyday lives. Depending on where you live, the existence of clear social rules and norms will usually make you physically safer, make your life simpler and save you from embarrassment. Because they exist as taken-for-granted unspoken rules, we are usually not aware of the extent to which norms make our lives easier. Though when we change location – through migration, working in a different organisation, travel and so on – this can give us at least some insight into the role and importance of unwritten social conventions.

When I first started working at the University of Amsterdam, I had the privilege of working in a wonderful sixteenth century building, full of character with, among other things, elegant toilets with stained glass windows. However, the norms of using these toilets were different to what I had been used to while living in several other countries. While the cubicles themselves were private, the washbasins were communal and mixed sex. In England I had become aware that in different pubs and in different parts of the country, for example, there would be different norms for how much (or how little) eye contact or conversation to make in public toilets. Yet I was utterly clueless as to the interaction norms around these University of Amsterdam washbasins. Was I to limit my interactions to a basic ‘hello’, for example, when washing hands next to younger male and female colleagues or students? Or was that too friendly perhaps? Or not friendly enough? And how was I to interact with one female colleague who regularly brushed her teeth at those washbasins? Interactions with her were especially awkward as I could not really ask her questions, given that it was difficult for her to reply. Over time, I learned how to survive these toilet experiences, but, especially as a socially awkward Brit, those early weeks made me acutely aware of the value of norms and the potential for awkwardness and embarrassment in their absence, or rather where one did not understand these norms (remember Christopher in the Introduction).

Social norms and their continuity are invaluable for many and especially for those who hold positions of (relative) privilege and power – such as a lecturer at a lovely old university. Yet in order to perform their function for the wider organisation and its members, these norms also need to be upheld. As apparent in the long quotation from Elias above, norms must be ‘policed’ (see also Becker 1963: 2 – Box 1.1), and we place constraints on others through an array of processes such as chastising, ridicule, laughing, shunning and avoiding those acting ‘outside’ the norm. While the precise manner of controlling others varies across societies and may be more formal and explicit or informal and implicit (see Wouters 2007), this policing of those around us makes life easier for most of us while also making many of us potentially vulnerable and some very vulnerable indeed.

Box 1.1 The labelling of deviance and mental health problems

Perhaps the most important social scientific study of deviance is Howard Becker’s (1963) work Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Here, Becker delineates deviance chiefly in terms of social rules, processes of labelling and the reactions of others. Echoing Blumer (e.g. 1971) Becker notes that it is not just that ‘social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance’, after all we are all guilty of breaking rules. What is also important is how these groups then ‘apply’ these rules ‘to particular people … labelling them as outsiders’ (1963: 9). Like Goffman’s work on stigma (1963), Becker was also interested in the moral career of those labelled as deviant, and here he echoes Lemert’s (1951) work on primary and secondary deviance. While some have fleeting experiences or experiments with deviance, others – as the result of ‘social structures and changes in perspective’, come to ‘follow a career which leads them into ever increasing deviance’ (Becker 1963: 24).

Scheff (1974), drawing further on Lemert, applied this understanding of deviance to develop an explanation of the origin of chronic severe mental health problems. Controversially, Scheff argued that while many people may have one-off, fleeting or ‘primary’ experiences of deviant thinking or behaviour that could be considered as reflecting mental illness, it is the categorising of some of these people with the label of ‘schizophrenic’, for example, which then consolidates this vulnerability into a more enduring pattern and career of ‘secondary’ deviance. In this sense and influenced by the anti-psychiatry wave of his time, Scheff argued that psychiatric institutions do not so much treat as impose and foster enduring mental illness.

While Scheff’s labelling theory of mental health problems came to be widely critiqued, Bruce Link and colleagues (1989) developed a ‘modified labelling approach’, arguing that rather than simply internalising a label as a self-fulfilling prophecy, a less direct mechanism is at work by which labelling encourages longer-term mental health problems. This mechanism centres around stigma; mental illness labels can create stigma which then reduces people’s social networks and social support, thus making them more vulnerable to longer-ter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing ‘a critical introduction’
• 1 Vulnerability as deviance and stigma
• 2 When ‘normal’ people become vulnerable
• 3 The intersectionality of vulnerability
• 4 Understanding vulnerability through the lens of risk
• 5 Trust, hope, magic and the paradox of vulnerability
• 6 The vulnerable body
• 7 Vulnerability to suffering
• 8 Ethical concerns in researching vulnerability, as inseparable from methodological and analytical considerations
• Conclusions – three types of knowledge around vulnerability
• References
• Index