Jason Hughes

Bringing Emotion to Work: Emotional Intelligence, Employee Resistance, and the Reinvention of Character

This article centrally examines the sociological significance of emotional intelligence (EI) as a nascent managerial discourse. Through developing a three-way reading of the writers Richard Sennett, Daniel Goleman, and George Ritzer, it is contended that EI can be understood to signal ‘new rules’ for work involving demands for workers to develop moral character better attuned to the dynamics of the flexible workplace - character that is more ‘intelligent’, adaptive, and reflexive. Furthermore, it is argued that while EI appears in some important respects to open the scope for worker discretion, it might also signal diminished scope for worker resistance. However, ultimately, the case of EI is used to problematise recent discussions of worker resistance - to suggest the possibility of ‘resistant’ worker agency exercised through collusion with, as well as transgression of, corporate norms and practices.

Learning to smoke : tobacco use in the West

Why do people smoke? Taking a unique approach to this question, Jason Hughes moves beyond the usual focus on biological addiction to demonstrate how sociocultural and personal understandings of smoking crucially affect the way people experience it. Hughes begins by tracing the transformations of tobacco and its use over time, from its role as a hallucinogen in Native American shamanistic ritual to its use as a prophylactic against the plague and a cure for cancer by early Europeans, and finally to the current view of smoking as a global pandemic. He then analyzes tobacco from the perspective of the individual user, exploring how its consumption relates to issues of identity and life changes. Comparing sociocultural and personal experiences, Hughes ultimately asks what the patterns of tobacco use mean for the clinical treatment of smokers and for public policy on smoking. Pointing the way, then, to a more learned and sophisticated understanding of tobacco use, this study should prove to be valuable reading for anyone interested in the history of smoking and the sociology of addiction.

The idea of moral panic – ten dimensions of dispute

This paper explores the open and contested concept of moral panic over its 40-year history, exploring the contributions made by the concept’s key originators, as well as contemporary researchers. While most moral panic researchers are critical, humanist, interpretivist, interventionist and qualitative, this paper highlights ten areas of productive dispute within and around the meaning of moral panic theory’s ‘common sense’. Such diversity of interpretation creates multiple possibilities for convergent and divergent theorization and research within a supposedly singular conceptual framework. This lack of closure and consequent diversity of political standpoints, intellectual perspectives and fields of empirical focus, rather than representing the weakness of the concept of moral panic, reflects and contributes to its successful diffusion, escalation and innovation.

Sacrifice and distinction in dirty work: men’s construction of meaning in the butcher trade

Through a study of the butcher trade, this article explores the meanings that men give to ‘dirty work’, that is jobs or roles that are seen as distasteful or ‘undesirable’. Based on qualitative data, we identify three themes from butchers’ accounts that relate to work-based meanings: sacrifice through physicality of work; loss and nostalgia in the face of industrial change; and distinction from membership of a shared trade. Drawing on Bourdieu, we argue that sacrifice and distinction help us understand some of the meanings men attach to dirty, manual work – forming part of a working-class ‘habitus’. Further, these assessments can be both ‘reproductive’ and ‘productive’ as butchers reinforce historically grounded evaluations of work and mobilize new meanings in response to changes in the trade.

Towards a Developmental Understanding of Happiness

In this paper we centrally explore the ‘sociogenesis’ of the concept of happiness: the social processes by which it came to be a term appropriated by different practitioner communities - from policy makers to academics, from a burgeoning self-help industry to advocates of positive psychology. Our core focus is upon shifting historical understandings of the term and how these relate to more general social processes. Our aim in this paper is not to present a definitive history of happiness, but rather something of the overall direction of changes in dominant approaches to, and understandings of, happiness particularly within what we might broadly term ‘the human sciences’. Ultimately, we offer a series of tentative reflections upon the implications of a developmental approach to happiness for sociological analyses of this increasingly popular area of concern.

The use of ethnography to explore meanings that refuse collectors attach to their work

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to detail how the ethnographic approach can be usefully adopted in the context of researching dirty or undesirable work. Drawing on a study of refuse collectors, it shows how ethnography can enable a fuller social articulation of the experiences and meanings of a social group where conventional narrative disclosure and linguistic expression may be insufficient. Design/methodology/approach – Viewing ethnography as no one particular method, but rather a style of research that is distinguished by its objectives to understand the social meanings and activities of people in a given “field” or setting, this paper highlights aspects of reproductive and “dirty” work which may be hidden or difficult to reveal. Combining the methods of participant observation, photographic representation and interviews, we add to an understanding of dirty work and how it is encountered. We draw on Willis and Trondmans (2002) three distinguishing characteristics namely, recognition of theory, ...

Beyond the Symbolic: A Relational Approach to Dirty Work through a Study of Refuse Collectors and Street Cleaners

Drawing on a relational approach and based on an ethnographic study of street cleaners and refuse collectors, we redress a tendency towards an overemphasis on the discursive by exploring the co-constitution of the material and symbolic dynamics of dirt. We show how esteem-enhancing strategies that draw on the symbolic can be both supported and undermined by the physicality of dirt, and how relations of power are rooted in subordinating material conditions. Through employing Hardy and Thomas’s taxonomy of objects, practice, bodies and space, we develop a fuller understanding of how the symbolic and material are fundamentally entwined within dirty work, and suggest that a neglect of the latter might foster a false optimism regarding worker experiences.

Foreword: Moral panics in the contemporary world:

The papers in this special issue stem from the conference ‘Moral Panics in the Contemporary World’, held at Brunel University in December 2010 – nearly 40 years since the landmark publication of Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and Jock Young’s The Drugtakers (1971) and ‘The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fantasy’ (1971). Over 150 international delegates from a variety of disciplines came together to discuss the continuing relevance of the concept of moral panic to analysing a range of contemporary phenomena. The aim of the conference was to explore and evaluate how the concept has developed and continues to develop, and how relevant and useful it remains to the analysis and understanding of current fears, risks, social problems and controversies. Speakers from the plenary sessions included the key progenitors of the moral panic concept, Stan Cohen and Jock Young, and current central figures in moral panic (re)conceptualizing, Chas Critcher and Sean Hier; the academic Catharine Lumby and the journalist James Oliver offered their reflections on being involved and implicated in specific moral panics. This issue includes: papers featuring four of the six speakers from the plenary sessions; a paper authored by Chris Jenks, who gave the opening address at the conference; and two papers from the thematic strands, the first by Julia M. Pearce and Elizabeth Charman, the second by Ragnar Lundstrom. The conference began with an opening address from Brunel University’s Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Sociology, Chris Jenks. In his paper here, ‘The context of an emergent and enduring concept’, Jenks traces the genesis of the concept of moral panic against the backdrop of the social and intellectual upheaval that accompanied its development. He then goes on to explore some of the subsequent developments since its initial formulation, in particular how the possibilities for breaking free of moral constraints have, in contemporary culture, become increasingly individualized and privatized – a process which has accompanied a more general shift in which questions of liminality and transgression have effectively moved to centre stage. Jenks discusses how transgression can be understood as at once a component of, and a counterpoint to, moral panics. He shows how transgressive behaviour is intimately tied up with the continual drawing and redrawing of limits on behaviour, with moral panics a means simultaneously to secure and redefine the

Whose Responsibility is Adolescent’s Mental Health in the UK? Perspectives of Key Stakeholders

The mental health of adolescents is a salient contemporary issue attracting the attention of policy makers in the UK and other countries. It is important that the roles and responsibilities of agencies are clearly established, particularly those positioned at the forefront of implementing change. Arguably, this will be more effective if those agencies are actively engaged in the development of relevant policy. An exploratory study was conducted with 10 focus groups including 54 adolescents, 8 mental health practitioners and 16 educational professionals. Thematic analysis revealed four themes: (1) mental health promotion and prevention is not perceived to be a primary role of a teacher; (2) teachers have limited skills to manage complex mental health difficulties; (3) adolescents rely on teachers for mental health support and education about mental health; and (4) the responsibility of parents for their children’s mental health. The research endorses the perspective that teachers can support and begin to tackle mental well-being in adolescents. However, it also recognises that mental health difficulties can be complex, requiring adequate funding and support beyond school. Without this support in place, teachers are vulnerable and can feel unsupported, lacking in skills and resources which in turn may present a threat to their own mental well-being.

Emotional Dimensions of Dirty Work: Butchers and the Meat Trade

This chapter explores the emotional dimensions of dirty work. In particular, looking at the meat trade, it investigates how butchers draw on and activate emotions in managing the ‘dirtiness’ of the job. Thus, we address the question: what emotions do butchers convey as they discuss key aspects of work practices and their work role? While a body of research has explored how dirty workers manage taint in a variety of occupations (e.g. Dick 2005; Tracy and Scott 2006; Ackroyd and Crowdy 1990), and in so doing have revealed some of the emotional elements involved (Simpson et al. 2011), few studies have made it a central concern—despite well-established recognition of the need to incorporate emotions into analyses of work (e.g. Fineman 1993, 2003). A focus on emotions helps us to explore how the social and the material intertwine through ‘relational’ aspects where emotions are not just a property of the self but more importantly a product and manifestation of the relationship between the individual and the world. In surfacing in a more explicit sense the emotional dynamics of dirty work, we point to, in accordance with some other research (Bolton 2005; Duffy 2007; Perry 1978), the significance of disgust, shame, pleasure, and pride. In addition, in the context of recent ‘cleansing’ and regulation of the trade, we highlight how nostalgia, as ‘a positively toned evocation of a lived past’ (Belk 1990), marks men’s response to how the work is experienced. We consider these themes in the light of a ‘dirty work habitus’, showing how the emotional dynamics of dirty work are complex and ambiguous and how an understanding of these dimensions must be framed within a specific ‘field’ of class and gender relations.