When two worlds collide: The role of affect in ‘essential’ worker responses to shifting evaluative norms

Concerns about devaluation and misrecognition are central for understanding the experiences of workers in stigmatised occupations. Yet contemporary approaches have been criticised for over-simplifying workers’ responses to mis/recognition. Povinelli’s concepts of ‘trembling of recognition’ and ‘social tense’ offer a useful starting point for extending existing understandings of mis/recognition by highlighting the contextual importance of temporality. To explore these ideas, we report on an ethnographic study of waste management workers in London, UK. The findings suggest that dirty workers’ responses to mis/recognition are a complex mix of discordant cognitive and affective reactions and narrative strategies, shaped by changing normative ideals. The findings suggest that recognition derives not only from workers’ encounters, meanings and feelings attached to the past and present but also from the sense that they have a valued part to play in the future

Personal Aesthetic Values Development as the Basis for a Modern Musician’s Spiritual Formation

This article proves the necessity of personal aesthetic foundations development, proposes mechanisms for the formation of aesthetic values, studies the "aesthetic" category in the aspect of the problem of the individual’s spiritual world formation. Musical activity is considered as a basis for the development of aesthetic consciousness and the most important factor in the formation of aesthetic culture of the modern musician. In Methods section, a four-complex model of individual’s spiritual self-determination and self-actualization is provided. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s1p56

The Body Dances: Carnival Dance and Organization

Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty we seek to open up traditional categories of thought surrounding the relation `body-organization' and elicit a thought experiment: What happens if we move the body from the periphery to the centre? We pass the interlocking theoretical concepts of object-body/subject-body and habitus through the theoretically constructed empirical case of `carnival dance' in order to re-evaluate such key organizational concepts as knowledge and learning. In doing so, we connect with an emerging body of literature on `sensible knowledge'; knowledge that is produced and preserved within bodily practices. The investigation of habitual appropriation in carnival dance also allows us to make links between repetition and experimentation, and reflect on the mechanism through which the principles of social organization, whilst internalized and experienced as natural, are embodied so that humans are capable of spontaneously generating an infinite array of appropriate actions. This perspective on social and organizational life, where change and permanence are intricately interwoven, contrasts sharply with the dominant view in organization studies which juxtaposes change/ creativity and stability