Respectable Everyday Life. An Ethnography of Unemployment

我的论文《体面的日常生活》是一本关于长期失业的民族志。它旨在了解所谓的Langzeitarbeitslose的行动能力，以应对贫困和社会排斥。在勃兰登堡州工业城市维滕贝格进行的人种学田野调查中就有这样的例子。通过对失业现象的实证分析和实践论的视角，我的研究有助于理解后工业社会的文化体系及其合法化策略，以及其符号表达和内部矛盾。一方面，失业的霸权定义与另一方面，失业人员的机构之间存在着一种紧张关系，即定义和解决失业问题。我的人种学研究提供了两个地方公开观察到的、集体的和相互冲突的实践的结果。我关注的是食品银行的一项创造就业的措施，以及针对上瘾的失业者的培训计划。我创作了五幅失业福利接受者的肖像，试图提供对应对实践的可能性和差异的更深入理解。这些肖像代表了受访者的观点和他们无意识的和战略性的应对做法。这些肖像展示了个人如何组织他们的日常活动，以过上体面的生活。这一定性研究表明，失业福利接受者的状况是如何以物质资源短缺为特征的。失业者把他们的处境更多地看作是他们自身无能的产物，而不是经济力量的产物。失业救济保障了失业者的物质存在，然而大多数受访者认为他们在社会秩序中失败了。我的分析说明了受访者是如何反对媒体、政治和闲聊中对失业的霸权观点的。然而，这些受访者发现很难建立自己的另类自我形象。他们每个人的自我形象都很脆弱。根据受访者的职业道德，他们无法取代他们以前的工作，无论是物质上还是象征上。

My dissertation "Respectable Everyday Life" is an ethnography of long term unemployment. It aims to understand what action abilities so called Langzeitarbeitslose have to deal with poverty and social exclusion. Examples come from ethnographic fieldwork in the industrial city of Wittenberge in Brandenburg. By analyzing the phenomenon of unemployment empirically and from the perspective of practice theory, my study contributes to the understanding of the cultural system of postindustrial society, its strategies of legitimization and its symbolic articulation and internal contradictions.There is a tension between the hegemonic definitions of unemployment on the one hand, and the agency of unemployed persons on the other concerning defining and resolving unemployment. My ethnographic study provides results from publicly observable, collective and conflicting practices in two places. I focus on a job-creation measure at a food bank and on a training program for addictive unemployed persons. I create five portraits of unemployed welfare recipients that attempt to provide a closer understanding of possibilities and differences in coping practices. The portraits represent the views of the interviewees and their unconscious and strategic coping practices. The portraits show how the individuals organize their daily activities in order to live a respectable life. This qualitative study demonstrates how the situation of unemployed welfare recipients is characterized by a shortage of material resources. The unemployed perceive their circumstances more as the product of their own incapacities as opposed to economic forces. Unemployment benefits secure the material existence of unemployed, however most interviewee’s feel they have failed within the social order.My analysis illustrates how the interviewee’s oppose hegemonic views of unemployment in media, politics and small talk. Notwithstanding, these interviewee’s found it difficult to establish their own alternative self-image. Each of their self-images remained fragile. Depending on the interviewee’s work ethics, they could not replace their former work, neither materially nor symbolically.