Positionings Towards the ‘Work-Dogma’ from the Margins: Making Sense of Vulnerabilities and Inequalities in the Interview Situation

Abstract

The norm of wage labor imposes itself on the unemployed as a material, legal and symbolic-discursive order. As ‘deviants’ from the norm, unemployed people are often confronted with pejorative judgments or social exclusion in everyday life. This paper asks how differently positioned unemployed people living in precarious circumstances position themselves in relation to the norm of employment and critique its accompanying social order. Based on the experiences with 25 interviewees, the paper argues that the social inequalities and power relations associated with the work-dogma permeate the research situation itself. This epistemic tension provides a methodological opportunity to place the interview situation and the mutual address between researcher and interviewee at the center of the analysis. Inspired by Situational Analysis (Clarke) and Interpretative Subjectivation Analysis (Bosančić), a heuristic is developed that focuses on inequalities and vulnerabilities in the research situation. The analysis of the interview dynamics reveals different modes of self-positioning with respect to the wage-labor norm, ranging from an embarrassed subordination under discursively transported subject positions to forms of critical appropriation and affective rejection. By identifying different self-positionings that challenge the norm of employment, the paper situates itself in ongoing debates within critical sociology, feminist epistemology and social philosophy about possibilities of criticism from the margins, arguing for a pluralistic and relational understanding of subversive practices and articulations of critique.