How to Conduct Ethnographies of Institutions for People with Cognitive Difficulties by Kjeld Høgsbro

Author:Kjeld Høgsbro [Høgsbro, Kjeld]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Work, People With Disabilities
ISBN: 9781351024242
Google: 9fS2DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-10-16T03:49:37+00:00

Theoretical aspects

In the 1960s sociology turned towards the study of interaction in everyday life with an onset in the work of George Herbert Mead (Mead 1934). There was a growing interest in the labelling process in everyday life and the subjective experiences and personal life history. The antipsychiatry movement at the end of the 1960s tapped the work of Bateson, Sartre, Goffmann and Foucault to develop a theory of certain dynamics of family life which could cause the development of schizophrenia (Laing 1960). As such, the theoretical development emphasised first and foremost the mechanisms of the secondary socialisation in opposition to any theory of biological heritage. Stigma and performance management was developed as core concepts for the secondary socialisation, and with ethnomethodological experiments the cruel forces of social hierarchies and expectations were being disclosed. In different ways the holocaust history still plagued the academic consciousness and with the Frankfurther School as a driver every stone was turned to find out which mechanisms in modern society could actually cause such a disaster. As such, the personal identity was being defined as a social synthesis between the personal experience of self and the ascribed identity you got from the interaction with significant others if this ascription was further supported by significant strong actors like professional groups (Goffman 1963). The concept of illness was constructed in this interaction.

In the 1970s, sociology kind of left the focus on the individual life story and the symbolic interactions of everyday life. It was a decade where the dynamics of social life were understood as a conflict between major strong actors or classes of society often linked to an Althusserian conception of Marx and Engels’ historical analysis.

Accordingly the concept of illness was seen as a subject for negotiations. With inspiration from the 1960s it was still regarded as a kind of social construction but now defined as the result of a struggle between different actors in the formation of the society. Among those strong social actors in the negotiation you would of course identify the medical profession and the medical industry. Thus, a radical organisation of user movements was seen as unavoidable if a change of the implicit suppression of these social actors should be counteracted. The role of peers and self-help organisations was being highlighted.

In a much later reflection on this issue, Campbell and Oliver consider if the most radical solutions to this exclusion of professionals from the self-help, peer-based organisations had been an adequate solution to the problem. But as they write (Campbell and Oliver 1996: 67):

Before you can develop a clear understanding of disability, the group most concerned needs to address it and look at it and understand it. When it is done that, then because the group is an oppressed group, it will have less experience and less capability than the other people who have come in, and they will modify it on their terms. So if you have able-bodied people included with the experiences they will bring, their perception will modify the group.

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