Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes.
Lynne Friedli,Robert Stearn +1 more
TLDR
The coercive and punitive nature of many psycho-policy interventions is described and the implications of psycho- policy for the disadvantaged and excluded populations who are its primary targets are considered.Abstract:
Eligibility for social security benefits in many advanced economies is dependent on unemployed and underemployed people carrying out an expanding range of job search, training and work preparation activities, as well as mandatory unpaid labour (workfare). Increasingly, these activities include interventions intended to modify attitudes, beliefs and personality, notably through the imposition of positive affect. Labour on the self in order to achieve characteristics said to increase employability is now widely promoted. This work and the discourse on it are central to the experience of many claimants and contribute to the view that unemployment is evidence of both personal failure and psychological deficit. The use of psychology in the delivery of workfare functions to erase the experience and effects of social and economic inequalities, to construct a psychological ideal that links unemployment to psychological deficit, and so to authorise the extension of state—and state-contracted—surveillance to psychological characteristics. This paper describes the coercive and punitive nature of many psycho-policy interventions and considers the implications of psycho-policy for the disadvantaged and excluded populations who are its primary targets. We draw on personal testimonies of people experiencing workfare, policy analysis and social media records of campaigns opposed to workfare in order to explore the extent of psycho-compulsion in workfare. This is an area that has received little attention in the academic literature but that raises issues of ethics and professional accountability and challenges the field of medical humanities to reflect more critically on its relationship to psychology.read more
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Revolting subjects: social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain
TL;DR: In this article, Yuill has produced an academic book that is not light on history, theory, examples or argument, but is yet eminently readable and accessible for students, practitioners in social care and health, policy-makers and people facing the issues in their own families and communities alike.
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Trends in mental health inequalities in England during a period of recession, austerity and welfare reform 2004 to 2013.
TL;DR: This article used the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLF) to investigate trends in self reported mental health problems by socioeconomic group and employment status in England between 2004 and 2013 and found that the trend in the prevalence of people reporting mental health problem increased significantly more between 2009 and 2013 compared to the previous trends.
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The amazing bounce-backable woman: Resilience and the psychological turn in neoliberalism
Rosalind Gill,Shani Orgad +1 more
TL;DR: The authors examines the growing prominence accorded to the idea of resilience as a regulatory ideal, locating it in the context of a "turn to character" in contemporary culture which we see as...
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Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences
Felicity Callard,Des Fitzgerald +1 more
TL;DR: Rethinking Interdisciplinarity as mentioned in this paper is a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities, and establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines.
References
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Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
TL;DR: Berube as discussed by the authors discusses the intersection of disability and queerness in the context of the Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies.
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Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)
TL;DR: The body as accumulation strategy of David Harvey as mentioned in this paper is a polemic that is a call for precision, not a way of drowning out the productive destructiveness of capital, and it is not to devalue Harvey's profound contributions to understanding the destructive power of capital.
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Whistle While You Work A Review of the Life Satisfaction Literature
TL;DR: A review of the multidisciplinary literature on the relationship between life satisfaction and the work domain is presented in this paper, where a meta-analysis of life satisfaction with respect to career satisfaction, job performance, turnover intentions, and organizational commitment is performed.