Re-presentation of an ideal labour market in the advisory interviews of the Federal Employment Agency

Abstract

Re-presentation, dramaturgy, mise-en-scène; terms that have a central function in various different disciplines of the arts and which have become diffused into the sociological analysis of modern societies for quite some time now, such as into cultural sociology. In our article, they represent the analytical tools with which to reflect on the empirical subject - advisory interviews at the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA) - in both a functional and formal way. We wish to show how the myth of an ideal labour market, composed of self-regulating partial labour markets, is played out as the mise-en-scène 'advisory interview' in a social way. To sum up, we want to present a reconstruction and interpretation of the observation of a specific practice and the exercises characterising it. In order to compare the empirical subject of the 'advisory interview' with the concept of the 'social performance', we use - as tertium comparationis - terms which are predominantly used in aesthetic contexts. From a methodological perspective, we are thus moving on a theory-generating field (Glaser/Strauss 1998), on which we attempt to interpret 'conventionally' gathered data material by applying terms that are 'foreign to the discipline' and to problematise this social situation in a reconstructive way. (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku)

Cite article

Sowa, F. & Staples, R. (2013): Re-Präsentation eines idealen Arbeitsmarktes in Beratungsgesprächen der Bundesagentur für Arbeit. In: S. Brogi, C. Freier, U. Otten & K. Hartosch (Hrsg.) (2013): Repräsentationen von Arbeit : transdisziplinäre Analysen und künstlerische Produktionen (Gesellschaft der Unterschiede, 11), p. 247-264.