Biographies and (trans)national social support of older migrants in Luxembourg.

Scientific Conference (2015)

“Do You Want to Negotiate with Me?”– Avoiding and Dealing with Conflicts Arising in Conversations with the Young Unemployed

in Social Work & Society (2015), 13(1),

This paper addresses conflict talk in social services. We focus on naturally occurring face-to-face conversations between claimants and personal contact persons in German job centres for young people ... [more ▼]

This paper addresses conflict talk in social services. We focus on naturally occurring face-to-face conversations between claimants and personal contact persons in German job centres for young people under the age of 25. Using conversation analysis we identify conflict episodes arising in these conversations. We show how the participants display disagreement/agreement and how they escalate or terminate conflict episodes. We show that participants tend to avoid full confrontation in co-present interaction (both the ‘customer’ and the ‘personal contact person’). They tend to maintain social continuity. On the other hand, many ‘customers’ file a complaint against the decisions of job centres concerning their unemployment benefits. There seems to be a lack of conflict solution potential in this social service organisation. There are not enough intermediate ways to deal with conflicts, which interactants tend to avoid but which are of course still there. [less ▲]

Praktiken der Ein- und Ausschließung im Jobcenter/U25. zur Rekonstruktion von Rationalitäten als Beitrag zur kritischen Institutionenforschung.

in Kommission Sozialpädagogik (Ed.) Praktiken der Ein- und Ausschließung in der Sozialen Arbeit. (2015)

Older migrants in Luxembourg – care provision between family and professional services.

Scientific Conference (2014)

Expériences migratoires et vieillissement au Luxembourg

in Aktiv am Liewen (2014), 49

Care provision for and by older migrants in Luxmebourg

Scientific Conference (2014)

Rationalitäten des Übergangs als Rahmenkonzept. Diskursive Verortungen und Erkenntnisinteresse

in Karl, Ute (Ed.) Rationalitäten des Übergangs in Erwerbsarbeit (2014)

Qualitative methodologies, older migrants, and the study of ambivalences.

Scientific Conference (2014)

Alter(n) als Übergangsprozess

in Schröer, Wolfgang; Stauber, Barbara; Walther, Andreas (Eds.) et al Handbuch Übergänge (2013)

Keep the case going on – rationalities of and in transition

Scientific Conference (2013)

Influenced by on the one hand the governmentality studies in social work/social pedagogy and on the other hand by neo-institutional and power sensitive approaches in organizational research, in the last ... [more ▼]

Influenced by on the one hand the governmentality studies in social work/social pedagogy and on the other hand by neo-institutional and power sensitive approaches in organizational research, in the last decade, research on institutional rationalities has become of eminent interest in social work re- search. The heuristic concept of ”rationality” aims at an analysis of practices and rules, that construct a difference between the legitimate and the illegitimate. It focuses on the reconstruction of knowl- edge. Organizations of public welfare production have to legitimate their practices, interventions and affordances thus referring to institutions as sets of legitimate ways to do things. My paper is based on the result of a recently finished empirical research project situated in the field of young people’s transitions to work. This study about talk-in-interaction in German Job Centers (project funded by the German Research Foundation, 2008–2011; University of Hildesheim) is based on a data corpus that consists of 52 transcripts of talks between professionals and clients/customers and additional 15 interviews with the personal advisors. The clients were all under 25 years old and receiving financial help. There backgrounds are very diverse, concerning their formal education degrees, their living situations, and some of them were still in the school system. We analyzed the transcripts of talk with conversation analyses and membership categorization analyses. The project team has reconstructed a rationality pattern that is oriented to the question how a case can be processed in the existing help schemes and institutional frames, and how a working consen- sus can be kept despite potential conflicts in interaction. Starting from these results, in my paper, I will go a step further and ask, what is the unsaid and the invisible in this pattern of rationality, and with which consequences. [less ▲]