Images of Care, Boundaries of the State: Volunteering and Civil Society in Czech Health Care

Read, Rosie

doi:10.3167/sa.2014.580307

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…In this vision, people held power to incite political change, not through distancing from but by engaging with the state. Similar to the cooperative relationship that Rosie Read (2014) observed between civil society and the state in Czech health care, this was a constructive affective relation. Rather than turning away from the state through despair or outrage, campaigners sought to mobilize a new, hopeful affective relation.…”

Section: Humanizing the Statementioning

confidence: 53%

“…Boundary work is one form of relational state making, where boundaries (e.g., civil society/state or state/family) are actively constructed and produce domains they seek to separate. Boundary work has been taken up by anthropologists studying statecraft in arenas where multiple actors-such as volunteers, NGOs, or family members-are involved (Brković 2016;Gilbert 2016;Read 2014;Read and Thelen 2007;Thelen, Thiemann et al 2014). The blurring of the state's boundaries (Gupta 1995) in such contexts requires intermediaries to "discursively distance themselves from the state, thereby recreating the image of a coherent state entity" (Thelen, Vetters et al 2014: 13).…”

Section: Affective Relations and Humanizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Making the State Blush

Altman

2020

Social Analysis

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The Australian state’s hostile deterrence policy toward people arriving by boat who seek asylum evokes polarized public sentiments. This article, which ethnographically follows a humanitarian NGO campaign in the lead-up to the 2016 Australian election, examines how citizens who opposed deterrence sought to affectively and morally influence the state and the public. Building on anthropological theories of the state and feminist scholarship on the sociality of emotion, I develop the notion of ‘affective relations’. Distinguishing from nationalist, humanitarian, and activist relations that set up divisive dynamics, campaigners invoked ‘humanizing’ to create affective relations based on common values, personalization, and responsiveness. Although the desired election results were not achieved, the focus on humanization represented a long-term shift to an inclusive alternative politics based on the transformation of power relations.

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Section: Humanizing the Statementioning

confidence: 53%

Section: Affective Relations and Humanizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making the State Blush

Altman

2020

Social Analysis

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“…The volunteering-as-citizenship perspective draws attention to volunteering vis-a-vis the state, social and legal rights, obligations and entitlements (e.g. Hyatt, 2001;Muehlebach, 2012;Read, 2010Read, , 2014Read, , 2019, but elides detailed enquiry into the conditions in which volunteers labour, including how they are incentivised, disciplined, motivated and monitored in their endeavours.…”

Section: Volunteer Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unwaged labour intensified: Volunteer management and work targets at a UK charity

Read

2020

The Sociological Review

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Volunteer management is an expert practice which aims to maximise the productivity and efficiency of volunteers’ activities, by adapting Human Resource Management (HRM) approaches to voluntary work settings. Sociological and social anthropological studies of volunteering have not explored the significance and effects of volunteer management in sufficient detail. This article critically examines the historical emergence of volunteer management in the UK, and explores its contemporary practice at a charity providing counselling services by phone and online. Using data drawn from an ethnographic study among volunteers and staff at this charity, I examine how management practices were calibrated to encourage volunteers to achieve productivity targets. Volunteers’ workloads increased as a result, but management strategies also portrayed a willingness to work intensively as a key measure of altruistic and compassionate motivations. Drawing on feminist analyses of the constitutive nature of service work for workers’ subjectivities, I examine how volunteer management strategies engaged volunteers at the level of affect in order to align their attitudes, feelings and behaviours with the achievement of targets. My argument contributes new insights to sociological and social anthropological debates about volunteering and its relationship to employment, by evaluating how the values of productivity, efficiency and value for money, all of which cohere within volunteer management expert practice, come to animate and reorder the experiences of volunteering.

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“…Such an approach emphasizes the role Anthropological approaches to the state have thus turned our attention to the state's dual nature as a set of representations and a set of practices (Abrams 1988;Mitchell 2006;Sharma and Gupta 2006a). In order to address the connection between state-as-image and state-as-practice, it is necessary to produce ethnographically sound analyses that will focus on the state as a set of relational practices between actors who are embedded in various networks and hierarchies, which often do not overlap with images of a coherent state (Read 2014;Simić 2017;Thelen, Thiemann and Roth 2014;Verdery 1996). Tatjana Thelen, Larisa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (2017) propose a relational approach to studying the state, which they term stategraphy.…”

Section: The Second Difference Between Neoliberalism and Classical LImentioning

confidence: 99%

Approaching Actually Existing Neoliberalisms: Citizenship, Responsibility, and (Health)care in Anthropology

Jugović-Spajić¹

2020

Genero

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Neoliberalism seems to be a ubiquitous concept, both in anthropological scholarship and in the public discourse, as global social inequalities continue to grow. In anthropology, neoliberalism has been particularly popularized in the past decade and a half, but - as is the case with most anthropological concepts - the consensus on its meaning has not been met. Furthermore, it is not rare to see neoliberalism being used in scholarship without an operational definition. Concurrently with its popularity, the concept attracted numerous criticisms. In this review article, I present a short overview of how neoliberalism has originated, then used, and criticized in anthropology and its sister disciplines such as human geography. Additionally, I focus on the transformations in the nature of the state, governance, and subjectivity that occur in late capitalism, as well as how we can approach those transformations ethnographically. The increased unavailability of welfare provision in neoliberalism has been heavily investigated in anthropology of health and care. I thus particularly discuss how the concepts of care and responsibility have been used in anthropology to that end.

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Images of Care, Boundaries of the State: Volunteering and Civil Society in Czech Health Care

Cited by 11 publications

References 3 publications

Making the State Blush

Making the State Blush

Unwaged labour intensified: Volunteer management and work targets at a UK charity

Approaching Actually Existing Neoliberalisms: Citizenship, Responsibility, and (Health)care in Anthropology

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