Speaker
Description
Since the early 1970s sociological perspectives have provided a lens for understanding school bullying as an essentially a social phenomenon. Bourdieusian, Foucauldian and Symbolic Interactionist approaches have been particularly popular owing to their capacity to demonstrate the complex interweavings of power and status in social relationships. This paper offers consideration of Norbert Elias's work which has been much scarcer in scholarly research on school bullying. I will address three core contributions of an Eliasian approach. Firstly, the central role that emotions play in understanding social interactions, which are often neglected in sociological research. Sentiments such as pride, resentment or shame, for example, are the result of evaluations made about interpersonal situations, and the imagined effects upon those other social actors. Second, how these are part of ongoing civilizing processes which are entrenched in historic norms, changing very gradually for the most part but at different points of history experience specific spurts. These spurts go some way to explaining the difficulties pressures that young people face in managing and navigating school interactions under changing school climate norms and policies. Finally, I propose that this viewpoint directs us to the unintended directions that school bullying has taken, contrasting it with more critical sociological perspectives. Schools in this sense are not scheming, conspiring, disciplinary institutions, but rather they respond in the only way possible to changing sensibilities in acceptable public behaviour. I close the paper with suggested areas in which a figurational approach might be empirically applied to school bullying.
Keywords
Norbert Elias; figurational approach; sociology
| Please indicate what type of scientific contribution it is | Theoretical contribution |
|---|---|
| Please also indicate what kind of contribution it is: | Scientific |
