Cultures of Rejection

Workplaces in the retail and logistics sectors make up the primary research environment for our investigation of cultures of rejection. Workplaces constitute exceptionally lively sites for the expression of social attitudes and daily routines. CuRe focuses on workers in the retail and logistics sectors, given the profound transformations entailed by processes of digitalisation, precarization, and labour casualization in these sectors. We collaborate closely with representatives of trade unions and members of shop-floor organizations to identify relevant workplaces, gain access to sites, and recruit respondents (see Cooperation Strategy).

In each participating country we identified four research sites, where we conduct a minimum of five semi-structured, qualitative interviews (100 interviews in total).  These interviews aim (a) to identify elements of cultures of rejection in individual, biographical narratives, and (b) to learn about experiences of reproduction, transformation, and crisis connected to economic, political, and socio-cultural spheres of “livelihood” (Narotzky 1997). Rather than unveiling any objective or “authentic” experience reflected in speech, we are interested in the ways people present, narrativize, frame, and articulate their experiences with, in, and/or against elements of cultures of rejection, thus “acknowledging the constructed, flexible and fictionalised nature of the process of accounting for the self” (Byrne 2003: 30). The CuRe researchers are interested in if and how workplace experiences, labor processes, and the social and cultural environments of workplaces more broadly affect the emergence, negotiation, and/or rejection of cultures of rejection.

We supplement these interviews with focus-group discussions, in which workers discuss issues previously identified as relevant to cultures of rejection in individual interviews. Focus groups allow us to capture a diversity of views and experiences, and to observe intersubjective processes of meaning-making related to cultures of rejection and the connections drawn to experiences of reproduction, transformation, and crisis. While interviews provide insight into and allow for analyses of individual narratives regarding cultures of rejection, focus-group discussions allow us to better understand how those narratives are negotiated and which interpretative patterns prevail.

Research in digital environments proceeds from the fact that ‘online’ and ‘offline’ aspects of the social world have become “intermeshed in interwoven human practices and social worlds” (Kozinets 2015: 69).  The act of going online has been replaced by simply being online amidst an ecology of devices, software, and infrastructures. Everyday social interactions repeatedly cross the threshold between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ and blur traditional notions of space. Understanding contemporary cultures of rejection therefore demands analysis of digital spaces of communication and interaction.

Our research investigates the digital spaces that respondents in Research Environment 1 (The Workspace) identified as relevant to the emergence, negotiation, and contestation of cultures of rejection. Facebook groups make up a particularly promising field in this regard. Facebook’s user base is continually growing; as of 2017 at least a third of the population in all project countries are users. The platform’s qualities of referentiality, communality, and algorithmicity (Stalder 2018) are linked to the formation of so-called “filter bubbles” or “echo chambers,” which can amplify the dynamics and specific elements of cultures of rejection. To study these environments, the project draws on the methods of discourse-centered online ethnography. Drawing on mappings, log data, and structured observation of digital spaces accessible to researchers, the project aims to identify the affective frames (Ferree et al. 2002) that shape the differences and antagonisms articulated in cultures of rejection.

Experiences of transformation and crisis take place in everyday social relations outside the workplace and can affect patterns of consumption, mobility, care work, leisure activities, or voluntary work. Therefore, we also investigate the emergence, negotiation and contestation of cultures of rejection in larger socio-spatial environments. Following the method of mental mapping (Gieseking 2013), participants identify spaces and places relevant to their economic, political and socio-cultural reproduction by drawing a geographical map, and from there we identify two environments for study in each of the five countries involved in the research process. Using a mixed-method approach that includes participatory observations and field notes, informal conversations, and on-site interviews, as well as document analyses and expert interviews, we conduct ethnographic research during field visits of one month each. The goal is to achieve a “thick description” (Geertz 1973) of the dynamics of socio-spatial reproduction, transformation, and crisis that were identified as meaningful in the context of cultures of rejection by the participants themselves.