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Women Leaving and Losing in Politics: Eulogy Work on a Public Stage
Abstract
Scholars have focussed on men leaving politics, either of their own choice or not. Often this is framed in the “becoming an ex” literature. There are fewer studies on women retiring from politics or losing elections. In turning our gaze to women, therefore, we examine the concession speeches of women who have lost elections and women who are exiting political life. These women must perform their transition to an ex-politician in the public eye, accomplishing the first steps in their identity shift in their concession speeches. They perform a type of “eulogy work” as they frame their symbolic death in exiting the public sphere. We find that in their speeches, women political losers, in contrast to men, establish their roles in a timeline of women in history. They frame their participation in politics as paving the way for other women later, carving out a place for themselves in history where their political identity will, in some sense, remain for posterity. In addition, they lean on history, emphasizing that they were standing on the shoulders of women who came before them. This helps to aggrandize their own role in history as well. They recognize their families and supporters but lean into plans to continue a public life of service in some form, thus creating an afterlife for themselves. They demonstrate their acceptance of the situation with reference to it being “time” in the timeline for them to step down or step back from politics, thus simultaneously accomplishing and resisting Ebaugh’s dynamics of disengagement.
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Time is of utmost importance in the writings of George Herbert Mead, the American pragmatist philosopher and social psychologist. Yet, despite Mead's prominence as the primary source of the symbolic interactionist approach to sociology, most social scientists are unfamiliar with his perspective on temporality. We describe his analysis of the present, the past, and the future - emphasizing that, for Mead, people live in the present, and that their interpretations of the past and the future are shaped by the present. In addition, we consider the implications of his perspective for our understanding of the self, interaction, and society.
Observing patients and providers at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, Goffman began the development of his basic concepts about how culturally and socially defined ‘difference’ shapes the status, roles, rewards and penalties of mental illness. His first set of articles and the book Asylums offered an overall analysis of the organisations that deal with the positive or negative reorientation of the self as monk, naval officer or physician in the first case, and mental patient, prisoner or labour camp worker in the second. Goffman outlines the pathways, rhythms, social processes and accommodations possible in the moral career of individuals who enter these organisations. And, he considers the critical role of context in shaping entrances, processes and outcomes. The follow-up, Stigma, focused directly on the aftermath of occupying a negatively valued status, where Goffman elaborated the many types, dynamics and effects of the devaluation of identities marked by social circumstances as damaged. In this chapter, the basic framework of Goffman’s ideas about the (1) organisational and community processes affecting identity that follow from mental hospitalisation, and (2) stigma that attaches and often remains after socially devalued labels are attached to mental illness are presented.
This article reports the findings of a large-scale survey investigating the experiences of the large number of MPs who left parliament following the 2010 general election. We have found that: the widely-held perception that MPs make a smooth transition into lucrative private sector employment after leaving Parliament is largely mistaken; the MPs’ expenses scandal has seriously undermined the status of MPs and, as such, may also have made a career in Parliament less enticing for good prospective parliamentary candidates; and the job of an MP remains fraught with difficulties for women due to the strain it places on family life.
The literature on agency neglects temporality; the literature on temporality neglects agency. This paper integrates these largely separate lines of research with the concept "time work," which is defined as individual or interpersonal efforts to create or suppress particular kinds of temporal experience. Semistructured, open-ended interviews were conducted with 398 subjects, who were asked to describe ways in which they engage in time work. Analytic induction yielded five themes: in descending order of prevalence, the subjects reported efforts to control or manipulate duration, frequency, sequence, timing, and allocation. The variety and prevalence of time work suggests the sovereignty of self-determination; for the most part, however, time work contributes to cultural reproduction.
Worldwide, politicians devote increasing attention to the sociodemographic representativeness of political institutions. The underrepresentation of specific groups (and of women in particular) in political institutions is a democratic problem (Phillips 1995). To counter the lack of representativeness of political institutions, measures have been adopted to increase the influx of female politicians in parliaments and governments. Among others, quota regulations have been implemented in several countries in recent years (Dahlerup 2007; Krook 2007). Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2013.
The NFL is the most popular professional sports league in the United States. Its athletes receive multimillion-dollar contracts and almost endless media attention. The league's most important game, the Super Bowl, is practically a national holiday. Making it to the NFL, however, is not about the promised land of fame and fortune. Robert W. Turner II draws on his personal experience as a former professional football player as well as interviews with more than 140 current and former NFL players to reveal what it means to be an athlete in the NFL and explain why so many players struggle with life after football.
Without guaranteed contracts, the majority of players are forced out of the league after a few seasons. Over three-quarters of retirees experience bankruptcy or financial ruin, two-thirds live with chronic pain, and too many find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Robert W. Turner II argues that the fall from grace of so many players is no accident. The NFL, he contends, powerfully determines their experiences in and out of the league. The labor agreement provides little job security and few health and retirement benefits, and the owners refuse to share power with the players, making change difficult. And the process of becoming an elite football player--from high school to college and through the pros--leaves athletes with few marketable skills and little preparation for their first Sunday off the field.
With compassion and objectivity, Not for Long reveals the life and mind of high school, college, and NFL athletes, shedding light on what might best help players transition successfully out of the sport.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Based on in-depth interviews conducted with British politicians, this book analyses the different impacts of leaving political office. Representative democracy depends on politicians exiting office, and yet while there is considerable interest in who stands for and gains office, there is curiously little discussed about this process. Jane Roberts seeks to address this gap by asking: What is the experience like? What happens to politicians as they make the transition from office? What is the impact on their partners and family? Does it matter to anyone other than those immediately affected? Are there any wider implications for our democratic system? This book will appeal to academics in the fields of leadership, political science, public management and administration and psychology. It will also be of interest to elected politicians in central, devolved and local government (current and former), policy makers and political commentators, and more widely, the interested general reader.
Eulogies serve a sensemaking function of identity construction-both for the deceased and for the survivors. This work examines the communicative construction of identity in eulogies and shows how eulogia discourse affirms and reconstructs our relational identity through communication. We extend scholarship on eulogies by using relational communication theories to investigate how eulogic discourse functions as identity construction, considering eulogies of ordinary people, and exploring the gendered nature of eulogies. We discuss how eulogies are specific ritualized forms of communication in which the bereaved focus on self-identity as they articulate their experience of grief.
Contents: A.P. Brief, J.P. Walsh, Series Editors' Foreword. Preface. Roles and Role Transitions. Role Identities. Psychological Motives Aroused by Role Transitions. Attributes of Role Transitions. Role Exit. Role Entry: Situational Context. Role Entry: Individual Dynamics. With M. Fugate, Role Transitions and the Life Span. With G.E. Kreiner, M. Fugate, S.A. Johnson, Micro Role Transitions. Epilogue: Summary and Major Themes.
Competitive reality television is a pervasive part of contemporary American culture and encompasses a range of topics and forms. We identify three categories, or spheres, of contestant-elimination reality shows: External Vote, Internal Vote, and Choosing Individual/Deity. Within each sphere, we examine the locus of blame and the structure of the show as contexts for the elimination as symbolic death. This symbolic death presents allegories of loss of fame, social isolation, and individual loss of job, career, or love across these spheres. Contestants perform eulogy work to cope publicly with their elimination at the moment of exit. Eulogy work enables departing contestants to frame their “death” as a good death and to “cool themselves out” in an attempt to save face. In this way, contestants deal with conceptions of self in the show and the transfer of that self back to a reality outside of the bracketed time and space of the show. Drawing on literature from the sociology of emotions, the sociology of death, and the sociology of ritual, we provide the concept of eulogy work to capture the performance of the self specifically in the context of loss.
This article examines means of coping adopted by defeated politicians to manage their unexpected loss. In particular, we consider how they deploy deflection rhetoric to claim that circumstances beyond their control resulted in the undesirable outcome. The data mainly derive from transcribed conversations with Canadian politicians at both provincial and federal levels of government. The analysis offers a case study of disengagement and how individuals, forced to assume a new status involuntarily, attend to the presented challenges. An understanding of social life is enhanced by investigating not only the dynamics of identity construction but also processes of “un-becoming.”
Focusing on the production of a processual ethnographic sociology, this article has three major objectives. The first is to outline the roots of “generic sociology,” particularly in light of the interpretive/ethnographic inquiry. The second objective is to indicate the sorts of difficulties ethnographers are apt to encounter in pursuing the study of generic social processes. Third, some suggestions for an intensification of efforts toward a generic processual sociology are offered. Thus some “interactive strategies” (pertaining to teaching, doing research, reporting findings, editing, conferencing, and networking) are proposed, as is an overview schema for a more intensively processually focused sociology. Some readers will be disappointed in that no solutions of a “quick fix” nature are offered. To the contrary, the development of a processual ethnographic sociology is viewed as a long, demanding, and cumulative process. To those mindful of the value of a generic conceptualization of social action to the study of group life, however, this seems a more desirable pursuit.
Shining Stars, Blindsides, and “Real” Realities: Exit Rituals, Eulogy Work, and Allegories in Reality Television
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Role Transitions in Organizational Life: An Identity-Based Perspective
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Leaving the Game: Status and Identity in the Role Exit of Professional Football Players (PhD)
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Life after Losing or Leaving: The Experience of Former Members of Parliament. School of Politics and International Studies
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