Suchergebnisse

There is significant literature in the social sciences about the Internet. A lot of it is dedicated to understanding interaction in virtual spaces like forums, chats, etc. Such analyses represent two different approaches. In the first approach, authors are concerned to clarify the limitations that virtual spaces put on interactional phenomena. In these cases the object of study is always face-to-face interaction. The second approach is to treat virtual spaces as a new field of interaction, an independent dimension for interaction phenomena. Our work runs follows this latter approach & offers a critique against the first position. The analysis uses part of the results obtained in a virtual ethnography. We report an examination of the development of interactive sequences in a specific virtual space: a forum of Estudis d'Humanitats i Filologia in Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (a virtual university).

In this qualitative study, we focus on Las Kellys, a Spanish movement of room attendants who have mobilised against labour precarisation and social devaluation, to address two challenges: (1) to characterise the role of social media in the construction and politicisation of collective identity as a stepping stone to mobilisation, and (2) to describe the lines of interplay between online politicisation of collective identity and other mobilisation factors such as grievances, social embeddedness and efficacy. Findings suggest that (1) room attendants build a politicised collective identity on Facebook, which functions as both an online community of coping and a locus of politicisation and micro-mobilisation, and (2) online politicisation of collective identity happens in online/offline interplay with the process of consensus mobilisation around the room attendants' issues (grievances), the social capital accumulated within intragroup and intergroup networks (social embeddedness) and the expectation of changing conditions and/or policies through protest (efficacy).

The growth of the hotel industry in Spain in recent decades has meant, among other things, the acceleration of the hotel room attendants' labour. An overload of physical activity, illnesses, and physical and mental exhaustion are the most visible consequences. Based on a qualitative study carried out with hotel room attendants working in Spanish hotels, the article analyses the effects of work intensification on room attendants' representation of their bodies. The results show that rather than the typical description of their body as a machine that must withstand high pressure, hotel room attendants define it as a vector body constructed through multiple flows and demands, which has to speed up its pace, being constantly overwhelmed and self-managed in the process. We discuss how the acceleration of work in hotels is the result of a series of organizational and individual practices, impacting the representation and corporal practice of the hotel room attendants.