(In)Dignity at the Margins

Distanced from urban growth centers and prosperous careers, a significant part of populations living in the Western hemisphere find themselves worse off than their parents’ generation. These ‘left-behinds’ are often portrayed as a dangerous class tempted to vote for authoritarian leaders promising restoring dignity for them and the regions they live in. However, most often, this linkage between large-scale socioeconomic transformations and macro-political tendencies is assumed rather than explored. This paper, firstly, argues for why dignity is an important concept for understanding major macro currents in the Western world and how these unfold in people’s everyday lives. It is related to transformations in labor markets and the economy. How do people find dignity in work when jobs are increasingly precarious, when some regions and industries prosper while others stagnate or decline? It is also related to major changes in how the state responds to these socioeconomic transformations where states have moved from welfare to workfare moving from ensuring citizens’ dignity by sheltering them from the whims of the market and to providing people with dignity by reintegrating them into the market. Western states' responses are, however, not unchallenged. Populist movements, most effectively from the right, thrive by promising the restoration of dignity of the ‘left-behinds’. Secondly, the paper outlines an approach to dignity as rooted in experiences where people’s value and worth are put to the test. We take the subjective lived experiences as a starting point and take seriously how the social psychology of everyday life allows for a complex analysis of this inquiry. To do so, we draw on Thévenot's concept of engagement to show how people maintain different goods in their everyday lives. These goods vary from intimate and often tacit issues of feeling at ease and caring to more moral issues of status and worth.