What does change of the law change? – Prostitution and the law in action: National regulation and local practices of public health policy in Germany
Keywords:
Prostitution, governance, policy, Germany, law in action, street-level bureaucracy, public health, actor-centred institutionalism habitus, Bourdieu, morality politics, Prostitución, gobernanza, política, Alemania, derecho en acción, burocraciaAbstract
This paper presents key findings from a qualitative-empirical research on prostitution governance that examined the professional habitus of governmental and nongovernmental frontline actors, such as police and public-order officers as well as social workers and employees of public-health services, in Germany. It has been carried out after fundamental changes within German prostitution policy. The paper focuses on the public-health sector to demonstrate exemplarily how and to what extent professionals’ patterns of perception, thought and action have a crucial impact on the implementation of prostitution policy, up to the point that their everyday practices counteract the “law in books”. To provide a better understanding of this, the empirically grounded and refined concept of professional habitus will be outlined and illustrated by a contrastive case comparison. Moreover, against the background of the current policy change reversal, the article takes up the concept of “morality politics” and relates it theoretically to the concept of “professional habitus”.
Este artículo presenta hallazgos claves de una investigación cualitativa-empírica sobre la gobernanza de la prostitución que estudió el habitus profesional de actores principales gubernamentales y no gubernamentales, así como de trabajadores sociales y empleados de servicios de salud pública en Alemania. La investigación se realizó después de cambios fundamentales en la política sobre prostitución de Alemania. El artículo se centra en el sector de salud pública para demostrar ejemplarmente cómo y hasta qué punto los modelos de percepción, pensamiento y acción de los profesionales tienen un impacto crucial en la implementación de políticas sobre prostitución, hasta el punto de que su práctica cotidiana contraviene la ley escrita. Para explicar mejor esto, se definirá e ilustrará el concepto empíricamente fundamentado y refinado de “habitus profesional” mediante un caso de comparación contrastivo. Además, sobre el trasfondo de la reversión del cambio de política de hoy en día, el artículo se ocupa del concepto de “políticas de moralidad” y lo relaciona teóricamente con el concepto de “habitus profesional”.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-0938
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