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There is extensive research documenting the physical outcomes of childbirth, but significantly less on socio-psychological outcomes. Investigating women’s perception of dignified treatment during birth contributes to a salient, under-examined aspect of women’s childbirth experiences.

We use a two-part conceptualization of dignity, respect and autonomy, to understand how birth experiences and interactions either facilitate or undermine women’s perceived dignity. Data came from the Listening-to-Mothers I survey, the first nationally representative study of postpartum women in the United States (n = 1,406). Through linear regression analysis, we separately modeled women’s perception of respectful treatment and women’s perception of medical autonomy during birth.

Overall women reported high scores for both autonomy and respect. Differences between the models emerged related primarily to the role of interventions and provider support. While women’s perceived dignity is related to elements that she brings in to the delivery room (e.g., birth knowledge, health status), much variation was explained by the medical encounter itself (e.g., type of medical interventions, pain management, nurse support, and number of staff present).

This study is cross-sectional, and required either a telephone or internet access, thus limiting the full generalizability of findings. Two findings have direct practical relevance for promoting women’s dignity in childbirth. First, the number of staff persons present during labor and birth was negatively associated with both respect and autonomy. Second, that women with high levels of knowledge about their legal rights during childbirth were more likely to report high scores on the dignity scale. Limiting staff in the delivery room and including knowledge of legal rights in childbirth education or during prenatal visits may be two mechanisms to promote dignity in birth.

These findings address an important, under-examined aspect of women’s childbirth experiences. This study investigates how different birth experiences and interactions either promote or violate childbearing women’s perception of dignity, and has significant implications for the provision of maternal healthcare. The results reinforce the importance of focusing on the socio-psychological dimensions of childbirth.

This chapter shows that Kant’s notion of human dignity can be understood as a novel ‘care of the self’ and an ‘art of not being governed’. Drawing on a Foucauldian approach, it demonstrates that Kant intends to shape an ethical subject that strives for freedom and self-mastery. It also argues Kant’s idea of dignity embodies a political and spiritual form of resistance against dominant relations of power and subjectivities. Thanks to this novel perspective, this chapter also offers novel insights on the political force of human dignity. With Kant, this notion becomes a ‘government of the self by oneself’.

This chapter presents two examples of misinterpretation of the philosophical term and historical concept of human dignity in contemporary legal theory and practice. Current legal theories (R. Alexy) still introduce Pico’s concept of dignity regarding the human personality and personal (volitional and rational) abilities. The term ‘dignity’ is marginal for Pico and shows the spiritual way to the status of the original Adam. Pico’s concept of dignity is located in the area of spirit (hyperphysics), not metaphysics (soul) or physics (materials). Günter Dürig in his commentary to Grundgesetz also used the Kantian concept of human dignity. Dürig exaggerated this value and used it also for the area of physics (to protect the human being as a personality). For Kant, the term ‘dignity’ was also marginal, and he used it in the area of metaphysics (soul – especially the moral and rational parts), regarding transcendence for homo noumenon, not for homo phaenomenon. In general, it seems to be problematic to use the ideal of the dignity for the law, which regulates the social relations between concrete phenomenal personalities. There are parallels to Pico. The Kantian starting point was different from Pico, because Kant stays in the area of metaphysics (especially the moral and rational parts). Both consider freedom as a condition of dignity. The concept of autonomy of will is significant for both, but each thinks of it in different ways. For both, human being can become master of oneself, but in a different context.

The central thesis developed during this study is the idea that human dignity must be understood as the right to be recognised as a participant in the institutional practice of human and fundamental rights. This form of association between human dignity and human rights is a response to the various barbarities of the twentieth century, whether by fascist, Nazi, and socialist regimes in Europe, either by South African apartheid or by military dictatorships in Latin America. Human dignity after Auschwitz is the foundation for the construction of a post-metaphysical institutional morality, independent of an idealised concept of rational subjective personality and closer to the historical and material conditions to guarantee the political personality of every human being. In order to defend this thesis, the study is conducted in two steps. First, two conceptions of dignity will be discussed, namely dignity of man and human dignity. Second, it is intended to discuss how the modern conception was incorporated into the practice of human rights after Auschwitz as a way of responding to a crisis in the modern model of the practice of rights.

In this tribute to Randy Hodson, I will demonstrate how the defining concept of his research – that “life demands dignity and meaningful work is essential for dignity” (Hodson, 2001, p. 3) – has led me to fundamentally reinterpret much of my earlier fieldwork, principally represented in Managing in the Corporate Interest: Control and Resistance in an American Bank (Smith, 1990) and Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy (Smith, 2001). I then suggest that we add a fifth condition to his formulation of challenges to dignity. Hodson identified four: management abuse, overwork, limits on autonomy, and contradictions of employee involvement. The framework needs to be contextualized within the fifth major challenge of our times: the broader environment of employment precariousness under neoliberalism that has deeply affected our micro-experiences at work, including those singled out by Hodson.

Randy Hodson’s categories offer an ambitious, comprehensive framework for analysing the objective and subjective conditions that shape dignity and resistance at work. In this chapter, we engage with Hodson and his collaborators work through exploring its potential usefulness in helping understand the experience of low-skill and low-paid factory workers at the end of supermarket supply chains in the United Kingdom. In emphasising the purposeful and strategic actions of workers to attain and maintain dignity within work, and management-influenced conditions that destroy or deny it, Hodson’s perspectives overlap with themes in more recent labour process theory that elaborate expanded notions of labour agency. While we share such concerns, we also identify some limitations to the framework and its explanatory powers, particularly where threats to dignity are associated with concepts of abuse and mismanagement. Our investigations of the supermarket supply chain reveal that management, authority and work organisation in these plants is not, by and large, ‘abusive’, ‘chaotic’ or ‘anomic’. Such terminology creates the unavoidable impression of pre-rational workplaces based on arbitrary, personal power. In our cases, the plants are not much ‘mis-managed’ as managed rationally according direct and indirect pressures exerted through supply chain power dynamics. Hodson’s framework for addressing issues of dignity and to a lesser extent resistance, remain an indispensable but incomplete entry point for understanding its dynamics.

Discussions about the dignity of human beings often focus on violations of a person’s dignity that are performed by other persons. However, human beings can also violate their own dignity or at least they can expose it to a violation by others thoughtlessly or intentionally. In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant states that ‘[o]ne who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him’. Kant presupposes that persons can infringe or even forfeit their own dignity – for instance through servile behaviour – and that violating one’s own dignity is a violation of a duty towards oneself. Starting from the tension between dignity in terms of honour and worth in current debates and in Kant’s own thinking, as well as between understanding dignity as absolute or relational, I develop a comprehensive account of dignity as a duty to oneself. The author argues for a twofold obligation towards oneself to respect one’s own dignity: (i) a duty (as the necessity of an action done out of respect for the moral law) to respect one’s authority as an autonomous person in the Kantian sense; and (ii) beyond the Kantian framework – an obligation arising from the practical necessity that follows from one’s self-understanding as a self-determined, self-expressive individual personality in a socio-cultural context. Finally, the author outlines the consequences of the idea of ‘making oneself a worm’ for the concept of dignity in the realm of rights by discussing why, even though persons can behave like worms, others ought not to step on them.

The meaning of justice and dignity have changed over time, as has the idea of a normative or moral ‘foundation’. Given that justice and dignity are commonly ascribed foundational roles in practical philosophy, this chapter charts important changes in these concepts and changes in how they have interacted. The ideas of rights and status capture the most persistent points of interaction between justice and dignity. However, because rights and status are themselves unstable concepts, and because both rely upon contextual theories of freedom and the state for their meaning, no simple reconciliation between justice and dignity as foundations is possible. In sum, we cannot treat justice and dignity as equally foundational if foundational is taken to mean the final determinant of our obligations.