Functionally indispensable

“Failure” and institutional legitimacy in Japan's peer-run addiction recovery network

Bibliographic Data

ID23312492
AuthorsSelim Gokce Atici (0000-0003-3839-4714, Princeton University, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume10
Pages100836
Publication date2026-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSSM - Qualitative Research in Health (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2667-3215 • E-ISSN: 2667-3215
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.ssmqr.2026.100836
OpenAlexW7171517146
LanguageEN
References cited38

J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f makes it hard to see how peer-led institutions can flourish alongside medical, welfare, and correctional systems by becoming operationally indispensable to these networks they depend on, which need them to contain risk and crises and to support people that correctional and medical facilities cannot contain.A newer literature helps shift the terms of this problem by putting agential negotiation amid shifting expert authority at the center of analysis (Eyal 2013;Campbell 2019).Rather than treating criminalized and stigmatized groups as dualistic with social order, it emphasizes how such oppositions are produced and stabilized (Wacquant 2001).Rather than treating adaptation (or desistance) as the necessary pathway to institutional legitimacy, it tracks shifting arrangements and everyday practices of co-dependency across actors and institutions (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006).Related work foregrounds how racialized and gendered structural violence shapes differentiated pathways of status reconstruction (e.g., Ray and Seamster 2019), and how embodied experience becomes a basis for credibility claims in health movements and epistemic cultures of lay knowledge (Epstein 1996).But they can still lead us to neglect a crucial mechanism in this case: how institutional forms and cultural practices shaped around stigmatized recovery 1 may gain legitimacy by becoming unavoidable to the functioning of other institutions.How they become unavoidable is the question this article takes up.I trace it to a set of cultural practices and institutional arrangements, including community-facing work, charismatic directorship, institutional layering, and the reworking of failure into expertise, that adjacent institutions come to depend on.1 Besides my references to emic categories of recovery, I treat recovery primarily as an organizational field position and a set of routinized practices.I foreground how it is constituted and mobilized (Woods et al. 2022) rather than how it is felt, narrativized, or administratively defined.

Addiction · Component (thermodynamics) · Context (archaeology) · Government (linguistics) · Legitimacy · Perspective (graphical) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk · Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes

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