No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

2010 marks fifty years since the clos­ure of the Naval Dock­yard on the Isle of Shep­pey in Kent. It was quite a blow to the island. There was the imme­di­ate loss of an ‘occu­pa­tional com­munity’ where the single large employer that had dom­in­ated the local eco­nomy and brought people together with a shared sense of…

Research­ing women and work can be really puzz­ling. There is a series of things I genu­inely don’t under­stand: how it feels to earn your liv­ing in a work­place where you are the only woman or in a small minor­ity; what it’s like fre­quently find­ing your­self the only per­son of your sex in work­place con­texts; the…

Whilst there are ever-increasing oppor­tun­it­ies to explore work in the new eco­nomy through altern­at­ive medi­ums, here in organ­iz­a­tion stud­ies (a dis­tinct­ive, though I hope wel­come, cousin of the soci­ology of work move­ment), we often equate sen­sual forms of know­ing with all things visual. Not to dis­miss this visual turn of course: it helps us to…

In 1982, Miriam Glucks­mann pub­lished a book about the exper­i­ence of women work­ing ‘on the line’ at a fact­ory in West Lon­don which pro­duced speedo­met­ers for cars. She had left her higher edu­ca­tion teach­ing job to work in this fact­ory, not with the inten­tion of pro­du­cing an eth­no­graphy, nor with any illu­sions of ‘join­ing the…

Earlier this year, I star­ted hanging around Billings­gate, London’s whole­sale fish mar­ket. I tell the fish mer­chants there that I’m try­ing to under­stand the whole pro­cess, of where the fish comes from and goes to, how it gets dis­trib­uted, who’s selling what, and more gen­er­ally what goes on at the mar­ket. It’s part of an…

In Decem­ber 2005, just a few months into a two-year research con­tract at Essex, the bull-dozers arrived and star­ted dig­ging dir­ectly out­side my office. Con­struc­tion of the new Social Sci­ence Research Build­ing was finally under­way. A good thing for sure, in prin­ciple but not in such close prox­im­ity. Still, I took to look­ing out of…

par­ti­cip­at­ory art at work I recently co-organised an exhib­i­tion work : place explor­ing the exper­i­ence of work at the Uni­ver­sity of Essex. We pro­duced a col­lect­ive artistic inter­ven­tion to describes the Uni­ver­sity on ‘What a Day’, the 18th March 2009. We received almost sev­enty entries into a com­pet­i­tion that asked for an artistic rep­res­ent­a­tion of the…

Intro­duc­tion Dur­ing a hol­i­day spent with my five year old nephew I reluct­antly began to become an author­ity on children’s TV char­ac­ters. Nos­tal­gic­ally I thought back to my own child­hood remem­ber­ing Post­man Pat and Fire­man Sam. It struck me how so many pop­u­lar children’s TV pro­grammes focus solely on the area of work, a theme…

Taken from the Intro­duc­tion to Ming Jue: Pho­to­graphs of Long­bridge and Nanjing (Stu­art Whipps, 2008, Walsall: New Art Gal­lery) Pho­to­graphy by Stu­art Whipps [http://www.stuartwhipps.com/] One of the main con­cerns soci­olo­gists had in the 1960s and 1970s was how indus­trial work­ers coped with the bor­ing mono­tony of their routine jobs, but iron­ic­ally within two dec­ades attention…

This pro­ject ana­lyses the social organ­isa­tion of work on a build­ing site and the dif­fer­ent forms of labour that go into the refur­bish­ment of a build­ing. It explores the ways in which the build­ing space is con­cep­tu­al­ised and lived by those who work on the pro­ject – build­ers, archi­tects and engin­eers – and the ways…