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

Essex is a maligned county, present in pop­u­lar myth­o­logy as a home for trouble­some women – from Mat­thew Hop­kins’ 17th cen­tury witches, to the sexu­ally pro­voc­at­ive but appar­ently stu­pid 1980s Essex Girls, and today’s primped women of The Only Way is Essex. When J. B. Priestley wrote Eng­lish Jour­ney he was exer­cised by some troublesome…

Towards the end of the first series of the Emmy-award win­ning US drama, Mad Men, set in the fic­tional world of the New York advert­ising agency, Stirl­ing Cooper, in the early 1960s, there is a scene which offers a seduct­ive vis­ion of the work of advert­ising prac­ti­tion­ers and their role in weav­ing com­mer­cial fables. The…

The repub­lic­a­tion in 2009 of Miriam Glucksmann’s eth­no­graphy of fact­ory work, Women on the Line (ori­gin­ally pub­lished in 1982 under the pseud­onym, Ruth Cav­endish) was the start­ing point for a panel dis­cus­sion on research­ing gender and work at the Work, Employ­ment and Soci­ety Con­fer­ence, which took place in Brighton in Septem­ber 2010. I approached Miriam…

The 2010 Inter­na­tional Visual Soci­ology Asso­ci­ation (IVSA) Con­fer­ence was held at the world’s old­est uni­ver­sity, Uni­versità di Bologna, in Italy. Bologna la Rossa (named for its red roofs and his­tor­ic­ally left­ist polit­ics) is an utterly beau­ti­ful city, with por­ti­cos along the streets enabling walk­ers to wander sheltered from the sun­shine. This annual con­fer­ence is a…

One of the most effect­ive and real­istic depic­tions of manual work in cinema is found in a scene in the avant-garde film Pravda (1970) by Jean-Luc God­ard (offi­cially by the Groupe Dziga Vertov), well-described in Monaco (1976). This is a short piece about the events in May 1968 in what was then Czechoslov­akia. Whereas most…

A few weeks ago, I went in search of fish at Felix­stowe (on the Suf­folk coast, UK), took a wrong turn and found myself try­ing to drive into the Port. In the few minutes it took to ask for dir­ec­tions at the secur­ity gate (where the men were very friendly and help­ful), sev­eral lor­ries came…

The Work­ing Lives of Lon­don­ers is a series of pho­to­graphs by Har­riet Arm­strong on dis­play at City Hall (22 March to 7 May 2010) which shows Lon­don­ers ‘going about their daily routine in the cap­ital’ (The Guard­ian). A selec­tion of images was pub­lished in The Guard­ian in March, but more can be seen on Harriet…

Dawn and I recently watched Mes­rine: Killer Instinct and Mes­rine: Pub­lic Enemy Num­ber 1, a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Jacques Mes­rine, France’s most fam­ous bank rob­ber. Apart from a brief period work­ing in an architect’s prac­tice, Mes­rine (played by Vin­cent Cas­sel) made a liv­ing from illegal activ­it­ies. A pro­fes­sional crim­inal has to do…

Watch it and love it. As a story about gangs, drugs, inequal­ity and social/institutional and legis­lat­ive fail­ure to pro­tect poor com­munit­ies, The Wire is astound­ing telly. In por­tray­ing the inter­con­nec­tions between the struc­tures of power and the power­less – and show­ing how these are not always embed­ded in formal insti­tu­tions – it comments