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

Flight attend­ants are an extraordin­ar­ily pop­u­lar sub­ject of study (Hoch­schild, 1983; Taylor and Tyler, 2000; Wil­li­ams, 2003). Research focuses on the emo­tional labour and body work involved, as Dawn high­lighted recently. The cus­tomer here is a power­ful, but shad­owy fig­ure, who extracts and deserves ser­vice, and whom the cabin crew must please. These aca­demic concerns…

I was look­ing for images of ‘body­work’ recently for a sem­inar dis­cus­sion with stu­dents and came across Brian Finke’s col­lec­tion on Flight Attend­ants (see: http://www.brianfinke.com/). I was drawn to this pho­to­graph because of the cir­cu­lar­ity of the dif­fer­ent forms of labour it reveals. Body­work as the work of main­tain­ing a body in the right shape…

Life as a soci­olo­gist of work isn’t inev­it­ably amus­ing, but Friday’s news that a group of French postal work­ers had taken La Poste to court for recom­pense for the labour involved in clean­ing their uni­forms made me smile. I did enjoy the chal­lenge this court case makes to the idea that all labour that (re-)produces…

My Dad has a story about how he came to get a job. It was the mid-60s, and he was going to leave school with a mis­cel­lany of o-levels. The teacher called him in and said, 
“well Pet­tinger, what’s it to be”.
“dunno sir”
Mr Heck­thorpe starts read­ing from the list of pos­sible careers, start­ing at A.
“Accountant?”

I got lost last week­end, end­ing up at Tolles­bury Mar­ina. I was think­ing about Kat Riach’s piece on sound, as I walked around (it’s not that I’m a work­aholic, but a deeply incul­cated soci­olo­gical ima­gin­a­tion isn’t eas­ily switched off; it’s a gov­ernance of the soul).
There was no-one else around, but it was not quiet.

They were…

Richard Alcock in The Guard­ian writes today about the ever-increasing pay gap in the UK between rich and poor. I do like his idea that pro­fes­sional hater Melanie Phil­lips be nom­in­ated for a nice big pay cut to see the effect on her work motiv­a­tion (though if Alcock’s eco­nom­istic account of what drives people to…

What’s the fast­est grow­ing occu­pa­tion in the UK, quiz-fiends? Well, the smart-Alecs amongst you will point out that with unem­ploy­ment rising, there’s very little growth in any part of the labour mar­ket. But you will have slipped into the trap 

I recently went to the work­shop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was tak­ing his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and oth­er­wise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attend­ing to the fin­ish rather than the sound.…

I toured the dental lab at the Uni­ver­sity of Essex’s Southend cam­pus, and this set of ‘prac­tice teeth’ caught my eye.

Before stu­dents are allowed to touch a patient, they get a set of false teeth caked in fake plaque to hone their scrap­ing tech­nique on. I thought that the hard part would be deal­ing with the…

Nik Rose’s con­cep­tu­al­isa­tion of the late mod­ern self as being com­pelled to engage in the act­ive gov­ernance of the soul has been pro­voc­at­ive for those who study inter­me­di­ary work. Inter­n­al­ising norms of self-exploitation, to work harder, longer, faster, to let work dom­in­ate ‘the social’