Lynne Pettinger is Lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex. She studies musicians, customers of prostitutes, customer service work and green collar work.
January 30, 2012 Bata in Essex and the Decline of the Third England
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…
January 11, 2012 The Art and Craft of Approaching your Head of Department to Submit A Request For A Raise
These are difficult times, and perhaps you’re holding tight to your contracted hours and hoping that the downsizing finger doesn’t point your way. You are not considering approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise. And so you would not look at the shelf and think: oh, that’s the self-help book…
January 2, 2012 Qualifications Versus Capabilities: Learning to Thread
I had my eyebrows threaded at the Beauty Plus concession in my local department store. Threading, very common in Asia, uses twisted lines of cotton thread to remove hair. It’s low-tech, and demands crafty fingers. Ten minutes of relative pain, some rosewater and an hour of redness and then ready-made arched eyebrows. The last time…
November 18, 2011 Moments of Domesticity
I was sat in the taxi office, nosing around as I waited. The waiting area was as much backstage as frontstage; the place where the drivers came for their breaks. There’s a towel sqaushed over a rail, just outside the toilet door, and a reminder to keep on top on the domestic work. At a…
October 30, 2011 Seasonal Work
When making counts and comparisons of those in employment, the canny statistician knows to take account of seasonal work. Labourers are taken on to harvest crops in late summer, even in this age of mechanised agriculture, and temporary Christmas workers boost December’s employment figures. Late October is not a common time for seasonal work, but…
October 26, 2011 Road Building, or What I Did on my Holidays (part 2)
Last night, I caught a minute or two of a tv programme about driving. An elderly Scottish actor drove an elderly English car along “one of Britain’s best drives” (defined according to an algorithm based on nostalgia for a time where driving was a select pleasure not a universal pain). This episode showed a road…
October 16, 2011 Water Works, or What I Did on my Holidays (part 1)
Wester Ross in Scotland is a sparsely populated and beautiful area of mountains, lochs, heather and midges. I went there on holiday. Here at nowaytomakealiving.net we don’t like to blog about our own lives too much, but I’m going to break with tradition in this post, and a couple more in the future. I like…
September 19, 2011 Divine Command Theory
The shelters on platform 3 are behind royal blue plywood. National Express ask for my patience. I can’t see work, but I can hear it. Around the side of the hoarding, away from the wind there’s the entrance: a door propped open by a trailer filling up with knocked down walls, some bricks still cemented…
August 31, 2011 Collars and Categories
Blue collar: maker White collar: manager Pink collar: data processor Green collar: recycler Open collar: homeworker Scarlet collar: sex worker Gold collar: consultant
July 27, 2011 Pay As You Earn
A simple form of direct taxation, intuitive: you work a week, you pay a proportion of your week’s wages. You work a month, then you pay a proportion of that month. No calculations at the end of the year, no need to keep a piggy bank to put it by. It goes before you know…