Lynne Pettinger is Lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex. She studies musicians, customers of prostitutes, customer service work and green collar work.
May 17, 2012 You’re Screwed
There’s a lot of construction work gone into the high-tech sport venues that are now littering the country. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that matter. These screws are some of the ‘missing masses’, as mundane and as important as can be (Latour, 1992). (source: cyclingweekly.co.uk via Ewen Speed) On your hands and knees: your mate lines…
May 11, 2012 The Cost Of Bleeping
Since reading Ewen Speed’s piece about working contracts in the NHS, I’ve been thinking more about the experience of health care work. I’ve just read a fascinating and perplexing tale of the contingencies of work in healthcare. The first time I saw a pager, in 1994, I though it was a pretty clever device. You…
April 17, 2012 Don’t Be A Mobber
Having a job is one thing, something to be grateful for. Having a job that grants you ‘dignity at work’ is something better. In the UK, a longstanding Unite the Union campaign for dignity stresses freedom from bullying as making for a decent workplace and happy workers. An obvious example of bullying is the bad…
February 21, 2012 Handwritten
My GP writes notes straight onto the computer, and I’ve seen students try to keep up with lectures by typing on an ipad. In these days of cheap laser jet printing, where even the smallest of businesses can usually afford to type up their signs, and there are few spaces left for public displays of…
February 16, 2012 Delivery Services
Search is the metaphor for the internet age (Stark, 2009). Google’s a verb, and you can access the world from your smartphone. And so who has any use for the fat, heavy paper directory, searchable only in the sense that entries are organised in alphabetical order? Well, someone still wants and needs it, and someone…
February 8, 2012 Are Only Boring People Bored?
Of course not. Boredom, one of the ‘minor’ and ‘non-cathartic’ Ugly Feelings that fascinate Sianne Ngai (2005), is the lot of the service sector worker. Whether bored by the repetition of script — of which ‘have a nice day’ is the most clichéd, and ‘who’s next please?’ the most common — or bored by the…
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…