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

For Boltanski and Chi­apello (2007), capitalism’s exist­ence and evol­u­tion requires that its work­force under­stand and accede to its demands. For a cap­it­al­ist sys­tem to oper­ate there must be a ‘spirit’ that achieves the incul­ca­tion of norms (e.g. a norm of a work ethic). They argue that the norms through which the work­force are incor­por­ated change…

Five Daugh­ters (BBC 1, 25th, 26th, 27th April) told the stor­ies of Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alder­ton, Paula Clen­nell and Annette Nich­olas, who were murdered in Ipswich in 2006. It was based on testi­mony of those involved. The five women were sex work­ers (or ‘Vice Girls’ to read­ers of some news­pa­pers) work­ing on the…

I know a few Not­ting­ham lads, mostly liv­ing in Lon­don these days. My friends had grand­dads who worked in one of the big Not­ting­ham light indus­tries: for Play­ers, Boots or Raleigh, unless they were unlucky and had to go down the mines. I’ve had a lot of fights with my Not­ting­ham friends about the cultural…

1. Sym­pathy I went into a cafe the other day and asked for a table for 1. The waiter looked at me. “you’re on your own!?” he said, reach­ing out and, well, hug­ging me. So much for the cold intimacies of emo­tional cap­it­al­ism (Illouz, 2007), this was warm sym­pathy. I would have been hap­pier to…

I write for a not-for-profit music web­site. The site is run by one extraordin­ary man, ‘John’, and it’s quite a man­age­ment task. The staff writers get together once, maybe twice a year. The recent meet up in a cot­tage in the rainy Peak Dis­trict was fiery. Office parties often are. There would be no reason…

The hotel inspector Dawn met judges stand­ards in B&Bs, mak­ing a vir­tue of clean­li­ness and ‘good’ ser­vice. B&B own­ers, in turn, judge and reg­u­late their cus­tom­ers. Chris Grayling, cur­rently shadow home sec­ret­ary, thinks chris­tian B&B own­ers should be allowed to turn away guests they con­sider to be sin­ners. Mar­kets don’t just reflect (notion­ally private) moralities;…

H&M, the Scand­inavian fast fash­ion brand has just opened a store in the town I live in. It opened a few days after a fire killed 21 employ­ees of a knit­wear fact­ory in Bangladesh which is sub­con­trac­ted by H&M to make those cute stripy jump­ers, and that really use­ful little black cardy.

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…

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?”