Lynne Pettinger is Lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex. She studies musicians, customers of prostitutes, customer service work and green collar work.
March 16, 2010 The Damage of the Strike
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…
March 8, 2010 The Postman’s Uniform
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…
March 4, 2010 Careers Advice
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?”
February 18, 2010 Noticing Work Spaces: Sound Without Vision
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…
January 8, 2010 Working Time and the Pay Gap
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…
January 6, 2010 Mesrine: the career of a killer
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…
December 4, 2009 Care
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
November 20, 2009 Learning to Clean Teeth
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…
November 13, 2009 The Virtuous Journalist
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’
November 8, 2009 The Small Things That Matter: Walking
I just wanted to notice the importance for work of something as small and taken for granted as walking. I thought about it when I saw the retrospective on Richard Long at Tate Britain. Richard Long works through walking. Early pieces include his walk in an ‘unspoiled’ meadow to create a line.