Dawn Lyon

Configurations of Care Work: Paid and Unpaid Elder Care in Italy and the Netherlands

Most current sociological approaches to work recognise that the same activity may be undertaken within a variety of socio-economic forms - formal or informal, linked with the private market, public state or not-for-profit sectors. This article takes care of the elderly as an exemplary case for probing some of the linkages between paid and unpaid work. We attempt to unravel the interconnections between forms of care work undertaken in different socio-economic conditions in two settings, the Netherlands and Italy. The research is part of a broader programme concerned with differing interconnections and overlaps between work activities. In this article, we are concerned with: 1) how paid and unpaid care work map on to four ‘institutional’ modes of provision - by the state, family, market, and voluntary sector; and 2) with the configurations that emerge from the combination of different forms of paid and unpaid work undertaken through the different institutions. Despite the centrality of family-based informal care by women in both countries, we argue that the overall configurations of care are in fact quite distinct. In the Netherlands, state-funded care services operate to shape and anchor the centrality of family as the main provider. In this configuration, unpaid familial labour is sustained by voluntary sector state-funded provision. In Italy, by contrast, there is significant recourse to informal market-based services in the form of individual migrant carers, in a context of limited public provision. In this configuration, the state indirectly supports market solutions, sustaining the continuity of family care as an ideal and as a practice.

The challenges and opportunities of re‐studying community on Sheppey: young people's imagined futures

The ‘Living and Working on Sheppey: Past, Present and Future’ project took its starting point from the research undertaken by Ray Pahl and his team three decades ago on the Isle of Sheppey. In 2009–11, we revisited some of Pahls archived material, collected new (including some replicated) data and produced new materials, working collaboratively with community members of the Blue Town Heritage Centre on Sheppey. In this article, we examine the methodological challenges and opportunities of re-studying communities in this way, discuss the implications of community involvement in carrying out a re-study, and present some findings from one aspect of the re-study: young peoples imagined futures in 1978 and 2009–10.

Fishmongers in a Global Economy: Craft and Social Relations on a London Market

This article is based on multi-sensory ethnographic research into fishmongers on a south London market, the setting for a specific topography of work. We contrast Charlie, a white Londoner whose family has been in the fish business for over 100 years, with Khalid, an immigrant from Kashmir, who, even without the tacit knowledge of generations at his fingertips, has successfully found a place for himself in the local and global economy of fish. The research pays attention to the everyday forms of work that take place when the fishmongers sell to the public. We use these two very different cases to explore what constitutes work and labour and the different sensibilities that these two men bring to their trade. Drawing on observations, photography and sound recordings, the paper also represents the fishmongers at work. We take the two cases in turn to discuss learning the trade and the craft of fishmongering, the social relations of the market, and the art of buying and selling fish. More generally, the article explores how global connections are threaded through the local economy within a landscape of increasing cultural and racial diversity. It also critically discusses the gain of the visual as well as the aural for generating insights into and representing the sensuous quality of labour as an embodied practice.

INTERSECTIONS AND BOUNDARIES OF WORK AND NON-WORK

ABSTRACT It is widely recognised that a work activity can be undertaken in a variety of socio-economic relations. However, the ways in which work and non-work are differentiated, or intersect, are under-specified in existing research. This article takes the social care of older people as a field through which to explore the articulation of work and non-work. It analyses the nature of the boundaries between what counts as work, and what counts as non-work; the intersections of work and non-work, and what forms this embeddedness takes; and the variation of this articulation across different European countries (Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, and England). Three dimensions of articulation of work and non-work emerged from the analysis: (1) love or money; (2) morality versus instrumentality; and (3) from professional demarcations to embeddedness in everyday life. The article sets out how these vary by country. Overall, the research makes a general contribution to the sociology of work, and to our understanding of cross-national variation in the labour and provision of eldercare.

New Divisions of Labour? Comparative thoughts on the current recession

This article argues that it is useful to compare the current recession with that which occurred three decades ago. Drawing on research undertaken at that time by Ray Pahl, it is suggested that four questions are once again revealing in the study of the current economic downturn: ‘How have we come to be where we are currently?’, ‘Who gets what?’, ‘How do we know what we claim to know?’, and ‘What sorts of lessons can be drawn to inform thinking about the future?’ The usefulness of asking these questions is discussed, even though the answers must await further research.

Researching young people’s orientations to the future: the methodological challenges of using arts practice

Visual and arts-based methods are now widely used in the social sciences. In youth research they are considered to promote engagement and empowerment. This article contributes to debates on the challenges of using arts-based methods in research with young people. We discuss the experience of a multidisciplinary project investigating how young people imagine their futures – Imagine Sheppey – to critically consider the use of arts-based methods and the kinds of data produced through these practices. We make two sets of arguments. First, that the challenges of participation and collaboration are not overcome by using apparently ‘youth-friendly’ research tools. Second, that the nature of data produced through arts-based methods can leave researchers with significant problems of interpretation. We highlight these issues in relation to the focus of this project on researching the future.

Young people's orientations to the future: navigating the present and imagining the future

ABSTRACT This article discusses the findings of the Imagine Sheppey project (2013–2014) which studied how young people are ‘oriented’ towards the future. The aim and approach of the project were to explore future imaginaries in a participatory, experimental, and performative way. Working with young people in a series of arts-based workshops, we intervened in different environments to alter the space as an experience of change – temporal, material, and symbolic. We documented this process visually and made use of the images produced as the basis for elicitation in focus groups with a wider group of young people. In this article we discuss young peoples future orientations through the themes of reach, resources, shape, and value. In so doing, we reflect on the paths that our young respondents traced to connect their presents to what is next, what we call their modes of present–future navigation. We explore the qualities and characteristics of their stances within a wider reflection about how young people approach, imagine, and account for the future.

Working with material from the Sheppey archive

This article reflects on the experience of working with archived data in the Living and Working on Sheppey project which revisited material from Ray Pahl’s research on the Isle of Sheppey, published in the modern sociological classic, Divisions of Labour (1984). The article considers the reasons for revisiting archived material and some of the opportunities and challenges of working with archived material. For this discussion, we focus on one particular element of the original research: a collection of essays written by school leavers in 1978, and the archived notes from Pahl’s preliminary analysis of these data. We also draw on interviews with Pahl about this aspect of his research, and our experience of repeating the essay-writing exercise. We conclude with some comments on the dynamic character of the archive.

Gendered Time and Women’s Access to Power

Women’s workforce participation challenges conceptions of work time for all categories of workers, including top managers and politicians. Across industrialised countries, the combination of work time and family time are at the heart of discussions of the future of work. One of the popular suggested solutions has been a shorter working week. Yet, at the same time, there has been a growing concern that societies are increasingly two-tracked. One track is for those on the fast-time track of the fully employed in highly qualified jobs, and the other for those excluded from the workforce or willing to accept a ‘flexible’ construction of working time. This second group is the parking place for the ‘woman’s’ problem of combining work and family.

No Way to Make a Living.Net: Exploring the Possibilities of the Web for Visual and Sensory Sociologies of Work

This article reflects on the possibilities and pitfalls of a website, No Way to Make a Living at: http://nowaytomakealiving.net, as a sociological space for exploring what work (paid or unpaid) is like in todays world. The site includes research projects, short thoughts on everyday working lives, and different kinds of textual (fictional, autobiographical and analytical), aural, and visual representations of work. It emerged as a collaborative project from our frustrations with some dominant representations of work in contemporary photography, and the limitations in the forms of knowledge we can convey in academic publishing. We argue that the contemporary complexity of work exceeds the dominant forms of sociological representation available to us, and illustrate how a website provides multi-media opportunities to gain new insights into work. However, we also problematise the status of visual and sensory methodologies as a panacea for the shortcomings in more conventional sociological practices. We discuss the analytical and imaginative potential of absence as well as presence. And in the final section, we frame the site as a contribution towards a more ‘open sociology’, and one which engages with a readership we can only partially know.