Lynne Pettinger

Brand culture and branded workers : service work and aesthetic labour in fashion retail

The juxtaposition between production and consumption that characterises the retail sector render it interesting for studies of work and consumption. Contemporary chain store clothing retail is characterised by “lifestyle retail brands” that compete for sales through offering products and services targeted to customers of particular class, age, and gender backgrounds, and with particular orientations to fashion. This paper argues that the influence of branding and marketing in retail extends beyond components such as store design. Branding influences who is employed in a store, and what work they do. This is manifested in two main ways, through customer service provision and through how workers are embodied, both of which influence consumption by shoppers. This article draws on an innovative ethnographic study to explore the nature and meaning of customer service and aesthetic labour.

‘Knows How to Please a Man’: Studying Customers to Understand Service Work:

This paper argues that sociologists interested in service work in consumer culture should pay attention to customers’ understandings and accounts of their experience and participation in service encounters. It takes the market for sex as a case study and counters the neglect of customers within the study of service work by analysing customer service reviews of paid-for sex published on a UK website, Punternet. It argues that male customers, familiar with the norms of consumer culture, assess the erotic, aesthetic and emotional labours performed by female workers to make judgements of service quality which suggests that the feminised ‘good worker’ is defined as professional when they disguise the market transaction.

Representing shop work: a dual ethnography

The post-structuralist focus on text and the production of text has recently produced a ‘crisis of representation’ for ethnography. This article argues that questions of representation are best engaged with while the researcher is in the field, gathering data. The argument is explored with reference to a dual ethnography of customer service work whereby the competing roles of worker and customer are acknowledged and incorporated into the research design through period spent observing as a worker and as a shopper. Researching customer service work as a worker and as a shopper reflects how claims to representation are contingent on the social role taken by the researcher. The implications of this for discussions of insider and outsider status and reflexivity are considered.

MARKET MORALITIES IN THE FIELD OF COMMERCIAL SEX

The website ‘Punternet’ contains customer service reviews (‘field reports’) of commercial sex encounters in the UKs indoor sex market. Treating Punternet as a calculative device shows how ordinary understandings of morality underpin consumer markets, as field reports qualify commercial sex to produce understandings of ‘good value’. The varied, messy and sometimes contradictory understandings of value, values, worth and goodness that are present in the calculative device of Punternet reveal the complex ways in which market actions are made moral by consumers. ‘Value’ in the market for sex is a moral judgement made by male authors whose understandings of themselves as deserving customers derives from the stories they tell of good and bad service providers. Although the moral status of prostitution is contested by many, Punternet reports lay claim to it being a legitimate consumer activity, with customers themselves vulnerable to being denied ‘value for money’. The good worker is seen as providing value for money by being professional, committed to pleasing the customer and appearing to enjoy her job.

Embodied labour in music work

This paper frames the work of performance as embodied labour in order to understand the contingent production of particular music performances. It is an interdisciplinary account that sits at the intersection of the sociology of work, culture and the body. The concept of embodied labour is developed with reference to the complex account of materiality - of bodies and things - present in Tim Ingolds account of skill. This material account of skill is used to inform use to develop already of well established conceptualizations of body labour: craft, emotional and aesthetic labour through a reading of how these dimensions of embodied labour make possible the work of performance.

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.

Politics, Policy and Privatisation in the Everyday Experience of Big Data in the NHS

Abstract Purpose This chapter explains how fundamental organisational change in the UK National Health Service (NHS) is being effected by new practices of digitised information gathering and use. It analyses the taken-for-granted IT infrastructures that lie behind digitisation and considers the relationship between digitisation and big data. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative research methods including discourse analysis, ethnography of software and key informant interviews were used. Actor-network theories, as developed by Science and technology Studies (STS) researchers were used to inform the research questions, data gathering and analysis. The chapter focuses on the aftermath of legislation to change the organisation of the NHS. Findings The chapter shows the benefits of qualitative research into specific manifestations information technology. It explains how apparently ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ quantitative data gathering and analysis is mediated by complex software practices. It considers the political power of claims that data is neutral. Originality/value The chapter provides insight into a specific case of healthcare data and. It makes explicit the role of politics and the State in digitisation and shows how STS approaches can be used to understand political and technological practice.

The promises of creative industry higher education: an analysis of university prospectuses in Malaysia

In the context of economic growth policies that stress the importance of a ‘creative economy’, and the expansion of private universities, there has been an enormous growth in the number of creative industry degrees offered by Malaysian HEIs. This paper provides a critical discourse analysis of the promotional materials used by two private institutions, Multimedia University and Limkokwing University, to persuade students that these degrees will offer them a desirable future as employable ‘industry savvy and tech savvy’ creative graduates. We explore the structures of feeling that promotional material seeks to engender in potential students as it promises them future success in a globalised, high-tech world.

The Judgement Machine: Markets, Internet Technologies and Policies in Commercial Sex

The judgements and valuations made on Internet review sites are part of contemporary consumer culture. This article considers what such sites do in the market for commercial sex. It contributes to policy discussions in two ways. Firstly, it considers how the infrastructure and mechanisms of the web enables organising, searching and reporting of consumer experience and hence how web reviews mediate commercial markets. It thereby draws links between social policies that concern the Internet and those that relate to sex work. Secondly, it explores how sex review sites mediate the field of commercial sex and discusses some of the potential insights for policy audiences. Policies directed at the regulation of this market will benefit from clear recognition of what customers understand their actions to be and how they participate in the construction of norms about commercial sex.