Rachel Lara Cohen

Rethinking ‘mobile work’: boundaries of space, time and social relation in the working lives of mobile hairstylists

This article investigates the relationship between spatial mobility and the labour process, developing a typology of ‘mobile work’. Working while mobile is a largely white-collar (and well researched) phenomenon whereas mobility as work and mobility for work involve more diverse occupations and have been omitted from sociological analysis of mobile work. The article explores the range of work involving spatial mobility before focusing on a hitherto unexamined form of mobility for work, mobile hairstyling. Relationships between mobility, employment status and the construction of spatial, social and temporal work-life boundaries are excavated. It is shown that previous arguments linking mobile work with decorporealisation or unboundedness are inadequate, applicable primarily to working while mobile. Other types of mobile work may or may not corrode work-life boundaries; whether they do depends in part on workers’ income security. Data are drawn from the Labour Force Survey and interviews with self-employed mobile hairstylists.

When it pays to be friendly: employment relationships and emotional labour in hairstyling

This article examines worker-client relationships in hairstyling. Data are drawn from interviews with 15 hourly-paid and 32 self-employed hairstylists and a self-administered survey. Relations of employment are found to be central to the deployment of emotional labour. Self-employed owner-operators are highly dependent on clients, rely on deep-acting, enact favours, and are prone to emotional breaking points when they fail to realise their ‘congealed service’. In contrast, hourly-paid stylists perform surface acting, resist unpaid favours and experience fewer breaking points. Methodologically this article demonstrates the importance of comparative employment relations analysis (CERA) for exposing the relationship between employment structures and labour process experiences.

Ordinary risks and accepted fictions: how contrasting and competing priorities work in risk assessment and mental health care planning

Communication and information sharing are considered crucial to recovery‐focused mental health services. Effective mental health care planning and coordination includes assessment and management of risk and safety.

Feminists really do count: the complexity of feminist methodologies

We are delighted to be presenting this special issue on the topic of feminism and quantitative methods. We believe that such an issue is exceptionally timely. This is not simply because of ongoing debates around quantification within the field of feminism and women‟s studies. It is also because of debates within the wider research community about the development of appropriate methodologies that take account of new technological and philosophical concerns and are fit-for-purpose for researching contemporary social, philosophical, cultural and global issues. Two areas serve as exemplars in this respect and both speak to these combined wider social science and specifically feminist methodological concerns. The first is the increasing concern amongst social scientists with how the complexity of social life can be captured and analysed. Within feminism, this can be seen in debates about intersectionality that recognise the concerns arising from multiple social positions/divisions and associated power issues. As Denis (2008: 688) comments in respect of intersectional analysis „The challenge of integrating multiple, concurrent, yet often contradictory social locations into analyses of power relations has been issued. Theorising to accomplish this end is evolving, and we are struggling to develop effective methodological tools in order to marry theorising with necessary complex analyses of empirical data.‟ Secondly, new techniques and new data sources are now coming on line. This includes work in the UK of the ESRC National Data Strategy which has been setting out the priorities for the development of research data resources both within and across the boundaries of the social sciences. This will facilitate historical, longitudinal, interdisciplinary and mixed methodological research. And it may be the case that these developments facilitate the achievement of a longstanding feminist aim not simply for interdisciplinarity but for transdisciplinarity in epistemological and methodological terms.

The methodological impact of feminism: A troubling issue for sociology?

As British sociology seeks to overcome a historical distaste for quantitative research methods, one of the discipline’s most dynamic sub-fields may prove troublesome. Feminist research thrives both within and outside sociology. As such it provides new insights and enriches the discipline, something recognized by the 2010 Benchmarking Review of Sociology. Yet feminist research has long been associated with an antipathy towards quantitative methods. This article explores the extent to which this persists. Methodological patterns in articles from 19 journals in the interdisciplinary field of ‘women’s studies’ are analysed. Perhaps surprisingly, a large proportion of articles employed quantitative methods. Those engaged with feminist literature or epistemologies were, however, unlikely to be quantitative. This article also highlights the importance of national contexts, suggesting perhaps we should not ask why UK research is so qualitative, but why US research is so quantitative.

Study protocol: cross-national comparative case study of recovery-focused mental health care planning and coordination (COCAPP)

BackgroundThe collaborative care planning study (COCAPP) is a cross-national comparative study of care planning and coordination in community mental healthcare settings. The context and delivery of mental health care is diverging between the countries of England and Wales whilst retaining points of common interest, hence providing a rich geographical comparison for research. Across England the key vehicle for the provision of recovery-focused, personalised, collaborative mental health care is the care programme approach (CPA). The CPA is a form of case management introduced in England in 1991, then revised in 2008. In Wales the CPA was introduced in 2003 but has now been superseded by The Mental Health (Care Co-ordination and Care and Treatment Planning) (CTP) Regulations (Mental Health Measure), a new statutory framework. In both countries, the CPA/CTP requires providers to: comprehensively assess health/social care needs and risks; develop a written care plan (which may incorporate risk assessments, crisis and contingency plans, advanced directives, relapse prevention plans, etc.) in collaboration with the service user and carer(s); allocate a care coordinator; and regularly review care. The overarching aim of this study is to identify and describe the factors that ensure CPA/CTP care planning and coordination is personalised, recovery-focused and conducted collaboratively.Methods/designCOCAPP will employ a concurrent transformative mixed methods approach with embedded case studies. Phase 1 (Macro-level) will consider the national context through a meta-narrative mapping (MNM) review of national policies and the relevant research literature. Phase 2 (Meso-level and Micro-level) will include in-depth micro-level case studies of everyday ‘frontline’ practice and experience with detailed qualitative data from interviews and reviews of individual care plans. This will be nested within larger meso-level survey datasets, senior-level interviews and policy reviews in order to provide potential explanations and understanding.DiscussionCOCAPP will help identify the key components that support and hinder the provision of personalised, recovery-focused care planning and provide an informed rationale for a future planned intervention and evaluation.

Femininity, Childhood and the Non-Making of a Sporting Celebrity: The Beth Tweddle Case

Gymnastics is regularly classified as a feminine-appropriate sport, embodying grace and elegance and is an Olympic sport which has regularly produced female sporting celebrities. Beth Tweddle is the most successful British gymnast of all time and the first to achieve international success, culminating in a medal at London 2012, yet she has received relatively little media coverage and few corporate endorsements. Employing a ‘negative case’ methodology, this athletes relative lack of celebrity is investigated. The article suggests that it can be explained by (a) contradictions underpinning the gender-designation of gymnastics, and (b) the social invisibility of a core audience for the sport: young girls. An implication is that the achievement of celebrity within ‘feminine’ sport may be increasingly unattainable, especially for female athletes. The article uses mixed methods, including primary analysis of print and social media and secondary analysis of a national survey of young people in the UK.

Playing with Numbers: Using Top Trumps as an Ice-Breaker and Introduction to Quantitative Methods

Abstract Statistics anxiety has been widely documented among both postgraduate and undergraduate social science students and shown to be an obstacle in engaging students in quantitative methods. This article builds on previous studies that have highlighted the utility of fun and games in productive learning and overcoming anxiety. A personalized version of the game Top Trumps was developed for use with a class of postgraduate sociology students in the UK. This game provides an ideal way for students to inductively learn about basic statistical concepts, such as range and dispersion. The game also creates opportunities to engage students in critical discussion of measurement and social categorization. The article suggests that the employment of such hands-on learning exercises, especially when used in the first week of a quantitative methods module, can stimulate student interest, ameliorate statistics anxiety and encourage critical discussion, thereby positively impacting learning goals in the rest of the module. The article ends by briefly outlining how to adapt the game for use within an undergraduate module.

Repair work as good work: craft and love in classic car restoration training

Repair work is essential if we are to develop environmentally-sustainable societies, but repair activity has largely disappeared in advanced economies. Where it survives, work in repair is typically ‘dirty’ and undesirable. This article asks how repair work can be experienced as ‘good work’, drawing on the accounts of 20 trainees on a classic car restoration course. We observe that two features made repair ‘good work’ in trainees’ eyes: craft and love. Craft skills enabled trainees to imagine improved employment futures, but also engendered emotional satisfactions. What the trainees emphasized even more was love, in four distinct ways. First, there was ‘object-love’ for the classic car. Second, love was evoked as repair reconnected them with ‘authentic’ younger selves. Third, love was claimed to be a prerequisite to do the work. Fourth, love mediated market relationships, connecting repairers and clients in a ‘community of enthusiasm’. Our discussion contributes to studies of workplace emotions, which typically focus on feminized work, by showing how love also matters in experiences of masculine work. Identifying the attractions of repair, we also consider the liminal context of training and highlight the key conditions for the survival and growth of repair as paid ‘good work’.

Spatio–Temporal Unboundedness: A Feature, Not a Bug, of Self-Employment

This article considers whether unbounded times and spaces of work are systematically associated with self-employment. In contrast to analyses that frame the spatial and temporal location of work as signifying autonomy or freedom, it posits that self-employment is produced by, and then reproduces, constraints on and preferences about spatio–temporal organization at both occupational and individual level. Using data from 5 years of the U.K. Labour Force Survey (2013-2017), the article takes a novel approach in the quantitative analysis of self-employment by conducting intraoccupational analysis within each of four relatively homogenous occupational groups: hairdressers, shopkeepers, art workers, and accountants. Analysis shows that (a) at population-level self-employment is strongly associated with both spatial and temporal unboundedness; (b) these effects are stronger for women than men; (c) in intraoccupational analyses, gender, alongside other sociodemographic measures, is largely nonsignificant, suggesting that the relationship between these and self-employment is primarily produced by differences associated with occupational segregation; and (d) the association between self-employment and different types of spatio–temporal unboundedness varies markedly by occupation. The article points to the importance of occupation and the spatio–temporal organization of concrete work activity in understanding the reproduction of self-employment. It concludes, therefore, that spatio–temporal unboundedness should be considered as a feature, or structural component, of self-employment, not a choice or by-product.