Rosemary Mellor

Professional Work and Professional Careers in Manchester's Business and Financial Sector

This paper examines professional work and professional careers and the extent to which professionals face change, uncertainty and risk in their careers. The key issue is whether the power and privilege of the professions is being undermined. It draws on research from Manchesters business and financial sector including accountancy, law, actuarial work and corporate finance. Interviews with senior partners and managers in a range of organisations indicate that important changes in the professions are taking place including diversification, inter-professional competition, organisational change and specialisation. There has also been a change in relationships with clients and an intensification of work. Interviews with junior professionals show that job mobility is high in the early career although most envisaged staying with one organisation for the majority of their careers. Hours of work were long but not necessarily seen as onerous. They were well remunerated in commanding high salaries at a relatively young age with the prospect of greatly enhanced rewards in the future. Few had experiences of redundancy and none of unemployment although the consensus of opinion was that the professions are no longer a job for life. Perceptions of insecurity were greater than experiences of it. It is argued that the privilege and power of the professions can only be understood in the context of the organisations in which they are employed and the political economy in which those organisations operate. Increased economic competitiveness has led to changes in professional work but professionals continue to enjoy advantaged careers in the labour market.

Family business in Russia: the path to middle class?

The paper seeks to explore via a series of interview-based case studies aspects of the emergence of an entrepreneurial middle-class in Russia. The paper notes the origins of those studied in the professional or highly skilled workers in the former Soviet Union. The paper reveals the complexity and fragility of the circumstances of these entrepreneurs and suggests that commentary in both Russia and the West that pins its hopes for social stability on the emergence of a new property owning middle class in Russia are, at best, premature.

The Future of Regional Cities in the Information Age: The Impact of Information Technology on Manchester’s Financial and Business Services Sector

Castells identifies two potential consequences of the introduction of information technology into the workplace: dispersal of the workforce and individualization of work, including the spread of teleworking. Such tendencies would undermine one of the rationales for cities: bringing large numbers of people together in order to choreograph their work. Has information technology had the impact that Castells suggests? Evidence from interviews with members of the financial and business services sector in central Manchester is used to test Castells’ claim about the effects of information technology on work and workers.The interviewees reveal that, despite changes in working practices resulting from heavy investment in information technologies, the potency of formal and informal face-to-face interaction to generate cohesion and trust, and maintain competitiveness, encourages firms to locate in the city centre and curtails the attraction of teleworking.

Family and Community Ties in Space and Time

The community studies of the postwar period in British sociological research were an important source of empirical research on people’s everyday lives and how they were structured by class (Crow and Allan 1994; Eldridge 1990; Kent 1981). That is to say, they highlighted the different patterns of sociability among the working and middle-classes. It was found, for example, that in their leisure time members of the working class socialized with family and longstanding friends from their community (Dennis et al. 1956; Stacey 1960). Members of the middle-class, by contrast, socialized with colleagues from their jobs and more recent friends (Bell 1968; Pahl and Pahl 1971). These divergent patterns were the consequence of different migratory practices among the working and middle classes. The working classes usually took manual jobs locally and they could maintain relations with family and friends in the communities in which they lived out their lives. In contrast, the middle classes moved in search of high-level non-manual employment and they had to forgo family and community ties in new cities and towns (Bell 1968; Pahl and Pahl 1971). The working classes were ‘local’ while the middle classes were ‘cosmopolitan’.