Susan Halford

Regulation Theory, the Local State, and the Transition of Urban Politics

An effort is made in this paper to contribute to recent debates, inspired by the regulationist literature, on the restructuring of capitalist society. A major weakness in this literature concerns the treatment of the state, and especially the local state. Despite the fact that the state is clearly identified as a key component of any mode of regulation, the actual processes through which economic and social forces are translated into state activity are rarely examined, Moreover, these forces are usually assumed to operate at the national scale, but in this paper it is contended that the practices and relations of regulation also operate locally. These local spaces of regulation arise not only because of the uneven development of capitalist societies, but also because local agencies are often the very medium through which regulatory practices arc interpreted and ultimately delivered. The local state is thus a key component in these local modes of regulation, and will be implicated in any transition from one mode to another. These issues are examined by looking at the changing nature of urban politics in three British ‘cities’: Sheffield, Bracknell, and Camden in inner London. It is concluded that the local state is both an object and an agent of regulation, which itself needs to be regulated so that its strategies and structures can be used to help forge a new social, political, and economic settlement.

Place, Space and Time: Contextualizing Workplace Subjectivities:

This paper explores the relations between management discourse and employee subjectivity in the process of organizational change, drawing on a new empirical study of doctors and nurses working in the British National Health Service (NHS). It builds on recent critiques of more muscular accounts of discourse to examine the manoeuvres made by working subjects in response to managerialist discourses of the entrepreneurial self. While others have shown that alternative discourses including gender, age and profession are important here, this paper argues that we must pay attention to the spatial and temporal contexts within which such generic discourses are received and understood in order to interpret the practices of subjectivity and power in organizational life. We suggest that this approach allows new insights to policy concerns in the NHS; to our understanding of the nature of work subjectivities; and to sociological understandings of organizational power.

Gender, Power and Organisations

This important text offers an overview and synthesis of theory and research into the gendered dimension of organisations, exploring how gender difference is constructed within organisations and intertwined with organisational power relations. Assuming little prior knowledge on the part of the reader, it examines a series of key areas of substantive interest in the study of organisations, bringing to bear a wide range of social and feminist theory in understanding the processes in play.

Spaces of Identity

It is 4.30pm in the Accident and Emergency department at Lakeside. The waiting room is half-full and has an un-nerving sense of tension and boredom. Each time the doors open, heads turn with curiosity and apprehension. AE unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells. I try to make myself as inconspicuous as possible: there seems no legitimate way for me to occupy this space. Based in the centre of the room, the all male group of doctors inhabits the space with ease. In between periods of urgency, communicated largely through speed of movement rather than speech, the doctors’ gather at their station, backs outwards, quiet, intently focussed on each other. The nurses do not enter this huddle but continue with their routine business. As the doctors’ conversation turns to plans for the evening’s entertainment, one stretches his arms above his head and pushes his chair out to stretch his legs and, doing so, blocks a main thoroughfare. A nurse side-steps smartly to avoid him. He doesn’t notice her.

Big Data: Methodological Challenges and Approaches for Sociological Analysis

The emergence of Big Data is both promising and challenging for social research. This article suggests that realising this promise has been restricted by the methods applied in social science research, which undermine our potential to apprehend the qualities that make Big Data so appealing, not least in relation to the sociology of networks and flows. With specific reference to the micro-blogging website Twitter, the article outlines a set of methodological principles for approaching these data that stand in contrast to previous research; and introduces a new tool for harvesting and analysing Twitter built on these principles. We work our argument through an analysis of Twitter data linked to political protest over UK university fees. Our approach transcends earlier methodological limitations to offer original insights into the flow of information and the actors and networks that emerge in this flow.

Restructuring Organisations, Changing People: Gender and Restructuring in Banking and Local Government

This paper contributes to debates about the changing nature of gender relations in employment by re-framing existing debates about economic restructuring and organisational theory. It draws upon research on current changes in British banking and local government to show how restructuring is concerned with changing the qualities of organisational members, and we demonstrate how this recognition offers a corrective to existing views of restructuring. We explore how current forms of restructuring appear to be undermining traditional forms of managerial masculinity and allow some scope for women to move into senior jobs, but also consider how new forms of masculinity are emerging. Thus we illustrate our argument that restructuring is an on-going and human process open to contestation and manipulation. We conclude by emphasising that, since restructuring should not simply be seen as a process administered from the top, there is inevitably a degree of indeterminacy about how gender is implicated in current restructuring processes.

RECONCEPTUALIZING DIGITAL SOCIAL INEQUALITY

This paper discusses conceptual tools which might allow an elaborated sociological analysis of the relationship between information and communication technology on the one hand, and social inequalities on the other. The authors seek to go beyond the familiar idea of the ‘digital divide’ to develop a focus on digital social inequality, through discussing three bodies of literature which are normally not discussed together. The paper thus addresses issues in feminist theory; the sociological field analysis of Pierre Bourdieu; and the Actor Network Theory. This paper shows that there are unexpected commonalities in these three perspectives which allow the possibility of effective cross-fertilization. All seek to avoid positing the existence of reified social groups which are held separate from technological forces, and all stress the role of fluid forms of relationality, from which social inequalities can emerge as forms of stabilization, accumulation and convertibility.

Towards a sociology of organizational space

This paper aims to contribute to, and extend, the emergent Sociology of organizational space. It engages critically with labour process approaches, which position space within a control-resistance paradigm, suggesting that the conceptualization of space embedded within these accounts is limited and limiting. Drawing on insights from cultural geography the paper uses a new empirical study to show the ways that spatial meanings and spatial practices in the micro-spaces of office life are constructed through diverse experiences, memories and identities operating at a range of spatial scales.

Geographies of opportunity: a regional analysis of gender-specific social and spatial mobilities in England and Wales, 1971 - 81

First, a regional analysis of the social mobilities of men and women nonmigrants is carried out. Second, the way in which regional context structures the options open to men and women is discussed, and, third, the fortunes of male and female interregional migrants are traced. The principal empirical results are: (1) that nonmigrant social mobilities have gender-specific spatial structures; (2) that this gender specificity is greater for upward than for downward social mobility; (3) that women are especially likely to be upwardly mobile in the South East region, and particularly so for entry into managerial posts; (4) that migrant social mobilities have gender-specific spatial structures; (5) that flows to the South East involve upward social mobilities both for men and for women but are relatively to the advantage of womens careers; and (6) that flows from the South East often involve the exit of women from the labour market, imply sideways or upward mobility for men, but are strongly to the disadvantage of womens employment careers.

Digital Futures? Sociological Challenges and Opportunities in the Emergent Semantic Web

In the context of recent debates about the ‘data deluge’ and the future of empirical sociology, this article turns attention to current activities aimed at achieving far-reaching transformations to the World Wide Web. The emergent ‘Semantic Web’ has received little attention in sociology, despite its potentially profound consequences for data. In response to more general recent calls for a critical politics of data we focus our enquiry as follows: first, we explore how sociological analysis of the artefacts and tools that are currently being developed to build a Semantic Web helps us to uncover the potential effects of this ‘next generation’ web on knowledge, data and expertise; and second we consider what a Semantic Web might offer to sociological research. We conclude by considering some implications of multidisciplinary engagement with the Web for the future of sociology.