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No Way to Make a Living.net Presence and absence on a website about work Lynne Pettinger (University of Essex) Dawn Lyon (University of Kent) 5th ESRC Research Methods Festival ‘Innovative Methods - New and Changing Forms of Work’ University of Oxford, Wednesday 4th July Changing Work The End of Work? No! Work matters The changing global division of labour The ever-increasing, ever changing service sector The ever-increasing unemployment rate ‘High skill’, ‘green’ and other recession-busting aspirations ICT, its affordances and its limitations Continuities in Work The persistence of inequalities of gender, class and ethnicity The persistence of some occupations, despite extensive technologically-driven changes to others: patients need carers, bricks need bricklayers The problematisation of the working day (or night) Starting points for the site The contemporary complexity of work exceeds representations and forms of sociological enquiry, or what standard sociological tools can and can’t do Limitations in the forms of knowledge we can convey in academic publishing Web-based space for exploring work No Way to Make a Living: Aims To showcase research projects, including work in progress To post ‘short thoughts’ on everyday working lives To make space for different kinds of textual (fictional, autobiographical and analytical), aural, and visual representations of work The website 1 http://nowaytomakealiving.net launched in October 2009 137+ posts to date about work – but we rarely blog about our own work Collaborative, cumulative, dynamic and openended Searchable through categories, tags or keywords Submissions welcome! The website 2 Presenting work Themes of the site reflect newly significant interests in sociology of work: body, materiality, building, movement, objects Conscious emergence from our research trajectories, but done differently Politics and critique of the world: present but with a light touch. Isn’t this what the internet is for? Unexpected presences Biggest tags are transport and customer service: Our experiences are a source of ideas Reflects the constant noticing in our ordinary encounters with the world Small surprises: guess the ‘work angle’ in posts on: Georges Perec, lottery, fish, Sardinia, speed, weather Absences Small number of posts about (for example): Knowledge work (3 posts) Creative work (8 posts) Bankers (0 posts) Why? Well known challenge of studying up These kinds of work are not that amenable to portrayal We don’t experience the customer angle of this work Modes of communication Short thoughts, stories, rants and biographical excerpts are easy to write and tell a good tale Visual/sensory not always the appropriate style of posting… but let’s explore some of the benefits of the visual… Visual and sensory data 1 Data collection and excess Visual methods tend to result in the production of hundreds of images There is a challenge for researchers in handling this volume of data This might be eased by technologies for analysis but is not overcome by them Visual and sensory data 2 How can we get sociological imagination to work on images? Recognised strategies include analysis of content, compostion, semiotics etc These approaches apply to individual images or small collections Tools from arts practice can help by putting images together in multiple ways to alert researcher to direction for analysis, e.g. collage, montage, sequences, assemblages Example 1: Building work collage http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/8 Analysis and representation of work Value of collage is in drawing attention to time by juxtaposing different moments in a process It shows the impact of labour and evokes the different types and stages of work that went into the refurbishment of the façade of the building It is especially useful to draw attention to forms of work that ‘cover their tracks’ such that the product of labour conceals the labour that went into it Collage can be used both as a mode of analysis to generate ideas and to represent them once they are formulated Excess and absence What if less is more? When and how might absence be ‘imaginatively productive’ for researchers and audience? At the level of data collection, this might mean making deliberate and partial selections in time and space Or using limiting technologies, e.g. choosing photography over film Both are ways of handling sensory excess Example 2: Sound without vision http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/656 Sound without vision In this example of the sounds of work, there was the noise of a radio, some laughter, the creaking and scraping of (hand-held?) tools and the whining of machines The fact that the work could not be seen generated a heightened awareness of the rhythms (if not the content) of work This post was a ‘short thought’ and not a project (with fully developed lines of analysis) but it is an instance of how sensory sociology helps us notice – and wonder about – the ordinary everyday anew Sound, text and image This post also prompts us to ask what configurations of sound, text and image both stimulate and communicate sociological imagination and interpretation? The space/capacity of the web has allowed us to experiment with different combinations: sound without image, the dominance of image over text, text without sound or image but as evocative of both We would argue that the web provides a productive and under-utilised space for exploring sociological analyses and representations of work Concluding thoughts The interactivity and openness of the web is a great bonus for researchers, and makes possible different forms of thinking, writing and talking. Ideas are shared easily, and conversations across time and space and beyond immediate networks are possible. Stimulating new forms of attentiveness (Les Back).