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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
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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).