Lynne Pettinger

The University of Warwick · Department of Sociology

In this paper, I consider “green collar work,” broadly defined as work intended to counter environmental degradation. I consider what might count as green collar work and compare the greening of work in different sectors, including industrial production, service work, working on “nature,” and expert work. I look also at how organizations affect the...

In the context of economic growth policies that stress the importance of a ‘creative economy’, and the expansion of private universities, there has been an enormous growth in the number of creative industry degrees offered by Malaysian HEIs. This paper provides a critical discourse analysis of the promotional materials used by two private instituti...

This paper frames the work of performance as embodied labour in order to understand the contingent production of particular music performances. It is an interdisciplinary account that sits at the intersection of the sociology of work, culture and the body. The concept of embodied labour is developed with reference to the complex account of material...

This article uses the philosophy of Félix Guattari to explore subjectivity among environmental consultants. Drawing on his exploration of processes of enunciation in the context of a critical appraisal of ‘assemblage theory’, it looks at how one environmental consultant operates and makes senses of her world, how she understands her practices and b...

This chapter explains how fundamental organisational change in the UK National Health Service (NHS) is being effected by new practices of digitised information gathering and use. It analyses the taken-for-granted IT infrastructures that lie behind digitisation and considers the relationship between digitisation and big data. Qualitative research m...

Linking the UK Coalition Government's Health and Social Care Act to historical trend to 'outsource' government IT projects to privately owned tech firms and to processes of technologisation in the National Health Service, this article explores both the reality and the rhetoric of the government's purported 'information revolution' in the NHS. It ta...

The judgements and valuations made on Internet review sites are part of contemporary consumer culture. This article considers what such sites do in the market for commercial sex. It contributes to policy discussions in two ways. Firstly, it considers how the infrastructure and mechanisms of the web enables organising, searching and reporting of con...

The website ‘Punternet’ contains customer service reviews (‘field reports’) of commercial sex encounters in the UK's indoor sex market. Treating Punternet as a calculative device shows how ordinary understandings of morality underpin consumer markets, as field reports qualify commercial sex to produce understandings of ‘good value’. The varied, mes...

This article reflects on the possibilities and pitfalls of a website, No Way to Make a Living at: http://nowaytomakealiving.net, as a sociological space for exploring what work (paid or unpaid) is like in today's world. The site includes research projects, short thoughts on everyday working lives, and different kinds of textual (fictional, autobiog...

This paper argues that sociologists interested in service work in consumer culture should pay attention to customers' understandings and accounts of their experience and participation in service encounters. It takes the market for sex as a case study and counters the neglect of customers within the study of service work by analysing customer servic...

This paper addresses the neglect of consumption in studies of aesthetic labour by theorising the gendered material cultures of work and consumption. Firstly, it argues that aesthetic labourers influence the consumption of others by working on the desirability of commodities, what Callon refers to as the 'qualification' of economic value. The paper...

This article argues that retail service work is characterised by engagement with material products. Retail sales assistants work to create the shop as a site of consumption, and to create the products for sale as desirable objects for consumption. This is more important than the customer service interactions that are often seen as characterising se...

Introductory chapter to edited collection, setting out our perspective: The central aim of this publication is to initiate and develop an empirically grounded understanding of the nature, dimensions, and relations of different forms of work. Work is not assumed to be a discrete activity carried out in exchange for remuneration in institutions (alt...

This article explores the way retail work entails a complex form of gendering. Three distinct, but related, forms of gendering interweave in this sector of the service economy. These are the gendering of the work tasks, the gendered structure of the occupation and the gender of the retail environment. Using insights from the sociology of consumptio...

The post-structuralist focus on text and the production of text has recently produced a ‘crisis of representation’ for ethnography. This article argues that questions of representation are best engaged with while the researcher is in the field, gathering data. The argument is explored with reference to a dual ethnography of customer service work wh...

The juxtaposition between production and consumption that characterises the retail sector render it interesting for studies of work and consumption. Contemporary chain store clothing retail is characterised by "lifestyle retail brands" that compete for sales through offering products and services targeted to customers of particular class, age, and...