Work, Organisations and Inequalities
Our research interests
This new grouping conducts novel research into the historical core of sociology: macro-level structures, and processes and outcomes of social inequalities. Sociological analyses of work include explorations of non-standard employment, ‘body work,’ as well as cross-national comparative studies of institutional effects on class and gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work. Also of interest are inequalities that unfold along the life course in such areas as criminal justice, education, family, health, earnings, and occupations. New research areas include environmental inequalities, and inequalities associated with new media and the Internet. Organisational subjects span the management of art museums and galleries and cultural policy from a neo-institutional perspective, to organisational features of police forces. These topics are explored with a mix of methods, from ethnography to comparative research using large-scale secondary longitudinal datasets.
Academic members
Victoria Alexander, Sara Arber, Rachel Brooks, Karen Bullock, Rachel Cohen, Jane Fielding
Research students
Elena Avetova, Stella Chatzitheochari, Colin Norris
Current and recent research
The innovative research of this grouping draws on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to interrogate structures, meanings, and processes of social life.
Victoria Alexander has written extensively on the sociology of the arts (both fine and popular forms), on state funding for artists and arts organisations, and on museums. She is also interested in organisational culture and visual sociology. She has been part of an ESRC-funded project on conceptions of vulnerability, with her contribution involving the use of visual methods to study participants’ views of their neighbourhoods and their sense of communities. Her current research focuses on arts philanthropy and on changes in the systems of production, distribution and consumption of the arts in the digital arena. Karen Bullock is a criminologist with a particular interest in the operation of the police service, with her research covering aspects of organisational change, governance and accountability.
Rachel Cohen's research explores work as an everyday activity, charting the labour process relationships of workers in specific occupations (hairdressing, car mechanics, accountancy) and employment relations (including self employment, waged labour and mobile work). From an interdisciplinary perspective and using a multimethod approach, Lynn Prince Cooke compares institutional effects on the division of paid and unpaid work in affluent societies, and how relative equality in these divisions affect life course outcomes for members of different social groups. Her recent monograph, Gender-Class Equality in Political Economies, traces how population, educational, and employment institutions and policies structured relative gender-class equality in paid and unpaid work in Australia, East and West Germany, Spain, the UK and the US. She is currently principal investigator on the Gender Equality in Relationship Transitions (GERT) project, a Leverhulme Trust funded international network with 13 colleagues who are exploring how the socio-political context alters men’s and women’s employment effects on relationship dissolution.
Inequality is a key theme of Sara Arber’s research, especially focusing on gender and class inequalities in health, pensions, caregiving and sleep. Her work in this area uses secondary analysis of large-scale surveys, and includes comparative research on inequalities in health and sleep with colleagues in Finland. Jane Fielding’s research interests lie principally in research methods (she is currently co-director of the National Centre for Research Methods Node, Qualitative Innovations in CAQDAS (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis)), but her substantive interests are in disaster studies. One current project involves the application of geographic information systems techniques to an investigation of environmental inequality in the flood plains of England and Wales.
Professional activities:
Victoria Alexander is Chair of the ESA Research Network on Sociology of the Arts and is a member of the Advisory Board for the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. Sara Arber is on the editorial board of Sociology of Health and Illness, an Advisory Editor of Social Science and Medicine, and Executive Board Member of ESHMS (European Society for Health and Medical Sociology). Rachel Cohen recently completed co-editing a special volume on ‘body work’ for The Sociology of Health and Illness, and she serves on the editorial board of Work, Employment and Society.
To find out more please contact:
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey GU2 7XH
UK
Tel. 01483 689450
Fax 01483 689551
E-mail: r.brooks@surrey.ac.uk
