Papers by Rachel Lara Cohen
Handbook of the Politics of Labour, Work and Employment
Routledge eBooks, Dec 17, 2015
Work Less, Live More?, 2008
Sociological Research Online, 2013
Gymnastics is regularly classified as a feminine-appropriate sport, embodying grace and elegance ... more Gymnastics is regularly classified as a feminine-appropriate sport, embodying grace and elegance and is an Olympic sport which has regularly produced female sporting celebrities. Beth Tweddle is the most successful British gymnast of all time and the first to achieve international success, culminating in a medal at London 2012, yet she has received relatively little media coverage and few corporate endorsements. Employing a ‘negative case’ methodology, this athlete's relative lack of celebrity is investigated. The article suggests that it can be explained by (a) contradictions underpinning the gender-designation of gymnastics, and (b) the social invisibility of a core audience for the sport: young girls. An implication is that the achievement of celebrity within ‘feminine’ sport may be increasingly unattainable, especially for female athletes. The article uses mixed methods, including primary analysis of print and social media and secondary analysis of a national survey of young...
Sociological Research Online, 2019
This article explores the occupational identities of hairdressers and vehicle mechanics working i... more This article explores the occupational identities of hairdressers and vehicle mechanics working in small and micro firms. Using qualitative interview data from two UK cities, it examines the ways that workers expounded, reflected on and discursively reframed public perceptions of their occupation. A novel distinction between two types of identity resistance is proposed. ‘Crusaders’ are workers who perform collective occupational resistance by rejecting characterisations as inappropriate for the occupation at large, whereas ‘mavericks’ accept that popular characterisations apply to other workers but differentiate themselves. The analysis identifies differences in occupational identity resistance strategies (crusader or maverick) when workers interact with two different publics: customers and trainees.
Do feminists use quantitative methods?
Body Work in Health and Social Care, Edited by Julia Twigg, Carol Wolkowitz, Rachel Lara Cohen and Sarah Nettleton. Chapters© 2011 The Authors. Book …
biomedicine
... absent body 75 adornment, bodily 26 Agate, John 156 ageing body 8, 14, 14758 association wit... more ... absent body 75 adornment, bodily 26 Agate, John 156 ageing body 8, 14, 14758 association with racialised body 1478, 1502, 1558 and geriatric ... 1023, 104 sexual medicine specialists 98100, 102, 103 sexuality and body work 2, 7, 12, 54, 612, 63, 77, 82 Sharma, V. 53 ...
Human Relations
Repair work is essential if we are to develop environmentally-sustainable societies, but repair a... more Repair work is essential if we are to develop environmentally-sustainable societies, but repair activity has largely disappeared in advanced economies. Where it survives, work in repair is typically ‘dirty’ and undesirable. This article asks how repair work can be experienced as ‘good work’, drawing on the accounts of 20 trainees on a classic car restoration course. We observe that two features made repair ‘good work’ in trainees’ eyes: craft and love. Craft skills enabled trainees to imagine improved employment futures, but also engendered emotional satisfactions. What the trainees emphasized even more was love, in four distinct ways. First, there was ‘object-love’ for the classic car. Second, love was evoked as repair reconnected them with ‘authentic’ younger selves. Third, love was claimed to be a prerequisite to do the work. Fourth, love mediated market relationships, connecting repairers and clients in a ‘community of enthusiasm’. Our discussion contributes to studies of workpl...
American Behavioral Scientist
A 'partial renaissance' of self-employment in labor markets of the global North has attracted pol... more A 'partial renaissance' of self-employment in labor markets of the global North has attracted policy concern across national, supranational and global scales, yet sociological thought has been somewhat slower to respond to this phenomenon. In response, this special issue focuses on everyday self-employment amongst workers drawn from countries across the world. The collection of articles in this volume originated, in part, from a recent symposium that took place at City, University of London, which highlighted the contribution of sociology and cognate disciplines to the study of self-employment. The volume considers the social and structural forces that condition this economic activity as an ideology and practice, as well as the constraints and opportunities for its maintenance and reproduction. It also examines the everyday lives of self-employed workers and in particular the ways in which self-employment is experienced across a range of geographical, occupational, and industrial contexts, and with regard to social categories including race, class, nationality and gender. As neo-liberal subjects we are increasingly required to inhabit an entrepreneurial self. As such, a sociological understanding of the global patterns and everyday experiences of self-employment-or entrepreneurialism as practice-is essential for a critical understanding of the economy and society and the cultural legitimations associated with this oft-celebrated and aspirational economic activity. The contributors in this volume often challenge the mainstream view of self-employment and entrepreneurship to reveal the complexity and scope of activity; their perspectives provide new insights for researchers and policymakers regarding the function of self-employment in a changing economy and society. This introduction initiates a discussion of the central debates in the study of self-employment, introduces a working conceptualization of selfemployment, and presents a brief synopsis of the articles in this volume.
American Behavioral Scientist
This article considers whether unbounded times and spaces of work are systematically associated w... more This article considers whether unbounded times and spaces of work are systematically associated with self-employment. In contrast to analyses that frame the spatial and temporal location of work as signifying autonomy or freedom, it posits that self-employment is produced by, and then reproduces, constraints on and preferences about spatio-temporal organisation at both occupational and individual level. Using data from five years of the UK Labour Force Survey (2013-17) the article takes a novel approach in the quantitative analysis of self-employment by conducting intraoccupational analysis within each of four relatively homogenous occupational groups: hairdressers, shopkeepers, arts workers and accountants. Analysis shows that: 1) at population-level selfemployment is strongly associated with both spatial and temporal unboundedness; 2) these effects are stronger for women than men; 3) in intra-occupational analyses, gender, alongside other sociodemographic measures, is largely non-significant, suggesting that the relationship between these and self-employment is primarily produced by differences associated with occupational segregation; 4) the association between self-employment and different types of spatio-temporal unboundedness varies markedly by occupation. The article points to the importance of occupation and the spatiotemporal organisation of concrete work activity in understanding the reproduction of selfemployment. It concludes, therefore, that spatio-temporal unboundedness should be considered as a feature, or structural component, of self-employment, not a choice or by-product.
Gender, Work & Organization
This article explores the relationship between 'body work' and gender, asking why paid work invol... more This article explores the relationship between 'body work' and gender, asking why paid work involving the physical touch and manipulation of others' bodies is largely performed by women. It argues that the feminization of body work is not simply explicable as 'nurturance', nor as the continuation of a pre-existing domestic division of labour. Rather, feminization resolves dilemmas that arise when intimate touch is refigured as paid labour. These 'body work dilemmas' are rooted in the material nature of body work. They are both cultural (related to the meaning of inter-corporeality) and organizational (related to the spatial, temporal and labour process constraints of work on bodies). Two sectors are explored as exemplars: hairdressing and care work. Synthesizing UK quantitative data and existing research, the article traces similarities and differences in the composition of these sectors and in how gender both responds to and reentrenches the cultural and organizational body work dilemmas identified.
Review of LA story : immigrant workers and the future of the US labor movement by Milkman, Ruth
Does feminism count? An analysis of feminist methodological practice
... An analysis of feminist methodological practice Rachel Cohen, Christina Hughes and Richard La... more ... An analysis of feminist methodological practice Rachel Cohen, Christina Hughes and Richard Lampard Department of Sociology, University of Warwick ... (p 6) Crompton (2008: 1225) 'A range of methodological expertise is essential for practicing sociologists. ...
Review of Changing places of work, by Felstead, A., Jewson, N. and Walters, S
Rethinking ‘mobile work’: boundaries of space, time and social relation in the working lives of mobile hairstylists
Work Employment Society, 2010
Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences, 2014
Statistics anxiety has been widely documented among both postgraduate and undergraduate social sc... more Statistics anxiety has been widely documented among both postgraduate and undergraduate social science students and shown to be an obstacle in engaging students in quantitative methods. This article builds on previous studies that have highlighted the utility of fun and play in productive learning and overcoming anxiety. A personalised version of the game Top Trumps was developed for use with a class of postgraduate sociology students in the UK. This game provides an ideal way for students to inductively learn about basic statistical concepts, such as range and dispersion. The game also creates opportunities to engage students in critical discussion of measurement and social categorisation. The article suggests that the employment of play and hands-on exercises, especially when used in the first week of a quantitative methods module, can stimulate student interest, ameliorate statistics anxiety and encourage critical discussion, thereby positively impacting learning goals in the rest of the module. The article ends by explaining how to adapt the exercise for use within an undergraduate module.
The Sociological Review, Apr 25, 2010
This article examines worker-client relationships in hairstyling. Data are drawn from interviews ... more This article examines worker-client relationships in hairstyling. Data are drawn from interviews with 15 hourly-paid and 32 self-employed hairstylists and a self-administered survey. Relations of employment are found to be central to the deployment of emotional labour. Self-employed owner-operators are highly dependent on clients, rely on deep-acting, enact favours, and are prone to emotional breaking points when they fail to realise their 'congealed service'. In contrast, hourly-paid stylists perform surface acting, resist unpaid favours and experience fewer breaking points. Methodologically this article demonstrates the importance of comparative employment relations analysis (CERA) for exposing the relationship between employment structures and labour process experiences.
The online participation and mobilization of offline antiwar activists: an investigation into the effects of gender, age, place and experience
This paper empirically questions the proposition that the internet has provided a new, more democ... more This paper empirically questions the proposition that the internet has provided a new, more democratic space for social movement organisation. Focusing on the post 9-11 antiwar movement in the UK, it is shown that the intenet (either email or the web) is seen by a large proportion of activists as a primary source of information. Furthermore, it is clear that the online communication has widened the space for activism in specific ways, for example: improving the connections of activists who are geographically dispersed. However analysis of the ways in which antiwar protesters use the internet shows that interactions are overwhelmingly hierarchical and uni-directional, providing few opportunities for discussion, debate or the development of democratic consensus about action. The failure of online discussion lists to provide this space is shown by a curvilinear relationship between the duration of activist engagement in the antiwar movement and propensity to spend time on these lists. ...
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Papers by Rachel Lara Cohen