ABSTRACT
In order to study work activities and how they are organised we need to decide just what we mean by ‘work’. This is not a matter of producing a
final and absolute definition of work. Sociology, like all scientific and other forms of systematic study, proceeds by deciding what is likely to be the most useful way of characterising the topics being studied. Certain types of economic enquiry in a modern industrialised society might best be conducted by defining work in terms of task-based activities for which people are paid by an employer, client or customer. However, this would exclude all those tasks that we refer to as ‘housework’ for example. This would be a serious omission given that, in Brown’s (1997) words, ‘without the enormous volume and unremitting cycle of domestic labour the formal economy of jobs and pay packets would cease to function’. Pettinger et al. (2006) build on this insight in their suggestions for a ‘new sociology of work’. At the heart of this is Glucksmann’s (1995, 2000) notion of the ‘total social organisation of labour’ and its emphasis on the ‘blurry line between work and not-work’.
