Seminar 4 abstracts

Professor Colin Williams, University of Sheffield
Professor of Public Policy, School of Management, University of Sheffield

Unravelling cultures of community engagement:  a geographically-nuanced approach
Previous studies have revealed that while the culture of community engagement in affluent localities is more orientated towards formal participation in community-based groups, the participatory culture of deprived neighbourhoods is more orientated towards informal (one-to-one) community exchanges. Reporting evidence from 861 face-to-face interviews in affluent and deprived urban and rural English localities, this paper transcends this dualistic depiction of participatory cultures by uncovering a more complex multi-layered understanding of the types of community engagement and how participation in these different types varies spatially. The outcome is a call for a more geographically-nuanced approach towards understanding and nurturing community engagement that reflects the contrasting cultures of community engagement in different locality-types.

Elder care work and the ‘total social organisation of labour’.
Miriam Glucksmann, University of Essex

The work of caring for the elderly, like most other care work, may be carried out in a variety of socio-economic relations: paid or unpaid, market or non-market, formal or informal. Different countries display different mixes of socio-economic modes of care work, which also interact in different ways. The paper will introduce the concept of ‘total social organisation of labour’ which was developed in order to facilitate analysis of work that straddles boundaries between socio-economic mode, and discuss recent extensions and modifications. The second part of the paper will draw on my recent research on elder care work in four European countries (UK, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands), using the approach to throw light on contrasting configurations of care.

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