Essex Sociology’s new ‘Research Bytes‘ YouTube channel includes interviews with Professor Mark Harvey and Professor Miriam Glucksmann. Mark discusses his research on the tomato and on new approaches to sustainable biofuels and land-use whilst Miriam describes her recent research on work and especially the new paradigm of ‘consumption work‘.
Professor Mark Harvey has been invited to be a Visiting Scholar at the National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan to facilitate collaborative research on sustainable consumption and bottled water, with Dr William Li, a graduate from the Department of Sociology.
The collaboration stemmed from a job posting to the Department’s Twitter and Facebook feeds for a research officer to support Professor Harvey’s ESRC funded project on bottled water. Read the rest of this entry »
ESRC funded Senior Research Officer in the Department of Sociology needed to undertake comparative research on consumption practices of bottled water in Europe, Mexico and India. The post has arisen as part of the formation of the Sustainable Practices Research Group, led by the University of Manchester, a programme of research on sustainability and consumption. The appointed researcher will work under the direction of Professor Mark Harvey, Director of the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation (CRESI).
For more information see http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ACC425/senior-research-officer/
Dr. Sean Nixon from Department of Sociology, University of Essex
Date: 4th November 2010
At 16:00 in Room 6.345 (Department of Sociology) followed by wine & nibbles in the Sociology Common Room.
Abstract:
Sean will lead a discussion of specific aspects of Bourdieu’s book – the reading is available in the Department of Sociology Office.
Bio:
Sean is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology atthe University of Essex and is Director of the MA Media Culture Society. Sean’s research has focused over a long period of time on the study of commercial cultures and consumption, particularly the intersection of the commercial domain with wider social and cultural changes.
Sean is currently working on a book length project, provisionally entitled Advertising, Affluence and Social Change. The book explores the commercial and cultural rise of advertising agencies and advertising practitioners in post-war Britain. Central to the argument that it develops is a reflection on the influence of advertising and marketing across a number of areas of British life: within industry and business, amongst the political parties and the machinery of government, within the popular media and in the lives of ordinary people.
This book, edited by Mark Harvey is about how to understand the huge variety of markets and market organisation in contemporary economies through a dialogue between a group of UK and French scholars. It presents a critique and development of institutional views of markets, and ‘puts markets in their place’ in a wider political and social context.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis in markets, the book makes a topical and significant contribution on the importance of the rules and regulations that constitute markets, and their broader political and legal frameworks. Moreover, the disruption of markets brings to the fore their interconnection with the broader economy, with production, distribution and consumption in a way often ignored at the height of market bubbles.
Applications are invited for two European Research Council funded Senior Research Officer Posts in the Department of Sociology, to undertake research on the new field of consumption work. The positions have become available as part of Professor Miriam Glucksmann’s 3 year ERC Advanced Investigator Grant to undertake a programme of research on ‘Consumption Work and Societal Divisions of Labour’.
This presentation, which was given at the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent on March 18 2010 gives an overview of Mark’s work of the last decade, and its specific contribution to the development of the understanding of economic sociology and innovation. The presentation covers a wide range of research, picking out the main features, rather than going into great depth. There are detailed notes to each slide which can be viewed via the Slideshare version.
Prof. Miriam Glucksmann has secured a €810k grant from the highly competitive and prestigious European Research Council Advanced Investigator scheme.
The project, “Consumption Work and Societal Divisions of Labour” aims to radically revise the foundational concept of ‘the division of labour’ by situating traditional understandings of the technical allocation of tasks within an expanded theoretical framework. Read the rest of this entry »
CRESI’s Professor Joan Busfield’s research on the expansion in medicine use has been published in Social Science & Medicine in March 2010. The paper documents the substantial increase in expenditure on drugs by the NHS in England (a 60% increase in real terms over the decade to 2006) whilst the number of prescribed medicines dispensed increased from an average of 8 per person in 1989 to 16.4 in 2008 – a doubling over twenty years, with annual increases now running at around 4–5 percent. Such increases are matched elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »
Miriam Glucksmann from Department of Sociology, University of Essex
Date: Thursday 4th March 2010.
At 16:00 in Room 6.345 (Department of Sociology, Colchester Campus).
This informal talk will introduce and raise for discussion the main arguments from Miriam’s recent article (Sociology 43, 5 October 2009 – abstract below) on the ’division of labour’. Including the work of consumers is central to this reconceptualisation and I’ll expand further on this in the context of my forthcoming research.
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