The Sociology of the Sociology of Work in the UK

Abstract

The Palgrave Handbook of the Sociology of Work in Europe (ed. Paul Stewart, Jean-Pierre Durand and Maria-Magdalena Richea) is the product of an ambitious project that seeks to locate the evolving character and role of the sociology of work within wider social, economic, and institutional settings. Separate chapters explore the contents and contexts of such social research and theorizing in eleven European nation-states since 1945. In doing so, the Handbook provides rich resources for a ‘sociology of the sociology of work’, which embraces discussion of changes and continuities in empirical and methodological preoccupations in each country, together with an examination of the dominant and competing analytical frameworks in play. Some of these features are seen as responsive to the interests and concerns of the powerful and advantaged, and when they dominate the intellectual agenda they are seen as ‘hegemonic’, whereas others, characterized as ‘counterhegemonic’, may potentially articulate the interests of the relatively powerless but also risk marginalization or exclusion. This review considers the strengths of the resulting analyses of the sociology of work, with particular attention to the British case study, and identifies some unresolved issues associated with mapping the institutional locations, intellectual currents, and hegemonic and counterhegemonic features that may characterize evolving sociologies of work.