Philip Hancock

This open access book focuses on the distinctive experiences of freelance and self-employed live performers in the UK’s live entertainment industries It provides an in-depth account of their working lives during COVID-19, showing how their experiences of the pandemic provide insight into the different types of precarity shaping what it means to be a live performer. A growing body of academic research has focused on the meaning, experience, and nature of precarity for those working in the cultural and creative sector, highlighting the problem of socio-economic precarity. This book demonstrates how a constant struggle for recognition also shapes the contours and lived experiences of live performance work. It emphasizes how, combined with affective and socio-economic forms of precarity, this recognitive precarity creates a distinctive and challenging set of working conditions. Drawing on original data generated through a national survey of self-employed and freelance performers across the live entertainment industries, combined with insights derived from a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews, this book presents an empirically rich insight into the struggles and opportunities presented by the multiple forms of precarity that the pandemic brought to the fore. It gives voice to a precarious workforce that remains integral to one of the UK’s most economically buoyant sectors but whose experiences are often marginalized in academic research, and in policy and practice. It will, therefore, offer a unique insight for both students and scholars of work and employment, and for those working in the cultural and creative sector, into the distinctive nature of work as a freelance or self-employed live performer.

No skimping. In their quiet but fierce attention to the unsung and the overlooked – paint splashes, tea stains, silences – Philip Hancock’s poems reveal the histories and horizons of entire lives.

Organizing Christmas is an exploration of the organizational character of Christmas. Taking as its starting point the view that Christmas initially achieved popularity due to its potential to promote social cohesion and political stability, this book both charts and scrutinizes its global emergence as the year's preeminent economic and organizational event. Combining historical narrative, original interviews, and social scientific research and theories, it tells the story of how Christmas has come to dominate the festival landscape and how it emerged as an integral component of the global evolution of contemporary social and economic relations. From the pre-Christian celebrations and politics of the turning of the calendar year, through the power games of Elizabethan England and the wily reinvention of the season by industrious Victorians, to today’s huge economic and logistical exercise that relies on everything from global supply chains to the domestic division of labour, Organizing Christmas demonstrates how the season exemplifies the spirit and practices of industrial, and now post-industrial, modernity. As well as documenting this fact, however, Organizing Christmas also critically interrogates what has become a vast festive-industrial complex. From low-paid factory workers in Yiwu to Santa Claus performers in Kingston, readers are given a chance to consider what the cost of this global festival might be and whether it is a price worth paying. Drawing on intellectual resources ranging from Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic critique of the culture industry, thorough Böhme’s analysis of the sociomaterial production of atmospheres, to Bloch’s ‘principle of hope’, it paints a picture of Christmas as a profoundly important, if deeply contested historical, cultural and, most significantly, organizational phenomenon. Aimed at students and academics in Organization Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Sociology of Work and Employment, as well as the general reader interested in the festive season, Organizing Christmas offers a differing perspective on a subject so familiar and yet so often overlooked.

Organizing Christmas is an exploration of the organizational character of Christmas. Taking as its starting point the view that Christmas initially achieved popularity due to its potential to promote social cohesion and political stability, this book both charts and scrutinizes its global emergence as the year's preeminent economic and organizational event. Combining historical narrative, original interviews, and social scientific research and theories, it tells the story of how Christmas has come to dominate the festival landscape and how it emerged as an integral component of the global evolution of contemporary social and economic relations. From the pre-Christian celebrations and politics of the turning of the calendar year, through the power games of Elizabethan England and the wily reinvention of the season by industrious Victorians, to today’s huge economic and logistical exercise that relies on everything from global supply chains to the domestic division of labour, Organizing Christmas demonstrates how the season exemplifies the spirit and practices of industrial, and now post-industrial, modernity. As well as documenting this fact, however, Organizing Christmas also critically interrogates what has become a vast festive-industrial complex. From low-paid factory workers in Yiwu to Santa Claus performers in Kingston, readers are given a chance to consider what the cost of this global festival might be and whether it is a price worth paying. Drawing on intellectual resources ranging from Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic critique of the culture industry, thorough Böhme’s analysis of the sociomaterial production of atmospheres, to Bloch’s ‘principle of hope’, it paints a picture of Christmas as a profoundly important, if deeply contested historical, cultural and, most significantly, organizational phenomenon. Aimed at students and academics in Organization Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Sociology of Work and Employment, as well as the general reader interested in the festive season, Organizing Christmas offers a differing perspective on a subject so familiar and yet so often overlooked.

City Works Dept. has work to to: repairs, maintenance, above all the paying of attention to a stratum of British society whose people and occupations have suffered from long neglect. Philip Hancock's poems do the job with patience, empathy and unshowy skill.

The practices and values of management are increasingly shaping the management of life outside of work. Here, experts reflect critically on the implications this has for our everyday experiences of self and society. The book helps students to reflect critically on the relationship between management and changes in the organization of work.

Work, Postmodernism and Organization provides a wide-ranging and very accessible introduction to postmodern theory and its relevance for the cultural world of the work organization. The book provides a critical review of the debates that have shaped organization theory over the past decade, making clear the meaning and significance of postmodern ideas for contemporary organization theory and practice. Work, Postmodernism and Organization will provide valuable material to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of organization theory, organizational behaviour, industrial sociology, and more general business, management and sociology courses.

Work, Postmodernism and Organization provides a wide-ranging and very accessible introduction to postmodern theory and its relevance for the cultural world of the work organization. The book provides a critical review of the debates that have shaped organization theory over the past decade, making clear the meaning and significance of postmodern ideas for contemporary organization theory and practice. Work, Postmodernism and Organization will provide valuable material to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of organization theory, organizational behaviour, industrial sociology, and more general business, management and sociology courses.