Miriam Glucksmann

Miriam Glucksmann

Visiting Professor

Department of Sociology

Languages
English, French
Key Expertise
Work, Employment, Labour, Gender

About me

Miriam Glucksmann studied in the Department (BA and PhD Sociology, LSE) and is a former Ginsberg Research Fellow. She is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, where she worked until 2015, having previously held positions at Brunel, Leicester and South Bank universities, and Visiting Research Fellowships at Manchester, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Griffith University, the Australian National University and the University of Stockholm, where she was awarded an honorary doctorate. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences. She joined the Department as a Visiting Professor in October 2015.

Miriam has longstanding interests in work, employment and gender, especially restructuring, and the connections between different forms of paid and unpaid labour, as part of a broader attempt at rethinking the foundational concept of division of labour. She completed a three year research programme on ‘Transformations of Work’ as an ESRC Professorial Fellow, and between 2010 and 2014 held an Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Council to research ‘Consumption Work and Societal Divisions of Labour’ which focused largely on the work undertaken by consumers.

Her first book was Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (1974, 2014), followed by Women on the Line (1982, 2009), an ethnography of female factory workers. These were followed by monographs on the history of gender, work, and time. She has been centrally involved in the feminist rethinking of work, care and employment. Her most recent book (jointly written with Katy Wheeler) is Household Recycling and Consumption Work: social and moral economies (2015).

During her time here Miriam is continuing to work on the shifting boundaries between paid and unpaid work. She is also developing a new project on the relation between history and memory, exploring differing experiences of the Holocaust and the intergenerational transmission of memory and emotion. This research draws on historical, archive and personal biographical materials.

Publications

Books

2015. Wheeler, K. & Glucksmann, M. (2015) Household Recycling and consumption work: social and   moral economies, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Paperback edition 2017.

2014. Social Analysis on ‘Work’: Time, space and gender.  Japanese Translation of Cottons and Casuals with new Preface, Tokyo:Hosei University Press

2014. Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought. Reissue as Routledge Library Editions Social Theory

2009. Women on the Line, 2nd edition with new Introduction, Routledge

2005. The New Sociology of Work, joint editor and contributor , Blackwell

2000.Cottons and Casuals: the Gendered Organisation of Labour in Time and Space, sociologypress/ Routledge

1990.Women Assemble: Women Workers and the ‘New Industries’ in Inter-war Britain, Routledge

1982.Women on the Line, Routledge. Published under the pseudonym of Ruth Cavendish.

1974. Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought, Routledge

Journal Articles

2016. ‘Completing and complementing: the work of consumers in the division of labour’, Sociology 50(5) 878–895.  DOI: 10.1177/0038038516649553

2015. Wheeler, K. & Glucksmann, M. 'It's kind of saving them a job isn't it? The consumption work of household recycling', The Sociological Review Vol. 63, 551–569

2014. Bake or buy? Comparative and theoretical perspectives on divisions of labour in food preparation work, Anthropology of Food, special issue S 10 ‘Comparing foodways: approaches to the cross-national and dynamic comparison of eating practices’ Available at http://aof.revues.org/7691

2013. and Kathryn Wheeler ‘Economies of Recycling, “Consumption Work” and Divisions of Labour in Sweden and England’ http://www.socresonline.org.uk/18/1/9.html

2012. ‘Reflecting on Women on the Line: Continuities and Change in Women’s Work’, International Labor and Working-Class History 81:168-173

2012. ‘Introducing Socio-economic formations of labour and consumption work.’ Sociologia del Trabajo 75, Primavera: 7-28

2009.‘Formations, connections and divisions of labour’, Sociology (Special Issue on Re-thinking Sociologies of Work), 43, 5: 878-895

2008. ‘Arbete i omvandling’, Ord & Bild 3: 104-113

2008. ‘Airbrushing the history of feminism: ‘Race’ and Ethnicity’, Feminism and Psychology 18, 3: 405-409

2008. Lyon, D. and M.G. ‘Comparative Configurations of Care Work across Europe’, Sociology  42,1: 101-118.

2007. with Nolan, J. ‘New technologies and the transformations of women’s labour at home and work’, Equal Opportunities International, 26, 2: 96-112.

2006. and Lyon, D. ‘Configurations of care work: paid and unpaid elder care in Italy and the Netherlands’, Sociological Research Online 11(2) at http://www.socresonline.org.uk/11/2/glucksmann.html 

2004. ‘Call configurations: varieties of call centre and divisions of labour’, Work, Employment and Society 18, 4: 795-811

1999. 'A Contingent Transmission of Sociology: Encounters with Norbert Elias’, Humanities Research, 55-61.

1998. ‘Organisation social totale du travail: une nouvelle approche pour une analyse sexuée du travail’, Les Cahiers du Mage, CNRS, Paris, 3-4/97:159-70

1998. ‘“What a difference a day makes”: a theoretical and historical exploration of temporality and gender’, Sociology 32, 2: 239-58

1998. ‘Deutsche Versöhnungen’, Das Argument, 224:208-16

1997. ‘German Reconcilings’, Soundings 6, Summer, pp. 29-46

1995. ‘Why “Work”?  Gender and the “total social organisation of labour”‘, Gender, Work and Organisation, Volume 2, no.2, April, pp. 63-75

1995. ‘Some do, some don’t’ some will, some won’t; some have, some haven’t: women, men, work and washing machines’, Gender and History, Volume 7, no. 2, August, pp 275-94