Body work is a central activity in the practice of many workers in the field of health and social care. This article provides an introduction to the concept of body work -paid work on the bodies of others -and demonstrates its importance for understanding the activities of health and social care workers. Providing an overview of existing research on body work, it shows the manifold ways in which this can inform the sociology of health and illness -whether through a micro-social focus on the inter-corporeal aspects of work in health and social care, or through elucidating our understanding of the times and spaces of work, or through highlighting the relationship between mundane body work and the increasingly global movements of bodies, workers and those worked-upon. The article shows how understanding work undertaken on the bodies of others as 'body work' provides a mechanism for relating work in the sphere of health and social care to that in other sectors, opening up new avenues for research.

Body work is a central activity in the practice of many workers in the field of health and social care. This article provides an introduction to the concept of body work -paid work on the bodies of others -and demonstrates its importance for understanding the activities of health and social care workers.Providing an overview of existing research on body work, it shows the manifold ways in which this can inform the sociology of health and illness -whether through a micro-social focus on the inter-corporeal aspects of work in health and social care, or through elucidating our understanding of the times and spaces of work, or through highlighting the relationship between mundane body work and the increasingly global movements of bodies, workers and those worked-upon. The article shows how understanding work undertaken on the bodies of others as 'body work' provides a mechanism for relating work in the sphere of health and social care to that in other sectors, opening up new avenues for research.

This article investigates the relationship between spatial mobility and the labour process, developing a typology of 'mobile work'. Working while mobile is a largely white-collar (and well researched) phenomenon whereas mobility as work and mobility for work

With 'efficiency savings' the watchword for health and social care services, reorganisation and labour rationalisation are the order of the day. This article examines the difficulties involved in (re)organising work which takes bodies as its object, or material of production. It shows that working on bodies ('body work') systematically delimits possibilities for labour process rationalisation which, in turn, constrains reorganisation of the health and social care sector. It does this in three main ways. First: rigidity in the ratio of workers to bodies-worked-upon limits the potential to increase capital-labour ratios or cut labour. Secondly: the requirement for co-presence and temporal unpredictability in demand for body work diminish the spatial and temporal malleability of the labour process. Thirdly: the nature of bodies as a material of productioncomplex, unitary and responsive -makes it difficult to standardise, reorganise or rationalise work. A wide-ranging analysis of body work in health and social care, as well as other sectors, fleshes out these three constraints and shows that attempts to overcome them and reorganise the sector in pursuit of cost savings or 'efficiency', generate problems for workers and the patients, whose bodies they work upon.

This article examines worker-client relationships in hairstyling.Data is drawn from interviews with 15 hourly-paid and 32 selfemployed hairstylists and a self-administered survey. Relations of employment are found to be central to the deployment of emotional labour. Self-employed owner-operators are highly dependent on clients, rely on deep-acting, enact favours, and are prone to emotional breaking points when they fail to realise their 'congealed service'. In contrast, hourly-paid stylists perform surface acting, resist unpaid favours and experience fewer breaking points. Labour in HairstylingSince Hochschild (1983) first suggested that interactive service workers carry out emotional labour in the course of their work, this proposition has become widely accepted. However the relationship of emotional labour, and client-worker social interactions more generally, to the structural relations of employment has received surprisingly little attention: most inquiries into emotional labour have been conducted in large companies amongst waged workers whose employment relations vary little. In consequence emotional labour has increasingly been abstracted from the structural conditions of its production, and come to be seen as the product of occupation; employers' capacity to exercise Foucauldian control over workers; or workers' production of meaning in their workplace interactions. This article shows that these conceptualizations are partial as workerclient interactions vary with variation in employment relations, even where workers face similar cultural and occupational demands. This is therefore a call to resituate emotional labour, and worker-client interactions more broadly, in the structures of employment within which they are produced.Emotional Labour: Alienation, Breaking Points and Gifts For Marx alienation has four dimensions: workers are alienated from the product of their labour, which appears, 'an alien being, as a power independent of the producer,' ([1844] 2000: 86), from the process of production (over which they have ceded control), from their 'species-being' (creative and social productive activity) and thus 3 (since social labour in capitalism is commodified) from both capitalists who direct their work and their co-workers (Marx [1844(Marx [ ] 2000. In The Managed Heart Hochschild (1983) extends this, claiming that, '[t]he worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self-either the body or the margins of the soul -that is used to do the work' (7). The flight attendant smiles; the debt collector snarls; both produce a product: 'the proper state of mind in others' (7). This product (a customer's response) is owned by the capitalist, who reaps its rewards. And the labour employed is 'emotional labour', comprising 'the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.' As such emotional labour is understood as a subcategory of 'labour'. Critically emotional labour is sold for a wage and Hochschild argues that this is why emotional labour is alienating,...

This article explores the relationship between 'body work' and gender, asking why paid work involving the physical touch and manipulation of others' bodies is largely performed by women. It argues that the feminization of body work is not simply explicable as 'nurturance', nor as the continuation of a pre-existing domestic division of labour. Rather, feminization resolves dilemmas that arise when intimate touch is refigured as paid labour. These 'body work dilemmas' are rooted in the material nature of body work. They are both cultural (related to the meaning of inter-corporeality) and organizational (related to the spatial, temporal and labour process constraints of work on bodies). Two sectors are explored as exemplars: hairdressing and care work. Synthesizing UK quantitative data and existing research, the article traces similarities and differences in the composition of these sectors and in how gender both responds to and reentrenches the cultural and organizational body work dilemmas identified.

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link Abstract:With 'efficiency savings' the watchword for health and social care services, reorganisation and labour rationalisation are the order of the day. This article examines the difficulties involved in (re)organising work which takes bodies as its object, or material of production. It shows that working on bodies ('body work') systematically delimits possibilities for labour process rationalisation which, in turn, constrains reorganisation of the health and social caresector. It does this in three main ways. First: rigidity in the ratio of workers to bodies-workedupon limits the potential to increase capital-labour ratios or cut labour. Second: the requirement for co-presence and temporal unpredictability in demand for body work diminish the spatial and temporal malleability of the labour process. Third: the nature of bodies as a material of production -complex, unitary and responsive -makes it difficult to standardize, reorganise or rationalise work. A wide-ranging analysis of body work in health and social care, as well as other sectors, flesh out these three constraints and show that attempts to overcome them and reorganise the sector in pursuit of cost savings or 'efficiency', generate problems for workers and the patients, whose bodies they work upon.2

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