Lynne Pettinger is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex. Her research interests include work and consumption in the service sector, with particular reference to aesthetic labour, and to the relationship between production and consumption more generally. She is currently examining the relationship between work, leisure and consumption in the lives of amateur musicians.

Jane Parry is Senior Research Fellow, who has worked in the Employment Group at the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) since 2000. A qualitative sociologist, her research interests include labour market disadvantage, lifestyle transitions, and the significance of work for individual identities, in particular, how these are affected by class, gender, ethnicity and occupational sector.

Rebecca Taylor is Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute whose research interests include voluntary work, community work and forms of work outside employment. Recent research has focused on those marginalized by the labour market such as ethnic minorities and older workers.

Miriam Glucksmann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. She has longstanding research interests in the historical and contemporary restructuring of work and employment. Her books include Women on the Line (1982) published under the pseudonym of Ruth Cavendish and Cotton and Casuals: the gendered organisation of labour in time and space (2000). Currently she is engaged on a three-year programme of research on ‘Transformations of work: new frontiers, shifting boundaries, changing temporalities’ as an ESRC Professorial Fellow.