XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

540

Value of Job and Beauty Work: Making Choice in Appearance, Space and Time

RC30 Sociology of Work (host committee)

Language: English

1/ The Value of Job. Every job has its value. It is not only wage, but also a wide range of qualitative characteristics (working conditions, prestige, and distance from home). Value of the workplace varies in space and in time. Free choice of field and place of employment is one of the fundamental human rights. It is natural when people of any age seek good valuable jobs. They improve their skills, develop meaningful competence etc. But in some cases human rights don’t meet the opportunities. Excessive spatial differentiation of the value of jobs creates uncontrolled migration flows, distorts economic structures, and has destructive influence on labour mobility. 2/ The "beauty work". We propose to examine the circulation of market power and symbolic violence by overlooking the   various wage activities that can be conceptualized as “beauty work”. Here, the “beauty work” refers to the execution of a professional activity which conceives, produces, maintains or distributes the various socially defined forms of appearances.  The sessions aims at reflecting on these professions, on their emergence, the content of their work, their qualifications, their limits, until the social characteristics and the individual who execute these professions, as well as the segmentation and stratification of the sector, as well as their role as the prescriber or “the canons of beauty.”