Local Business and People

Working individually, write a report on the following topic:

Engage with the local community and critically examine how work and employment issues discussed in the ‘The Individuals at Work’ half unit concern the local business and people. Possible directions of your investigation are listed below, and you can choose two to focus on.

The task: Your task is an open-ended, problem-based project to investigate the workplaces in the community of your choice. This means there is not an assigned topic to this project. To investigate how work and employment issues discussed in the ‘The Individuals at Work’ half unit concern the local business and people, you can use a variety of methods to gather information, as long as you justify how your chosen method(s) help to understand the issues and overcome challenges in conducting this project. Your information can come from different sources, such as websites, local or national statistical data, new paper articles, academic papers or interviews with individual business owners and workers.

Possible directions of investigation, from which you can choose two to focus on:

• 1. Is the community a globalised space of work, judging by the composition of the workforce and businesses?
• 2. What connection do the businesses have with workers living locally?
• 3. Is there a sense of the community, which is part of the identity for businesses and workers?
• 4. Has any big business moved in or out of the community in the past 5-10 years? What are the impacts of such move on the local people?
• What are the patterns of work in the local community? How has such patterns changed over the past 5-10 years?
• Are changes in the patterns of work a reflection of the wider national economic trend?

The Observable Field: A Local Community

The individuals: Business owners, Freelancers, Worker employed (full-time, part-time, permanent, temporary)

The workplaces:

• Ownership structure: public services, private companies, not-for-profit organisations
• Private companies can be divided into mass chains and independent outlets
• There may be ethnic businesses and family businesses

Changes and Trends

• Casualisation of work: is temporary, short-term, and part-time work on the rise or not?
• Informalisation of work: is work without employment contract on the rise or not?
• Diversification in the source of workers: has channels of recruitment diversified, e.g. direct recruit, through employment agencies, through social media, family, personal referral etc.
• Diversity in the workforce: increase or decrease in diversity?

Methods

• Secondary materials – websites, reports, news articles, published case studies and journal papers
• Observation – hanging around
• Visualisation – recording
• Fieldwork notes
• Ethnography – working and hanging around
• Interviews – ethics – inform people the research is for University course; ensure names are anonymised; seek consent for recordings

Structure of Work

• Introduction: Introduce the community with brief background; overview of work and employment issues under investigation
• Main discussions: Explain the significance of the chosen work and employment issues in the local community. Justify the method(s) adopted to collect information. Analyse and discuss the reasons behind the observed work and employment issues in the local community;
• Conclusions: A summary and reflection on the arguments presented

Example Topic:

Globalization has lead to the increasing in integration and interdependence of countries in different aspects including, economies, societies, cultures, politics and technology. This increased interconnectedness between countries has also influenced the lives of people in local communities significantly, especially the effect of globalisation and advanced technologies on work and employment in different sectors, including libraries. This project based report aims to address the effects of globalization on the work and employment patterns of Egham library and Royal Holloway University (RHUL) library in the Egham area. This report will examine the effect of globalization on employment patterns and will try to understand how these public services respond to global pressures by tapping into the local.

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