About the research
Naoko Takeda has been researching social change in Japan including residents’ regional movements, shifts in structures of employment and daily life, and spatial organisation. More recently she has focused on the manufacturing suburbs of Tokyo and the working class. In this research Takeda has been to keen to extend the scope of the work by conducting an international comparative study with the UK. In this regard Takeda has used several collections of the sociologist Ray Pahl, that are archived on paper and located in the National Social Policy and Social Change Archive. Specifically she has utilised the Isle of Sheppey studies, the Metropolitan Villages Survey, and the Three Hertfordshire Villages Survey. Alongside providing comparative data Takeda’s research revisits the overall work of Pahl in order to evaluate its wider contribution to the sociology of communities and families.
Ray Pahl conducted a series of research projects on the Isle of Sheppey in the 1970s and 1980s investigating patterns of work and social life. This resulted in his seminal sociological text: Divisions of Labour (1984). One mixed methods combined data collection from the late 1970s and early 1980s, SN 4876 Social and Political Implications of Household Work, investigated how households in a selected local labour market deployed their collective time, energies and resources to get work done. Work in this regard was broadly defined to include that done in the formal economy as employment, in the house as domestic work, and, more informally as a favour or for cash. Pahl explored the effect of opportunities for full or part-time work on the relative balance between these different types of ‘work’.
Publications
Takeda, N. (2009), Secondary analysis of qualitative survey data, Harvest Corporation