Time and place in memory and imagination on the Isle of Sheppey

Much has been said already about the influential sociological text, Divisions of Labour, published by Ray Pahl in 1984, and the research that led up to it from the late 1970s. It has been read as an unintended community study, as a site for the study of social change, for its significant conceptual contribution to the sociology of work and the relationship between formal, informal, paid and unpaid socio-economic modes, and for its careful empirical documentation and analysis of social polarization between work-rich and work-poor households. In what follows, I discuss Pahl’s approach to doing sociology, something about which he is explicit in his comments on the sociologist’s tools and tasks, and something which is felt between the lines of his work. I then explain the reused and replicated data on which the present chapter is based. The discussion that follows is in two parts. In the first, I explore the ways in which place is a site of affective attachment, produced through the rhythms and routines of everyday life, with particular reference to the atmosphere of the ‘bike rush’ of dockyard workers as recalled in oral history interviews. In the second, I make use of young people’s imagined futures to explore time, space and the operation of class.