Kate Hardy
Biographic Data
| ID | 3580939 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kate Hardy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kate |
| FAMILY NAME | Hardy |
| SIGNATURE | HARDY K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0429-2701 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 274 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Student workers as proto-workers: ‘Experience’, quitting and the production of consent
Work undertaken by students is widespread, but largely overlooked, with this employment dismissed as a precursor to ‘real work’. The designation of student work as not real, ‘proto-work’, is central to the production of consent. Drawing on original analysis of focus group interviews with 83 students undertaking paid work and Burawoy’s text, Manufacturing Consent , the article identifies two ways in which hegemonic legitimation of and consent to e…
Organising Beyond the Employment Relationship: Scaling Up and Institutional Power in Own-Account Unions
Sex workers lack structural power; they cannot withdraw their labour to stop production and most do not have a single employer with whom to collectively bargain. The absence of ‘wage-effort bargaining’ has led to conclusions that these workers cannot form successful unions. Yet own-account informal workers in the Global South have routinely organised outside employment relationships and wage-effort bargaining. Organisational forms amongst such wo…
Cultural adaptation and preliminary evaluation of the psychosis Reach family intervention in Pakistan
Most individuals with mental disorders reside in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where care is often provided by family members. However, Family Interventions for psychosis (FIp) are rarely adapted for LMIC contexts. Using a validated cultural adaptation framework, we adapted Psychosis Recovery by Enabling Adult Carers at Home (Psychosis REACH) – an intervention designed for delivery outside of clinical settings – and evaluated the adap…
Equally Bad, Unevenly Distributed: Gender and the 'Black Box' of Student Employment
Students comprise approximately four per cent of the UK labour force and as much as 20% in some occupations and jobs. Yet students' work is typically seen as marginal, secondary both to their current learning and future working biographies. Public and media attention on 'earning while learning' (EwL) tends to focus on the negative impacts of paid work on education. Meanwhile students' actual working conditions, occupations and employment experien…
Locating online labour: The salience of the national scale in remote digital work
Digital work that takes place exclusively online is often presented as spatially unbound, with workers able to work flexibly whenever and wherever they wish to do so, resulting - it is claimed - in the emergence of a 'planetary labour market' for online labour. Recent analyses have shown that fully remote work still clusters in geographical concentrations and is unevenly distributed across the globe. Drawing on an original data set of in-depth in…
Wage Theft and the Struggle over the Working Day in Hospitality Work: A Typology of Unpaid Labour Time
Drawing on Marxist political economy, this article examines wage theft in hospitality work. Through a detailed, qualitative study of workers' experiences in London hotels, a novel typology is developed that reveals how managers extract additional unpaid labour time through wage theft. The article argues that both the legal definition and existing academic formulations of wage theft fail to encompass the full range of ways that employers extract u…
Surplus to the city: Austerity urbanism, displacement and 'letting die
Urban scholars have traditionally associated displacement in cities of the global North with gentrification, generally understood as a class-based process of neighbourhood change. This article expands this scalar focus and adopts the larger scale of the local authority district (in this case the London borough) as its epistemological starting point to study the displacement of homeless people by the local state. Participatory action research was …
Hustling the Platform
An increasing amount of sex work in the United Kingdom is now digitally mediated, as workers and clients identify each other, agree prices and services, undertake security checks, and often make payment through various platforms and websites. Existing accounts of "digital sex work" have been both overly technological deterministic and optimistic, largely invisibilizing capital and the new forms of power and control it enables. The authors argue t…
Affective Organizing: Collectivizing Informal Sex Workers in an Intimate Union
As informal, self-employed workers, street sex workers are frequently understood as a "hard-to-organize" group. As they are not legally registered or protected, they are excluded from institutional arrangements for unionization and collective bargaining and from access to both labor and social protections, due to the lack of recognition of the work they undertake. Despite this, sex workers in Argentina have been successful in generating solidarit…
Introduction to the Special Issue: Everyday Self-Employment
A "partial renaissance" of self-employment in labor markets of the global North has attracted policy concern within national, supranational, and global arenas, yet sociological thought has been somewhat slower to respond to this phenomenon. In response, this special issue focuses on everyday self-employment among workers drawn from countries across the world. The collection of articles in this volume originated, in part, from a recent symposium t…
Austerity urbanism and Olympic counter-legacies: Gendering, defending and expanding the urban commons in East London
This article reflects on an occupation led by single mothers to contest the destruction of social housing in post-Olympics East London. In the process, it argues for a more gendered theorisation of the urban commons. Drawing on auto-ethnography, participant observation and qualitative interviews, the article argues three central points: First, that the occupation demonstrates the gendered nature of the urban commons and the leadership of women in…
In, Against and Beyond Precarity: Work in Insecure Times
In this Foreword to the special issue 'In, Against and Beyond Precarity' the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effectiveness, the editors suggest instead a focus on precarization as a process, drawing from perspectives t…
On where to Begin: Sheila Rowbotham's Women, Resistance and Revolution and Anti-capitalist Feminism Today
Macho, mobile and resilient? How workers with impairments are doubly disabled in project-based film and television work
Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of production in UK film and television (UKF&TV) is argued to exclude on the basis of gender, race and class. This article considers a social category that has been overlooked in these debates: disability. It argues that workers with impairments are 'doubly disabled' - in both the labour markets and labour processes of UKF&TV. It concludes that disability c…
New Sociologies of Sex Work
Sex work studies have seen an expansion in publications over the past decade, drawing together disciplines from across the social sciences, namely sociology, criminology and social policy. There has, however, been a tendency for research and writing to focus on the more obvious aspect of the sex industry - the visible elements of female street prostitution and those features which attract media attention such as the criminalised aspects of the se…
Uneven Divestment of the State: Social Reproduction and Sex Work in Neo-developmentalist Argentina
Sex work has been identified as an important dimension of the ‘survival circuits’ which have developed in the majority world in the context of neo-liberalisation, as a response to the deepening misery of the Global South. Yet while much research has explored the role of sex work in contexts of ‘neo-liberal’ regimes of capital accumulation, few have paid sustained attention to sex work in regimes which are not purely ‘neo-liberal’. Drawing on data…
Taking apart the “Swedish Model”: Diversification in Global Sex Work Policy
In August 2015, Amnesty International voted to support the development of a policy based on the decriminalization of all aspects of prostitution as the mechanism for ensuring the human rights of se
Students selling sex: Marketisation, higher education and consumption
Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy, yet the relationship appears consistent and permanent. This paper draws on findings from the largest study into the stripping industry in the United Kingdom to explore the relationships between students, sex work and consumption. To make sense of the relationship between students and participation in the sex industry, a deeper understanding of other …
The political economy of 'lap dancing: Contested Careers and Women's Work in the Stripping Industry
The visibility of striptease ('lap dancing') as a workplace and site of consumption has grown significantly over the past 15 years in the UK. This article draws on the first large scale study of stripping work in the UK, exploring original empirical data to examine why women continue to seek work in an industry that is profoundly precarious and often highly exploitative. It suggests that rather than either a 'career' or a 'dead end' job, many wom…
Flexible Workers: Labour, Regulation and the Political Economy of the Stripping Industry
Striptease and other types of erotic dance increasingly make up a large, lucrative and visible part of the sex industries in the United Kingdom and 'lap dancing' has become the focus of many important contemporary debates about gender, work and sexuality. This new book from Teela Sanders and Kate Hardy moves away from the more traditional focus on the relations between dancers and customers, to a focus on regulation and the working conditions exp…
Flexible Workers: Labour, regulation and the political economy of the stripping industry
Regulating Strip-Based Entertainment: Sexual Entertainment Venue Policy and the Ex/Inclusion of Dancers’ Perspectives and Needs
This article showcases a research, dissemination and impact study on the striptease industry that explores why key stakeholders (dancers) are excluded, and ways that inclusion in policy development is achievable. This form of erotic work has undergone increased attention from policy and regulatory officials in recent years with the introduction of a new licensing process as venues are categorised as Sexual Entertainment Venues. The article will d…
Clear, rigorous and relevant: Publishing quantitative research articles in Work, employment and society
This article was published in the journal, Work, Employment and Society [Sage Publications / © The Authors]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0950017014526448
Body/Sex/Work
Beautiful face, beautiful place: Relational geographies and gender in cosmetic surgery tourism websites
Cosmetic surgery tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism. This article explores the gendered construction of cosmetic surgery tourism in different geographical locations through an analysis of destination websites in Spain, the Czech Republic and Thailand. We examine the ways in which gender and other intersections of identity interact with notions of space, place and travel to construct particular locations and cosmetic surg…
In, Against and Beyond Precarity: Work in Insecure Times
In this Foreword to the special issue 'In, Against and Beyond Precarity' the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effectiveness, the editors suggest instead a focus on precarization as a process, drawing from perspectives t…
Surplus to the city: Austerity urbanism, displacement and 'letting die
Urban scholars have traditionally associated displacement in cities of the global North with gentrification, generally understood as a class-based process of neighbourhood change. This article expands this scalar focus and adopts the larger scale of the local authority district (in this case the London borough) as its epistemological starting point to study the displacement of homeless people by the local state. Participatory action research was …
Macho, mobile and resilient? How workers with impairments are doubly disabled in project-based film and television work
Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of production in UK film and television (UKF&TV) is argued to exclude on the basis of gender, race and class. This article considers a social category that has been overlooked in these debates: disability. It argues that workers with impairments are 'doubly disabled' - in both the labour markets and labour processes of UKF&TV. It concludes that disability c…
Austerity urbanism and Olympic counter-legacies: Gendering, defending and expanding the urban commons in East London
This article reflects on an occupation led by single mothers to contest the destruction of social housing in post-Olympics East London. In the process, it argues for a more gendered theorisation of the urban commons. Drawing on auto-ethnography, participant observation and qualitative interviews, the article argues three central points: First, that the occupation demonstrates the gendered nature of the urban commons and the leadership of women in…
The political economy of 'lap dancing: Contested Careers and Women's Work in the Stripping Industry
The visibility of striptease ('lap dancing') as a workplace and site of consumption has grown significantly over the past 15 years in the UK. This article draws on the first large scale study of stripping work in the UK, exploring original empirical data to examine why women continue to seek work in an industry that is profoundly precarious and often highly exploitative. It suggests that rather than either a 'career' or a 'dead end' job, many wom…
Devalued, deskilled and diversified: Explaining the proliferation of the strip industry in the UK
This paper looks beyond the debates that focus on the objectification of the female body to examine the question as to why strip clubs have proliferated and found a permanent place in the night-time economy in the UK. Using empirical qualitative and quantitative data from the largest study into the strip industry in the UK to date, we challenge the common assumption that 'demand' is responsible for the rise in erotic dance. Instead, we argue that…
Beautiful face, beautiful place: Relational geographies and gender in cosmetic surgery tourism websites
Cosmetic surgery tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism. This article explores the gendered construction of cosmetic surgery tourism in different geographical locations through an analysis of destination websites in Spain, the Czech Republic and Thailand. We examine the ways in which gender and other intersections of identity interact with notions of space, place and travel to construct particular locations and cosmetic surg…
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement
Sex workers in Argentina and beyond are making their histories visible through political action, often in the face of extreme and violent repression. Alongside two first waves of sex worker organizing, a third appears to be emerging from countries in the Global South, which has largely been neglected in academic commentaries. One such organization is Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina (AMMAR), the female sex workers' association of …
Wage Theft and the Struggle over the Working Day in Hospitality Work: A Typology of Unpaid Labour Time
Drawing on Marxist political economy, this article examines wage theft in hospitality work. Through a detailed, qualitative study of workers' experiences in London hotels, a novel typology is developed that reveals how managers extract additional unpaid labour time through wage theft. The article argues that both the legal definition and existing academic formulations of wage theft fail to encompass the full range of ways that employers extract u…
Hustling the Platform
An increasing amount of sex work in the United Kingdom is now digitally mediated, as workers and clients identify each other, agree prices and services, undertake security checks, and often make payment through various platforms and websites. Existing accounts of "digital sex work" have been both overly technological deterministic and optimistic, largely invisibilizing capital and the new forms of power and control it enables. The authors argue t…
Clear, rigorous and relevant: Publishing quantitative research articles in Work, employment and society
This article was published in the journal, Work, Employment and Society [Sage Publications / © The Authors]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0950017014526448
Introduction to the Special Issue: Everyday Self-Employment
A "partial renaissance" of self-employment in labor markets of the global North has attracted policy concern within national, supranational, and global arenas, yet sociological thought has been somewhat slower to respond to this phenomenon. In response, this special issue focuses on everyday self-employment among workers drawn from countries across the world. The collection of articles in this volume originated, in part, from a recent symposium t…
Uneven Divestment of the State: Social Reproduction and Sex Work in Neo-developmentalist Argentina
Sex work has been identified as an important dimension of the ‘survival circuits’ which have developed in the majority world in the context of neo-liberalisation, as a response to the deepening misery of the Global South. Yet while much research has explored the role of sex work in contexts of ‘neo-liberal’ regimes of capital accumulation, few have paid sustained attention to sex work in regimes which are not purely ‘neo-liberal’. Drawing on data…
Affective Organizing: Collectivizing Informal Sex Workers in an Intimate Union
As informal, self-employed workers, street sex workers are frequently understood as a "hard-to-organize" group. As they are not legally registered or protected, they are excluded from institutional arrangements for unionization and collective bargaining and from access to both labor and social protections, due to the lack of recognition of the work they undertake. Despite this, sex workers in Argentina have been successful in generating solidarit…
Students selling sex: Marketisation, higher education and consumption
Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy, yet the relationship appears consistent and permanent. This paper draws on findings from the largest study into the stripping industry in the United Kingdom to explore the relationships between students, sex work and consumption. To make sense of the relationship between students and participation in the sex industry, a deeper understanding of other …
Regulating Strip-Based Entertainment: Sexual Entertainment Venue Policy and the Ex/Inclusion of Dancers’ Perspectives and Needs
This article showcases a research, dissemination and impact study on the striptease industry that explores why key stakeholders (dancers) are excluded, and ways that inclusion in policy development is achievable. This form of erotic work has undergone increased attention from policy and regulatory officials in recent years with the introduction of a new licensing process as venues are categorised as Sexual Entertainment Venues. The article will d…
Equally Bad, Unevenly Distributed: Gender and the 'Black Box' of Student Employment
Students comprise approximately four per cent of the UK labour force and as much as 20% in some occupations and jobs. Yet students' work is typically seen as marginal, secondary both to their current learning and future working biographies. Public and media attention on 'earning while learning' (EwL) tends to focus on the negative impacts of paid work on education. Meanwhile students' actual working conditions, occupations and employment experien…
Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement
Sex workers in Argentina and beyond are making their histories visible through political action, often in the face of extreme and violent repression. Alongside two first waves of sex worker organizing, a third appears to be emerging from countries in the Global South, which has largely been neglected in academic commentaries. One such organization is Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina (AMMAR), the female sex workers' association of …
Devalued, deskilled and diversified: Explaining the proliferation of the strip industry in the UK
This paper looks beyond the debates that focus on the objectification of the female body to examine the question as to why strip clubs have proliferated and found a permanent place in the night-time economy in the UK. Using empirical qualitative and quantitative data from the largest study into the strip industry in the UK to date, we challenge the common assumption that 'demand' is responsible for the rise in erotic dance. Instead, we argue that…
Body/Sex/Work
Beautiful face, beautiful place: Relational geographies and gender in cosmetic surgery tourism websites
Cosmetic surgery tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism. This article explores the gendered construction of cosmetic surgery tourism in different geographical locations through an analysis of destination websites in Spain, the Czech Republic and Thailand. We examine the ways in which gender and other intersections of identity interact with notions of space, place and travel to construct particular locations and cosmetic surg…
Flexible Workers: Labour, Regulation and the Political Economy of the Stripping Industry
Striptease and other types of erotic dance increasingly make up a large, lucrative and visible part of the sex industries in the United Kingdom and 'lap dancing' has become the focus of many important contemporary debates about gender, work and sexuality. This new book from Teela Sanders and Kate Hardy moves away from the more traditional focus on the relations between dancers and customers, to a focus on regulation and the working conditions exp…
Flexible Workers: Labour, regulation and the political economy of the stripping industry
Regulating Strip-Based Entertainment: Sexual Entertainment Venue Policy and the Ex/Inclusion of Dancers’ Perspectives and Needs
This article showcases a research, dissemination and impact study on the striptease industry that explores why key stakeholders (dancers) are excluded, and ways that inclusion in policy development is achievable. This form of erotic work has undergone increased attention from policy and regulatory officials in recent years with the introduction of a new licensing process as venues are categorised as Sexual Entertainment Venues. The article will d…
Clear, rigorous and relevant: Publishing quantitative research articles in Work, employment and society
This article was published in the journal, Work, Employment and Society [Sage Publications / © The Authors]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0950017014526448
Taking apart the “Swedish Model”: Diversification in Global Sex Work Policy
In August 2015, Amnesty International voted to support the development of a policy based on the decriminalization of all aspects of prostitution as the mechanism for ensuring the human rights of se
Students selling sex: Marketisation, higher education and consumption
Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy, yet the relationship appears consistent and permanent. This paper draws on findings from the largest study into the stripping industry in the United Kingdom to explore the relationships between students, sex work and consumption. To make sense of the relationship between students and participation in the sex industry, a deeper understanding of other …
The political economy of 'lap dancing: Contested Careers and Women's Work in the Stripping Industry
The visibility of striptease ('lap dancing') as a workplace and site of consumption has grown significantly over the past 15 years in the UK. This article draws on the first large scale study of stripping work in the UK, exploring original empirical data to examine why women continue to seek work in an industry that is profoundly precarious and often highly exploitative. It suggests that rather than either a 'career' or a 'dead end' job, many wom…
New Sociologies of Sex Work
Sex work studies have seen an expansion in publications over the past decade, drawing together disciplines from across the social sciences, namely sociology, criminology and social policy. There has, however, been a tendency for research and writing to focus on the more obvious aspect of the sex industry - the visible elements of female street prostitution and those features which attract media attention such as the criminalised aspects of the se…
Uneven Divestment of the State: Social Reproduction and Sex Work in Neo-developmentalist Argentina
Sex work has been identified as an important dimension of the ‘survival circuits’ which have developed in the majority world in the context of neo-liberalisation, as a response to the deepening misery of the Global South. Yet while much research has explored the role of sex work in contexts of ‘neo-liberal’ regimes of capital accumulation, few have paid sustained attention to sex work in regimes which are not purely ‘neo-liberal’. Drawing on data…
On where to Begin: Sheila Rowbotham's Women, Resistance and Revolution and Anti-capitalist Feminism Today
Macho, mobile and resilient? How workers with impairments are doubly disabled in project-based film and television work
Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of production in UK film and television (UKF&TV) is argued to exclude on the basis of gender, race and class. This article considers a social category that has been overlooked in these debates: disability. It argues that workers with impairments are 'doubly disabled' - in both the labour markets and labour processes of UKF&TV. It concludes that disability c…
Austerity urbanism and Olympic counter-legacies: Gendering, defending and expanding the urban commons in East London
This article reflects on an occupation led by single mothers to contest the destruction of social housing in post-Olympics East London. In the process, it argues for a more gendered theorisation of the urban commons. Drawing on auto-ethnography, participant observation and qualitative interviews, the article argues three central points: First, that the occupation demonstrates the gendered nature of the urban commons and the leadership of women in…
In, Against and Beyond Precarity: Work in Insecure Times
In this Foreword to the special issue 'In, Against and Beyond Precarity' the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effectiveness, the editors suggest instead a focus on precarization as a process, drawing from perspectives t…
Affective Organizing: Collectivizing Informal Sex Workers in an Intimate Union
As informal, self-employed workers, street sex workers are frequently understood as a "hard-to-organize" group. As they are not legally registered or protected, they are excluded from institutional arrangements for unionization and collective bargaining and from access to both labor and social protections, due to the lack of recognition of the work they undertake. Despite this, sex workers in Argentina have been successful in generating solidarit…
Introduction to the Special Issue: Everyday Self-Employment
A "partial renaissance" of self-employment in labor markets of the global North has attracted policy concern within national, supranational, and global arenas, yet sociological thought has been somewhat slower to respond to this phenomenon. In response, this special issue focuses on everyday self-employment among workers drawn from countries across the world. The collection of articles in this volume originated, in part, from a recent symposium t…
Surplus to the city: Austerity urbanism, displacement and 'letting die
Urban scholars have traditionally associated displacement in cities of the global North with gentrification, generally understood as a class-based process of neighbourhood change. This article expands this scalar focus and adopts the larger scale of the local authority district (in this case the London borough) as its epistemological starting point to study the displacement of homeless people by the local state. Participatory action research was …
Hustling the Platform
An increasing amount of sex work in the United Kingdom is now digitally mediated, as workers and clients identify each other, agree prices and services, undertake security checks, and often make payment through various platforms and websites. Existing accounts of "digital sex work" have been both overly technological deterministic and optimistic, largely invisibilizing capital and the new forms of power and control it enables. The authors argue t…
Wage Theft and the Struggle over the Working Day in Hospitality Work: A Typology of Unpaid Labour Time
Drawing on Marxist political economy, this article examines wage theft in hospitality work. Through a detailed, qualitative study of workers' experiences in London hotels, a novel typology is developed that reveals how managers extract additional unpaid labour time through wage theft. The article argues that both the legal definition and existing academic formulations of wage theft fail to encompass the full range of ways that employers extract u…
Equally Bad, Unevenly Distributed: Gender and the 'Black Box' of Student Employment
Students comprise approximately four per cent of the UK labour force and as much as 20% in some occupations and jobs. Yet students' work is typically seen as marginal, secondary both to their current learning and future working biographies. Public and media attention on 'earning while learning' (EwL) tends to focus on the negative impacts of paid work on education. Meanwhile students' actual working conditions, occupations and employment experien…
Locating online labour: The salience of the national scale in remote digital work
Digital work that takes place exclusively online is often presented as spatially unbound, with workers able to work flexibly whenever and wherever they wish to do so, resulting - it is claimed - in the emergence of a 'planetary labour market' for online labour. Recent analyses have shown that fully remote work still clusters in geographical concentrations and is unevenly distributed across the globe. Drawing on an original data set of in-depth in…
Student workers as proto-workers: ‘Experience’, quitting and the production of consent
Work undertaken by students is widespread, but largely overlooked, with this employment dismissed as a precursor to ‘real work’. The designation of student work as not real, ‘proto-work’, is central to the production of consent. Drawing on original analysis of focus group interviews with 83 students undertaking paid work and Burawoy’s text, Manufacturing Consent , the article identifies two ways in which hegemonic legitimation of and consent to e…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Economics (11 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Sex work and related issues (11 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Work (physics (10 works)