This chapter explores the lives of ordinary men and women in Song China – the majority whose experiences were far less documented than those of the elite. What was daily life like for them? What brought them happiness, and what were their fears? Drawing on the remarkably rich materials from the Yijian zhi 夷堅志 (Record of the Listener), this chapter weaves together the life stories of ordinary people in Song China by examining their livelihoods, spiritual world, and emotional trauma. Through these narratives, it reveals how grand historical forces – commercialization, religious integration, and the brutality of war – shaped the everyday experiences of Song China’s non-elite population.

Artists might start out in one area or job and end up finding their best home in a slightly adjacent area. It might take moments or decades to land in the right spot, but the skills and lessons initially learned can still pay off in a related area. Even circuitous or winding pathways can take an artist where they need to go.

Chapter 7 turns to work in crafts and construction, an area of the economy that displayed much sharper distinctions between men’s and women’s work. It explores the role of apprenticeship in creating these gendered patterns before looking at one male-dominated work area, building and construction, and two in which women were often employed, textile and clothing production. Despite the absence of guilds in the great majority of localities providing evidence, the requirement of apprenticeship in many craft occupations effectively excluded women from those areas of work. Yet women’s skilled work in some areas of textile and clothing production, alongside the contributions of non-craftsmen in construction, suggest that specialisation through apprenticeship was just as much about status and prestige, as it was about skill acquisition.

Chapter 2 focuses on types of workers. It examines how work varied by age and marital status, showing that while men’s work remained fairly stable across the lifecycle, women’s work varied significantly. Evidence of working ‘for another’, outside the family household, is analysed in relation to debates about paid work. Evidence of occupations and status indicators are compared with work tasks to address the debates about by-employment and explore the work of labourers and servants. Although women typically lacked such descriptors, some analysis of how wives’ activities varied according to their husband’s occupations is possible.

The subjected status of the coloni equalled them to persons alieni iuris, as slaves were too, but they were still free. It made marriages with those not in this way subjected with regard to the transmission of status ‘unequal’. It implies that children follow the status of the mother. This ‘unequal marriage’ and its consequence was introduced by earlier laws. To prevent the children out of marriages of a colonus with a not subjected woman being not subjected, the senatusconsultum Claudianum was applied. That made children follow the status of the father. The abolition of the senatusconsultum led Justinian to introduce the faculty of estate owners to recall coloni from such marriages in order to prevent the loss of labour force. CJ 11.48.19 established that every colonus after thirty years of service was no longer alieni iuris and thus subjected to their estate owner, but free from his control over him and his property. Such coloni are called ‘free’ coloni (coloni liberi). They remained tied to the estate and had to render services and to pay poll tax, but could now fulfill public functions as no longer being of subjected status.

Chapter 4 commences a survey of the Court of Requests’ litigants. Drawing data out of the entire Court archive, it charts the origins of cases and clients in counties across English-governed territories and the status identifiers ascribed to both petitioners and defendants. The demography of this Court is characterised by considerable geographical and social breadth; this was a truly ‘national’ tribunal, accessible to everyone from poor widows and humble craftsmen to civic officials and the landed classes. The chapter puts these findings into dialogue with the scholarship on the relative litigiousness of English regions and on wealth distribution in early modernity. Finally, the chapter tests the claim that Requests was the ‘poor man’s court’, asking whether we can identify truly impoverished individuals among the standard social categorisations appearing in court records. It argues that royal justice could serve litigants of more humble status, though this observation will be qualified in following chapters.

Chapter 7 describes the generative, or bottom-up, forces that were part of urban life. These are organized in terms of households, crafts and occupations, neighborhoods, and quality of life.

Chapter 8 addresses the question of how and to what extent translation practices have become professions. In sociology, a profession is understood as an occupation that has been formally established, with boundaries determined by a canonized body of knowledge and formulated ethics, methods and technologies and recognition and authority given by the state. In contrast, translation occupations mostly form a heteronomous field that lacks formalized standards and controls. The chapter argues that this reflects a tension between professionalization as defined in sociology and ‘the rules of art’ or ‘the intellectual field’ as described by Bourdieu. In the latter, norms and value-scales depend on practitioners’ ethos and images rather than on institutional parameters.

Chapter 4 recovers what girls in apprenticeships learned, the range of trades they practiced and how they were taught. Treating apprenticeship as a training system, operating in parallel to that of boys, this chapter uses the mass of information in legal disputes to reconstruct tasks like starching, binding petticoats, using patterns and making lace; keeping shop; and the wider world of training in housewifery, literacy and working in schools. Gentry apprentices were particularly concerned with learning the right level of skills and avoiding ‘drudgery’, aiming at running their own shops and pressing for independence, while apprentices through the rest of the social spectrum followed a highly differentiated set of occupations making textiles and clothes, very few of which were entirely sex-specific. Training involved watching and copying, but also included a keen regulation of appearance and the risk of physical correction.

This chapter considers how facets of occupations and professions manifest in routine dynamics. Whilst the salience of occupations and professions on routines has been recognized in extant research on routine dynamics, it remains largely scattered. To illuminate the salience of occupations and professions in the literature on routine dynamics, which is multifaceted, we focus on three prominent research themes: skilful accomplishment (i.e., how actors perform tasks), interdependence (i.e., how actors collaborate to accomplish tasks) and truces (i.e., how actors compete to make exclusive claims to perform certain activities). We turn to the literature on professions and occupations to draw out theoretical and empirical intersections with research advocating routine dynamics. The analytical framework, comprised of a becoming lens, a doing lens and a relating lens corresponds with and provides the basis to advance research themes within routine dynamics. We suggest a stronger emphasis on occupations and professions holds promise for deepening knowledge about routine dynamics, which we articulate by proposing several avenues for future research, including the expansion of the concept of routines and a distinction between organizational and professional routines.

This chapter studies working life at Athens, sketching the range of occupations in the Athenian economy, from farming in the countryside to artisans, vendors, and purveyors of services in the city.

This chapter aims to establish a lower limit to the possible extent of horizontal specialization in the economy of classical Athens; in other words, the minimum plausible number of specialized jobs to do with production, exchange, and services. This exercise shows that even with a mindset sceptical to the idea of specialization, there cannot realistically have been fewer than 162 specialized full-time occupations in classical Attica. This demonstrates the complexity and dynamism of the classical Athenian economy.

The prosperous harbour town of Ostia in the second and third centuries AD is a good example for demonstrating the areas of daily life and economic activities, and skilled individuals and professionals. One can expect a very distinctive society, with lots of merchandising activities to fulfil the needs and requirements of the people who lived and worked in the city. Inscriptions, reliefs and mosaics inform us about many occupations and skilled professions, as well as guilds and club houses in Ostia. The aim of the contribution is to discuss evidences of monuments and written sources on skilled professionalism in Ostia exemplarily. In general, the individuals represented themselves in an appropriate manner and in their professional environment.

The job structure has become more polarized in recent decades in the United States. Automation and related computerized technologies replaced many jobs which are characterized by well-defined, routine activities that do not require complex analytical skills. Using recent data for the labor force, we find that job polarization increased through about 2011. This overall trend was the outcome of two contrary patterns including occupational downgrading among men and occupational upgrading among women. However, the perception of job polarization may be greater than its actuality because the distribution of household income has become more unequal than the occupational structure due to rising assortative mating. Job polarization seems to have tapered off since 2011 whereas household income inequality has continued to increase. The trend towards job polarization ironically occurred while the educational distribution of workers was becoming less polarized.