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This paper argues that sociologists interested in service work in consumer culture should pay attention to customers' understandings and accounts of their experience and participation in service encounters. It takes the market for sex as a case study and counters the neglect of customers within the study of service work by analysing customer service reviews of paid-for sex published on a UK website, Punternet. It argues that male customers, familiar with the norms of consumer culture, assess the erotic, aesthetic and emotional labours performed by female workers to make judgements of service quality which suggests that the feminised 'good worker' is defined as professional when they disguise the market transaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most towns and cities in the UK and USA possess a number of venues offering sexually orientated entertainment in the form of exotic dance, striptease or lap dancing. Traditionally subject to moral and legal censure, the majority of these sex-related businesses have tended to be situated in marginal urban spaces. As such, their increasing visibility in more mainstream spaces of urban nightlife raises important questions about the sexual and gender geographies that characterize the contemporary city. In this paper we accordingly locate the phenomena of adult entertainment at the convergence of geographic debates concerning the evening economy, urban gentrification and the gendered consumption of urban space. We conclude that these sites are worthy of investigation not only in and of themselves, but also because their shifting location reveals much about the forms of heterosexuality and homosociality normalized in the contemporary city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on research in the UK and the Netherlands, this article considers the respective legislative backgrounds, recent policy changes and their implication for sex workers in off-street environments. It considers the impact of different regulatory models on the employment rights, safety and welfare of sex workers and explores how working conditions in different indoor settings might be improved through legal and policy changes. We argue that although decriminalization of sex work is a precondition to secure the labour and human rights of sex workers, the involvement of sex workers in policy development and facilitation of different modes of working are necessary to improve their working conditions and autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2006 Coordinated Prostitution Strategy set out the aim of the then New Labour government to eradicate sex work from the streets of England and Wales. Towards achieving this Utopia, localized consultation with the community was demanded to ascertain community need to facilitate the development of evidence-based policies that would reside within existing local community safety frameworks. This article draws on an empirical study that considered “community perspectives” of street sex work in the Capital of Wales, Cardiff, in 2010. Adopting a mixed methodology, the study engaged with community members most affected by street sex work to develop realistic evidence-based policy. Our findings deconstruct central perceptions regarding the “inevitability” of sex work and offer potential solutions from the community perspective. This raises questions about how community opinion is incorporated within local policy-making processes, where that opinion differs substantially from central policy. We argue that community consultation must be ethical in the sense that consultation findings must be capable of having some impact on policy decision making/development. In conclusion, we urge local partnerships and central governments to listen to the views from the “shop floor” and consider carefully the strategies suggested by communities—however bold they might be. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social landlords in the United Kingdom are embedded in governance regimes that regulate citizens' conduct, including addressing antisocial behaviour. This article seeks to contribute to the literature on the geography of regulating conduct through examining the spatial dimensions of social landlords' attempts to influence behaviour, and to map the range of technologies and measures utilized by social landlords on to particular urban spaces. Two spaces are identified: the property and its vicinity, and the wider neighbourhood. The article argues that social landlords have been engaging in increasingly intensive regulation of the private and domestic arena of the home as well as expanding their role in the regulation of spaces and populations within and beyond residential neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social institution of prostitution or sex work has a long and varied history in the West, during almost all of which women playing their trade within it have been stigmatized. After a brief excursus on contemporary sex work and the concept of stigma itself, this article applies the author's jigsaw model to throw light on the causal role of social structures in shaping sex work stigma, in relation to women migrants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics working as escorts in central London, typically on a short-term opportunistic basis. Interviews with a small snowball sample of a dozen women inform and illustrate the analysis. The differential causal effects of relations of class, command, gender and ethnicity, as well as those of stigma, are considered. It is argued that stigma relations in a given context or figuration cannot be grasped in isolation, but are always part of a nexus of social structures of varying causal importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has four core aims. First, to identify the processes of change women undertake to leave sex work through a typology of transitions. The typology suggests four dominant ways out of sex work as reactionary, gradual planning, natural progression, and "yo-yoing." Second, the article argues against the low self-control theory by asserting that sex workers engage in specific deviant "careers" rather than stable deviant roles and, therefore, exit to "complete conformist" once sex work is ceased. Third, it rejects Mansson and Hedin's claim that the "emotional commitment" of individual women is the key factor to leaving but instead argues that structural, political, cultural and legal factors as well as cognitive transformations and agency are key determinants in trapping women in the industry. Fourth, the article challenges the U.K. policy context that reinforces "exiting" through compulsory rehabilitation and the criminalization of sex work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]