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Research on the coping behaviour of micro‐businesses during the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak of 2001 in the UK revealed the importance of households to micro‐businesses. However it was not just family members who helped businesses to cope with the crisis. Non‐family members of households also took part in activities to help businesses survive declines in turnover. Whilst business families have received considerable attention in research that examines how small firms are socially embedded and the consequences of this for business growth and decision making, this paper explores business households and how these enabled small firms to cope with the FMD outbreak. The paper develops the concept of the business household, explaining it from three (connected) perspectives: work, consumption and people. It is influenced by an institutional approach to the household, which relates the organisation of tasks inside the household to political and economic processes outside it, and is based on qualitative and quantitative data collected from both farming and non‐farming businesses in the north of England in 2001/2.

Spatial multiculture: changing formations of urban diversity and the difference a place makes -- The increasingly ordinary and increasingly complex nature of ethnic diversity and everyday social life: conviviality, community and why the micro matters -- Researching difference: differentiated populations, lives and places -- Multiculture and public parks: social practice and attachment in urban green space -- Semi-public space - corporate cafés, multiculture and everyday social life -- Conviviality and the social relations of social leisure organizations in diverse urban places -- Educational spaces, identities and young people's management of urban multiculture -- Multiculture and policy imaginations : engagements with the capacities of the informal social world -- Conclusions: precarious multiculture

This article contributes to understandings of the conviviality which has dominated recent sociological approaches to urban multiculture. The article argues for conviviality's conceptual extension by reference to recent rethinking of community as a profound sociality of 'being with' and a culture of urban practice. The article draws from a qualitative dataset examining sustained encounters of cultural difference and the relationships within social leisure organizations in three different English urban geographies. The article explores how the elective coming together of often ethnically diverse others, over time, in places, to do leisure 'things' meant these organizations could work as generative spaces of social interaction and shared practice through and in contexts of urban difference. The article concludes that putting conviviality as 'connective interdependencies' into dialogue with community as 'being in common' develops their sociological and explanatory power and counters the reductions and limitations that are associated with both concepts.

In social research some places and populations are disproportionately targeted by researchers. While relatively little work exists on the concept of over-research those accounts that do exist tend to focus on participant-based research relationships and not place-based research relationships. Using interdisciplinary approaches and fieldwork experiences from a recently completed qualitative study of urban multiculture in England we develop the over-research debates in three key ways. First, the notion of 'over-research' carries negative connotations and we reflect on these as well as the possibility of more nuanced readings of research encounters. Second, we develop a more relational analysis, in which place – the London Borough of Hackney – is understood to be an animating force in the research process. Third, we argue that our experiences of the research provide evidence that many of the participants in the project were adept and confident in their engagements with the research process. In this way, the article suggests, disproportionate research attention may foster not research fatigue but a more knowing and co-productive research relationship.

Since 2001, as the social and spatial compositions of multiculture and migration have become more complicated and diverse, geography has moved back to the centre of policy, political, and academic arguments about cultural difference and ethnic diversity in England. This spatial turn is most obvious in preoccupations with notions of increasing ethnic segregation, but it is also apparent in discussions of the possibility of everyday multicultural exchanges in relationally understood places. Responding to the work of others on these questions and in these places, and informed by data from research exploring Ghanaian and Somali migrant settlement in Milton Keynes, we review some of the quantitative and qualitative evidence being drawn on in academic, policy, and political debates about contemporary multiculture. We problematise the dominance of the concept of segregation in these debates and examine the value of the concept of conviviality for understanding the ways in which multiculture is lived.

This paper aims to discover how, with the decline and ending of the deep coal mining industry in many parts of the UK its legacy is being re-evaluated by those involved in various aspects of economic and social regeneration. It opens by exploring the way coal mine workers and their communities have been seen within popular and academic accounts, and in particular the way this group has been subject to ideal typification and stereo-typing. The main body of the paper examines the way this legacy is still subject to such interpretation, and that further, the specificity of the coal industry is commodified in a variety of ways. We point out the contradictory nature of this process and argue that it is inevitably damaging to a complex analysis of the deep problems facing former coalfield areas.

This paper engages with an emergent literature on multiculture and concepts such as conviviality and negotiation to explore how increasingly ethnically diverse population routinely share and mix in urban places and social spaces. As part of a wider ESRC funded, two-year qualitative study of changing social life and everyday multiculture in different geographical areas of contemporary England, this paper draws on participant observation data from three branches of franchised leisure and consumption cafe spaces. We pay particular attention to the ways these spaces work as settings of encounter and shared presence between groups often envisaged as separated by ethnic difference. Our findings suggest that corporate spaces which are more often dismissed as commercial, globalized spaces of soulless homogeneity can be locally inflected spaces whose cultural blandness may generate confident familiarity, ethnic mixity, mundane co-presence and inattentive forms of conviviality.