Let’s Talk: Face-to-Face Interaction Now
Jonathan Reades, Martin Crookston · Bristol University Press eBooks · 2021
Up, and with Sir W. Batten to White-hall to the Lords of the Admiralty and there did our business betimes. Thence to Sir Ph. Warwicke about Navy business – and my Lord Ashly; and afterward to my Lord Chancellor, who is very well pleased with me and my carrying his business. And so to the Change, where mighty busy; and so home to dinner, where Mr. Creed and Moore; and after dinner I to my Lord Treasurers, to Sir Ph. Warwicke there, and then to Whitehall to the Duke of Albimarle about Tanger; and then homeward to the Coffee-House to hear news … Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, entry for 14 November 16641 So: what do they DO? We wanted to talk to people about what they talk about when their face-to-face contacts happen, and about how the ‘people ideas’ in Chapter 5 play out in practice: real people talking about real jobs. Over two years, and in a variety of locations across Central and Inner London, we met with some forty individuals from a wide range of industries2: an agent at the Bank of England; a producer for Love Island; an account manager at OpenTable; the London-based assistant of a world-famous artist; someone from Google; the founder of a specialist catering start-up; partners in law firms; someone from Lloyd’s Insurers; someone from an ad agency…. We were not aiming to deliver a statistically robust sample of the city’s workforce, but to dip into the enormous range of roles and wide variety of dynamic and knowledge-intensive sectors of the urban economy.