In our place-based approach, communities play an important part in analysing transforming working lives. In our project, we conceptualise community on three levels.

• Community as empowerment: The Scottish Government emphasises the importance of communities though the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. This act aims at empowering community bodies by means of ownership or control of land and buildings. One important aspect here is the strengthening of voices in decisions about public services. Though not specifically focussing on workplaces per se, the details of the act weave in the theme of community in decision making and planning decisions.
• Community as service: Many not-for-profit organisations and advice centres aim at increasing employability through an offer of support services. Voluntary work is a pillar of the British welfare state, and after years of austerity often filling the gaps the erosion of welfare services left. They also reflect the drift towards self-activation and self-responsibility. Nevertheless, given these services operate in specific spatial environments, they also produce and reproduce communities empowering voice and participation, or with the potential as ‘meso-level’ community resources to improve, for example, population health.
• Community as resource: There is evidence that trade unions play an important role for workers to access collective resources to improve their wellbeing. There is also evidence that work collectives themselves impact positively on workers’ wellbeing.