Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the role of users' daily life as cultural and contextual influences in the design of sustainable workplaces. Using the example of a mosque designed into a workplace building in Oman, we show the marginalization of such knowledge in current approaches to design for sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

By considering the characteristic of current design approaches for social sustainability in the workplace, we explore the contradictions between these approaches' intentions and users' actual practices. This study is based on a recognized problem that design intention is often wrongly assumed to be an accurate prediction of a future user action, leading to lower-than-expected building performance when measured quantitatively through Post Occupancy Evaluation surveys.

Our contention is that an inadequate understanding of the structure of users' daily practices has resulted in this design problem. Empirical data comes from an ethnographic case study of an office building in Oman, including observations, shadowing, interviews, and documentary analysis. In particular, we focus on the example of the mosque's design, set a short walk from the building, and the unintended consequences this revealed. User engagement design consultations are shown to be superficial, and the resulting impressive prayer building, with its air-conditioned connecting tunnel, soon becomes replaced by prayer rooms in the main building itself.

Focusing on those who tend to be ignored in traditional design processes (such as cleaners) uncovered some surprising vignettes. One of these is used as the basis for this paper, demonstrating the role of cultural and contextual influence in the constitution of daily activities of users, which tend to be overlooked by current design approaches. This research goes beyond the traditions of POE to offer new insights into the design for social sustainability that contribute to the limited knowledge of sustainable workplace design and use within a Middle Eastern context.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents outcomes from an ethnography of workplace consultants undertaken in London before and during the Coronavirus pandemic. It will reflect on the careful branding of ‘flexibility’ and ‘freedom’ in the promotion of open-plan, and how Covid-19 may disrupt this march towards ‘sharing’.

Paper long abstract:

This paper stems from an 18-month ethnography undertaken amongst ‘workplace designers’ and ‘workplace consultants’ within one of the world’s largest architecture firms. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic the often derided open-plan office found itself being carefully rebranded as a space of caring and opportunity, with ‘sharing’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘freedom’ being pushed as positives in a world of increasing density.

With the Covid-19 pandemic however arguments for sharing space and facilities at work became suddenly unconvincing. Sharing became toxic. The office went from increasingly dense to suddenly empty, and possibly unnecessary.

I will present evidence from fieldwork interlocutors who have spent decades in the workplace industry, some of whom have lost their jobs post-covid, examining how professionals in this field think about the workers they design for, real or idealised, and how a tight community of workplace professionals create the physical environments which many of us did, until recently at least, spend huge amounts of our waking hours working.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores critical shifts in post-COVID19 work by reimagining the workplace as an ecology. This paradigm switch facilitates closer attention to how nascent working practices cross the borders of working organisms, traversing their bodies and consciousness, and resulting in ill health.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on research into the effects of post-pandemic neoliberal working practices on women's chronic inflammatory disorders in England. Following on from Tim Ingold's phenomenological rendering of work as a 'taskscape' (1995), I reimagine workplaces as living ecosystems interacting with porous organisms, rather than as sites of physical alienation and social disembeddedness. Instead, I posit workers are always necessarily dwelling in the site of their labour, inhabiting and imbibing working milieus as with any other 'natural' environment. In addition, current labour processes which are materially unbounded from specific location (office / factory / university) require novel forms of both bodily and conscious engagement from workers. These unbounded spaces demand intracorporeal negotiation with new forms of surveillance, monitoring, and social life. Among such entanglements, workers notions of self-governance and productivity are often stretched, with potentially damaging repercussions for their physiology and health. Following Bachelard's 'poetics of space' (1958) in which he posits home as both a physical entity and state of mind, I suggest current workers carry around an 'inner workplace' or internalised ethic of productivity which guides their daily activity. This delocalised drive pushes them to meet often unrealistic demands, perform consistent reviews, and meet centrally managed targets. What are the repercussions for workers in an already demanding neoliberal economy? Are they felt differently across genders, and if so, why? By reframing the contemporary workplace-as-an-ecology, I argue, we can pay closer attention to the ways porous bodies and minds take in, react, and internalise, nascent labour practices.

Paper short abstract:

A digital ethnography of workplace wellbeing at a London tech startup during the COVID-19 pandemic. It finds that workers understand wellbeing through the notion of productivity, which is actively cultivated through the successful management of the boundaries between work and nonwork social roles.

Paper long abstract:

During the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdown, the spatial and social structure of work was radically reconfigured by the switch to work-from-home policies and technologically-mediated work. Utilizing this point of transformation to working practices as a site to generate rich insights into the relationship between work and wellbeing, I examine how workers in a London tech startup cultivated a sense of wellbeing whilst working from home.

I found that workers associated wellbeing at work with the presence (or lack) of a balanced and self-determined work-life rhythm (Rapport 2008), understood via the language of productivity and fatigue. Using data collected through digital ethnographic methods during the COVID-19 pandemic, I explore how workers actively managed the boundaries between their work and non-work identities in temporal, spatial, and social ways (Ollier-Malaterre, Jacobs, and Rothbard 2019). In the absence of previously used boundary management techniques, such as the daily commute, and in the presence of increased digitally-mediated communication and restricted movement, workers utilized technology and space in novel ways to cultivate a sense of holistic balance. I suggest that the workers’ experience and perception of wellbeing speaks to broader socioeconomic trends that idealize flexibility in workers and corporations. However, depending on the social position of the worker, this flexibility could be experienced either as freedom, or as precarity.

This research highlights the analytical value of wellbeing for anthropology. In understanding socially-defined states of wellbeing, we gain an insight into the orientation behind everyday action, and the social, economic, and political contexts that frame it.

Paper short abstract:

This paper illustrates how Indian transwomen workers often advocate for workplace anti-discrimination policies by appealing to the power of business to change lives with reference to their own entrepreneurial practice of somatic transformation and arrival.

Paper long abstract:

To the extent that LGBTQ subjects are recognized in corporate organizational anti-discrimination and inclusion initiatives is often understood in queer theory as necessarily normative: only those suitable to corporate interests gain access to the assumed power and prestige that accompanies the interpellation of social others. In this paper, I take a different approach by suggesting instead that gender and sexual difference is in fact demanded – rather than sacrificed or suppressed – in processes of corporate inclusion. To the extent that queer theory has largely (and rightly) fixed critique on those excluded from institutional accommodations of difference, in this article I argue that gender and sexual difference is perpetually staged as a necessary obstacle by which corporate actors can articulate the need for their expertise to transform difference into something valuable to organizations. By placing queer theory’s focus on normativity into dialogue with anthropological theories of value, I use ethnography to illustrate that the inclusion of LGBTQ folks in novel inclusion exercises in corporate India in fact produces gender and sexual alterity, if only to be targeted for enculturation and exclusion.

To illustrate this, I draw from ethnography conducted in Bengaluru in 2018-19, where I observed transwomen entrepreneurs argue for the importance of their inclusion in corporate workplaces by referencing their own transformation from an urban underclass to a middle-class, and somatically transformed, worker-consumer. I argue for the wider significance in the transformation of urban citizen in neoliberal India, in which workplace protections become contingent on entrepreneurial transformations.

Paper short abstract:

I focus on life stories of municipal waste disposal workers – a precarious field of employment, using ethnographic research, examining urban spaces to uncover the relationship between waste and environment, labor relations and sustainability, through intersectional analysis.

Paper long abstract:

Spaces of waste disposal and dynamics of waste workers in Israel, are under-researched from the point of view of precarity and environment. This research focuses on life stories of municipal waste disposal workers and includes those involved in the chain of waste collection: truck drivers, bin preparers, and disposal workers. Some 8,000 workers are presently employed in waste disposal in Israel (Central Bureau Statistics, 2019). Similar to other sites around the world, this is a precarious field of employment (Housman, 1997; Rogers, 2000; Hudson, 2001; Hamilton et al., 2019), which is presently undergoing accelerated processes of privatization and is characterized by indirect employment (Benjamin, 2015). Literature dealing with the sociology of labor relations has included only a limited amount of inquiry into the perspectives of such employees. The waste collection process is documented using ethnographic research, examining urban spaces to uncover the relationship between waste and environment, labor relations and sustainability. The ethnographic documentation of waste disposal workers is from a perspective of intersectionality, which links gender, class, and ethnicity, as well as nationality and religion.

Therefore, the paper will focus on an analysis of low-status laborers through the prism of their over-lapping marginality, as I jointly discuss precarity through manhood, status, and other identity categories, through labor relations. I will offer an ethnographic analysis while demonstrating the ways in which working conditions deepen the marginalization of waste workers, arguing that the contemporaneous shift in the Israeli context is unique and complex due to the country's special ethno-national character, that already exist due to the neoliberal precarity reality and the state of the environment.

Paper short abstract:

Fair-trade is an increasingly prominent certification meant to “give farmers a better deal,” making their work, livelihoods, and the workplace of the farm more sustainable. This paper uses ethnographic data to examine the social effects of fair-trade production and the future of this model for the work of farming.

Paper long abstract:

Fair-trade certification has emerged as a mechanism meant to mitigate rising inequalities, support smallholder farmers within global supply chains, and “give farmers a better deal.” Aligned with “trade not aid” models, fair-trade certification is a global trade intervention aiming to make the workplace of the smallholder farm more sustainable. Given the growth of the fair-trade sector globally, it is perhaps surprising that fair-trade organisations admit that most of their cocoa farmers in West Africa make well below a living wage. Specifically, research has shown that fair-trade does not have a significant impact on the livelihoods and welfare of cocoa farmers in Ghana. Despite this research, the fact that fair-trade cocoa is a growing sector and produced by a hundred thousand smallholder farmers in Ghana suggests that participation in fair-trade cooperatives holds meaning for farmers’ everyday lives. This paper draws on ethnographic research to explore the social impacts of fair-trade and in what ways it does, and does not, provide a fairer workplace for farmers and their families. Moreover, younger generations and the children of smallholder cocoa farmers generally choose to leave the farm to seek opportunities in urban settings. This research also offers insights into the future and sustainability of fair-trade models of production if they are unable to attract younger generations to farming as a desirable work and livelihood. Examining the potential of fair-trade, this paper offers insights into the allure, contestations, and potential of interventions that seek to support and protect farmers and the work of farming within global agriculture trade systems.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the new imaginaries derived from precarious working conditions in post-pandemic Spain. After assessing some of the emotional and relational impacts of precariousness, the expectations, values and expectations regarding solidarity and cohesion in an increasingly individualistic and fragmented society are analyzed.

Paper long abstract:

Often, the Spanish Mediterranean culture has been perceived as one characterized by the preeminence of family and community ties, group solidarity, and an active and dynamic social life that offers multiple types of support (material, emotional, and informational). However, this perception is far from the current reality.

The Spanish labor market presents 40% of precarious jobs, labor competition has increased greatly, manual jobs are becoming highly colonized by tracking and control technologies (algorithms, platforms, GPS, etc.) and the consumption of anxiolytics has skyrocketed among the most precarious population. As other authors have pointed out (Sennet, 2006; Allison, 2013; Butler, 2004), this precariousness transcends the workplace and penetrates into people's daily lives, giving rise to a kind of "precarious society" where social and affective ties become ephemeral and fragmented. After the pandemic, and in these conditions, the need for spaces for sociability, social cohesion and solidarity manifests itself as a social imperative to alleviate the increase in loneliness, depression, personal dissatisfaction and the lack of vital goals.

We present some preliminary results (derived from 40 in-depth interviews) of an ongoing investigation into precariousness and its relational and emotional impact in post-pandemic Spanish society. However, beyond influencing personal tragedy and material precariousness, we want to insist on the emergence of new forms of behavior, values, arrangements and social expectations. What is the narrative of the people who suffer from it? Where and how do they get the strength to carry on? What new alternatives for sociability and solidarity can we imagine in this highly fragmented and precarious reality?

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with changes in the work of legal professionals with the insertion of automation and artificial intelligence in judicial proceedings in Brazil. The ethnography involves different discussions about these technologies, which are still in implementation and regulation in the country.

Paper long abstract:

The present work is a constitutive part of an ethnography on the use of automation and artificial intelligence in legal proceedings in Brazil. My interest in the research came precisely from my position as a judicial technician in a Court of Justice (Court of Justice of the State of Paraná), where I was able to follow the rumors of lawyers and co-workers regarding the use of robots and an alleged threat of their jobs for the use of machines in the justice system. From this suggestion, I started to follow debates involving these technologies. In this presentation, I try to focus on these debates, which took place online during the pandemic, with the subsequent documents research and interviews at the Court of Justice of the State of São Paulo, the institution with the most significant number of lawsuits in Brazil and where these technologies are gradually being implemented.

During this research, questions arise, such as the division of tasks that may or may not be performed by a robot, with the categorization between mechanical or intellectual; the acceptance by public servants of the use of technology; the revision or laborious human correction of automated activities; and even the form of a digital lawsuit still arranged as a paper document. The analysis also shows how forms of organization and language typical of the corporate world have become part of the routines of professionals in public service.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores embodied economic activities of bedroom traders as digitized labour through ethnographic research. It aims to create anthropological knowledges around the emerging imaginaries of speculative work and its impact on the changing nature of the workplace.

Paper long abstract:

Web3.0 and smartphone-access blur boundaries between domains of work and leisure, going beyond geographic or institutional limits to where and how work can be performed. Post-workerist theories (immaterial or relational labour) can be applied to that. However, certain forms of labour have become unbounded more than others, to the point where it becomes difficult to recognize them as such– one of these is retail investment via FinTech. How can investigating this as embodied activity contribute to trace changing working conditions?

I argue it is necessary to reconceptualize this economic activity as speculative labour (Bear 2020) to attend to a shift in ideologies of work that isolates workers from the social context of their economic activity. To showcase this, I will situate retail investing among labour theories, followed by an ethnographic outline of working conditions of five bedroom traders I do collaborative research with.

In differentiation from traditional banking roles, retail investors embody traders, wealth managers and analysts at once, while also bearing all financial risk in completely unregulated work environments without salary. Consequences can be mental (depression, gambling) and physical (insomnia, posture issues) unwellness. Moreover, well-being as multidimensional extends beyond individual to communal dynamics: Neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility for wealth management isolates and compounds inequalities around material conditions and financial, digital literacies. Examining bedroom trader’s embodied work experience reveals how speculative technologies shift imaginaries of work and what alternative ideas of investing work and workplaces emerge.

Paper short abstract:

The technological transition accelerated by the pandemic led to changes in territorial health services, especially in general practitioners’ work. Through an ethnographic study, I aim to highlight the innovative care practices they are experiencing using smartphones with their patients.

Paper long abstract:

Facing the impact of Covid-19, Italy’s healthcare services have massively accelerated the introduction of digital practices during the pandemic. Within a fragmented healthcare system driven by the health emergencies, as well as an increasingly aging population, the territorial service sector has greatly experienced the forced acceleration of digitalisation. Such a transformation attracted interests of private and non-private actors, transforming the relationships at play in territorial services without a clear guidance. Today, this technological transition has led to an area of concern in relation to the work of general practitioners (GPs), highlighting the significance of building and maintaining trust relationships between GPs, patients, and the healthcare system in the digitalised context In this uncertain scenario, GPs as well as patients are nowadays forced to deal with new technologies, such as smartphones. In this paper, through the lens of medical anthropology and Actor Network Theory, I aim to analyse the unofficial use of smartphones in GPs’ everyday activities. From the ethnography within the outpatient clinic, I explore how the absence of an official and unique digital structure around the GPs’ practice has led to both the GPs’ and the patients’ struggle of finding alternatives via using the smartphone’s instant messaging for arranging appointments, pharmaceutical prescriptions, and exchanges of clinical pictures and referrals via instant messaging. I suggest that digitalization is leading to the emergence of unprecedented care practices that highlight the transformative capacities between human and nonhuman actors.