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- Convenors:
-
Rachel J. Wilde
(University College London (UCL))
Kimberly Chong (University College London)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores new and old directions under the broad topic of work, labour and organisations to consider both methodological and theoretical insights into the sites, meanings and understandings of working life, and how these converge with technology, finance, homelife and leisure.
Long Abstract:
New technology is rerouting work and organisations, creating new orientations and junctions between practices of work, home, leisure and learning. Where are work and the workplace headed? Papers might consider how meanings of work have been reconfigured as it intersects with homelife through hybrid-working post-pandemic, or how individuals and families make choices about work in relation to values and/or how this converges or is kept separate with forms of leisure. What do the changing conditions of work, both in terms of location, place and technological interfaces, mean for how individuals are situated in organisational life? How do these reconfigured spaces impact on the way we work, the social relationships that underpin work, and create and recreate organisations? What is the role of finance, digital platforms and emerging economic forms that may offer alternative routes to work or ways of working? How are organisations like workplaces, trade unions or cooperative forms of social organisation responding to changing practices of work and learning to work?
This panel calls for contributors to reflect on these questions in theoretical and ethnographic ways, and/or how these new forms of work might also implicate the practice of doing anthropology and fieldwork in adaptive, remote, hybrid ways. What purchase do concepts such as “patchwork ethnography” (Günel and Watanabe 2024) have, when work is less place-bound? The panel will reflect on the methods and techniques required to capture working lives, and how this converges with the working life (and homelife) of the ethnographer.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents research on undergraduate transitions into work utilising online digital diaries as a means to tackle the observational challenge of individuals journeying through diverse pathways and reaching different destinations.
Paper long abstract:
Young people’s transitions to work can be non-linear, occur over an extended time period and be influenced by a range of individual, social and structural factors. This makes them a challenging topic for ethnographic observation, as the diversity of individual pathways and destinations means there is no obvious fieldsite. While one solution is to find cohorts engaged in employment support schemes (e.g. Leonard and Wilde 2019), these schemes bring their own narratives of the transition to work as an individual process that obscures the complex social relationships that make up young people and their knowledge and learning that is required for moving into work. This paper presents research on undergraduate transitions into work utilising multimedia digital diaries that sought to tackle this observational challenge. Through prompts that aimed to emphasise how young people and their knowledge are situated in social relationships, the diaries show how young people learn to articulate their skills, knowledges and their self-identity to themselves, before they can recontextualise them to employers in relation to specific job requirements (Wilde and Guile 2025). The paper reflects on the nature and depth of data collected through this method to explore what it can offer and what are its limitations for understanding journeys into work.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores mobile diary apps reveal gendered differences in the experiences of parents working from home in the UK tech sector. Women shared more personal, emotional reflections, while men offered brief, task-focused responses, highlighting the impact of digital tools on data.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic research into the work and family lives of parents working from home in the UK tech sector, this paper shares methodological reflections on how post-pandemic hybrid working arrangements call for an adapted methodological toolkit, and the opportunities and barriers that these tools may generate. To understand the intersections, blurred boundaries, and emotional currents that define the experience of working from home, this research employed ethnographic diary studies using a mobile-based app that invited participants to share video, audio, and text based responses to daily prompts over a one-week timeframe. Using digital tools such as a diary study app provides thick insight into the daily rhythms and routines of working parents beyond often beyond what is achievable during a semi-structured interview. However, over the course of collecting this data, what also became clear were divergent gendered approaches. Women used the app as a personal digital diary, sharing personal moments and reflections, often via audio recording, and photos of family and everyday life. Many men did not complete the full set of tasks. The entries they did provide were often short, focused on assessing the efficiency of their days, with little emotional reflection. Ultimately, this paper invites a discussion on how different digital tools may invite perspectives into divergent gendered experiences of the home and work in not only the data generated, but in the use of the tools themselves. Simultaneously, the types of reflections afforded by platforms may bias the observations made by the researcher in particular ways.
Paper short abstract:
In Enshi, producing short videos has become a responsibility for some tertiary sector workers. Unlike creating traditional advertising, these workers often use their personal experiences as video content. This shifts their perception of leisure and labor, giving rise to a new body politics.
Paper long abstract:
In Enshi, a county-level city in Hubei, China, new media practices have largely been integrated into work settings. In service industries such as foot massage centers, posture training schools, and beauty salons, not only are there dedicated new media marketing staff, but other employees are also required to regularly post Douyin videos for promotional purposes. These videos are not traditional advertisements; employees can choose the topics freely, but they must “expose“ the brand—by including the company’s location, links to its products/services, and adding related tags. In this context, Douyin, originally a platform for personal self-presentation and entertainment, has become an additional "workspace", reshaping the way people work and engage in leisure activities.
Drawing on anthropological theories of discipline and Foucault's concept of technologies of the self, this study aims to explore how individuals' adapts to the blurred boundary between work and personal new media consumption. It focuses on the ways in which these service industry workers respond to the spontaneous or passive use of their personal experiences/narrations for public and professional purposes, and speaks to whether and how self-presentation on social media is impacted. Furthermore, since the visibility of workers’ bodies is no longer entirely under their control and becomes potential marketing material, a new body politics closely tied to labor and workspaces emerges, involving interactions between digital platforms, workers, and their managers. This also prompts methodological reflections for digital anthropologists: How should we define the social media of our interlocutors? Are we observing their private space or their workspace?
Paper short abstract:
When work is no longer seen as an obligation but as a cool, fun, and even addictive game, should we rethink the concept of work? This paper examines London coders who view their jobs as playing the same games they enjoyed since childhood. Yet, are they as fortunate as they or others imagine?
Paper long abstract:
“My job is the best in the world. I get paid to solve puzzles,” a coder remarked during my 15 months of fieldwork in London. Developers frequently describe their work using terms like "game," "play," and "puzzle." The tech industry has adopted a playful culture, with flexible hours, casual environments, and constant "fun" activities designed to make the workplace feel engaging and cool. However, unlike Burawoy’s (1982) study of factory workers, where gamification was used to mask monotonous tasks, coding is inherently stimulating.
Coding has a straightforward goal—producing error-free code—and a clear feedback loop: the program either runs or it doesn’t. This simplicity mirrors the structure of a puzzle, where every piece must fit together logically to arrive at a solution. The well-defined and precise nature of coding creates what Graeber (2016) calls a "utopia of rules," offering coders a sense of freedom, certainty, and control within a structured environment. Yet, this very immersion can be addictive, pushing coders to the brink of burnout.
The rule-bound, absorbing nature of coding creates a distinct work experience that challenges traditional views of labor, blurring the lines between work and play.
Paper short abstract:
How does communal life reconfigure the common distinctions between home and workplace, self and company? Tracking how Indonesian Catholic nuns learn to ‘cover each other up’, I argue that the organisation of work is intricately intertwined with the collective development of character.
Paper long abstract:
How does communal life reconfigure the common distinctions between home and workplace? What might an ethnography of communal life teach us about the imbrication of self and company? This paper begins to answer these questions through the lives of an Indonesian order of Catholic nuns as they live and work together in intimate moral communities. Tracking how nuns learn to ‘cover each other up’, I argue that the development of work is intricately intertwined with the collective development of character and personality. Facing demands to both ‘become oneself’ and to ‘become one’ with others in the convent, nuns learn to take a complementary approach to both labour and personalities, responding collaboratively to each other’s actions and expressions. Through two years of participating in convent life, I offer an experience-near account of the complex ways that nuns play with different possibilities to discover their unique talents before assuming the mantle of one career, granted through their superiors’ assessment of character, abilities, and institutional need. This paper explores how interlocking careers ideally manifest as a holistic community—spread across convents and across continents—that works well together to achieve success beyond the possibility of any individual. By demonstrating how the organisation considers ‘character’ together with their assessment of ‘work’, I propose that an analysis of either must account for the ways each is defined and positioned within organisational thought. By attending to the ways that character and work emerge collectively, we may deepen our understanding of the blur between ‘private’ selves and ‘public’ work.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the emergent political subjectivities of garment workers visible in the multiple spaces created by the transnational advocacy & rights groups and localised networks of labour movements in the garment industry of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Paper long abstract:
Political subjectivity, as a subject–making process, is iterative in the sense that the form shifts as the context of the subject changes. The garment industry of Dhaka, known for its cheap labour, just-in-time manufacturing processes and deplorable labour conditions, is the focus of this paper that seeks to argue that political subjectivity is located not in only the location or space of work. The industry draws from time, strength and dreams of millions of workers who migrate from districts to the capital city for work and find ways to navigate the city and spaces that sustain workers and workplaces. Simultaneously, garment workers also navigate the colossal network of advocacy groups, local governmental authorities and localised activist circles that have narrativised the garment worker as either a victim of the larger capitalist processes or a militant–conspirator figure. However, the emergent subject in this neoliberal moment is seen to be equally alert to these narratives that have consistently invisibilized the culpability of capitalist extraction of gendered labour. As a result, political subjectivities are not just shaped by work or workspace, but the political economy of advocacy and activist spaces. Political subjectivity(ies), then, is not constituted uniformly but in several layers and meanings that exist simultaneously. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis of digital records, this paper seeks to assemble a response to the question — what are the registers through which we can locate or understand political subjectivities of garment workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh?
Paper short abstract:
This paper analysis the dual role of roads as a class construct and as a means of production for the food delivery gig workers in Delhi (India). Thereby, exploring how the workplaces have been reorganized and reshaped by the platforms for implementing the labour process on roads and producing value!
Paper long abstract:
Meteoric rise of gig economy has resulted in the formation of novel urbanscapes around the world. A sea of literature has emerged documenting the working conditions of gig workers and labour process of gig economy. However, a little has been explored about the relationships gig workers share with their workplace, i.e. The Road itself. Probing this can clarify the novel dynamics which are at play in the gig workplace and how they depart from the way workplaces are understood in traditional sociology and anthropology of work.
For data collection author enrolled as a gig worker in a popular food delivery platform in New Delhi (India) to uncover otherwise opaque aspects of the labour process. Multisited ethnographic methods were utilised to document the mobile and fluid realities of the emerging gig economy. It required the author to move from different sites of analysis which included – roads, delivery locations and the restaurants to understand the distinct function each one of them serve in the labour process of the platform. These ethnographic insights were also informed and refined by 67 in-depth interviews and accompanying gig workers to their delivery locations to bring forth their perspective.
Paper uncovers the narratives of hostilities, hierarchy and solidarity which are experienced and cultivated while delivering orders. Thus, understanding how roads function as class construct for ever increasing gig workforce in Delhi. Paper also analysis role of roads as a means of production in generating surplus value in the labour process of platform mediated gig work.
Paper short abstract:
Through the ethnographic example of cancer registrars in east Africa, this paper explores what I term 'economies of uncertainty' - economic models in which hope is mobilised in order to keep young, aspirational Africans in positions of precarious and often unpaid labour.
Paper long abstract:
Many economies in Africa function ‘volunteer economies’, economic systems which heavily rely on, and are shaped and informed by, volunteer activity. Frequently this takes the form of voluntary labour coming from the global north, however, it can also mean the voluntary labour of African subjects. In this paper I examine how conditions of precarity are tied in with hope to create what I term ‘economies of uncertainty’ – economic labour structures in which uncertainty, about the future, the next job, or even the current position, fuel and drive people to participate, often unwillingly, in systems and structures of voluntary or unpaid labour. Using the ethnographic example of cancer registrars in various urban centres across east and southern Africa, the paper asks how the pressures of contemporary urban life, coupled with the pressure to secure well-paid jobs, push educated and aspirational young Africans into work in the medical field where they find themselves caught in unpaid labour models from which they struggle to escape. It explores the stresses and stressors that this causes for the registrars, as well as their means of coping with this profound economic and financial uncertainty. The paper suggests that hope plays a key role in keeping registrars returning daily to work, despite frequently not getting paid for the work they do. However, although hope is key, family and financial pressures, career pressures, despondency and a lack of other options also play a crucial role.