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- Convenor:
-
Rachel J. Wilde
(University College London (UCL))
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Room 211, Teaching & Learning Building (TLB)
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 9 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
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:
Session 1 Wednesday 9 April, 2025, -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 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 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:
By examining short video practices that shape everyday labour at a women’s posture school in a Chinese county, this research highlights how digital media reinforces local values, using theories on anthropology of trap to explore selective visibility and algorithmic negotiation within digital labour.
Paper Abstract:
In Enshi, a county-level city in Hubei, China, new media practices have largely been integrated into work settings, especially in tertiary industry. In this context, Douyin, originally a platform for personal self-presentation and entertainment, has become an additional workspace, reshaping the form of labour and the operation of institutions.
This research explores the integration of short video practices into the everyday work of a women’s posture training school in Enshi, a fourth-tier city in southwest China. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how instructors navigate the demands of digital labour while negotiating local gender norms and platform algorithms. Through the lens of the anthropology of trap, this research highlights how short videos serve both as tools of attraction and mechanisms of selective visibility, ultimately illuminating the complex interplay between digital platforms, local culture, and everyday labour. Contrary to dominant narratives that frame short videos as agents of transformation and unprecedentedness, this study argues that they often reinforce existing social values and exclusions.
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 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:
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 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:
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 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.