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- Convenors:
-
Manuela Bojadzijev
(Humboldt University Berlin)
Johan Lindquist (Stockholm University)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D215
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Digitisation is not only profoundly transforming labour but also mobility and migration. The panel welcomes papers on the basis of exemplary ethnographic cases and investigation, which connect these two related fields of research.
Long Abstract:
Digitisation is profoundly transforming labour and mobility. On the one hand, almost all existing areas of work are changing as digitisation produces new forms of labour. With the help of the internet, work is increasingly globally distributed and organized, thus transforming labour relations. On the other hand, labour mobility itself is changing, as working in the global digital economy may both entail traditional forms of physical migration, and, for low-skilled workers, in particular, an increasingly precarious existence in the "gig economy." For others, however, the outsourcing of labour to the global south, for instance, entails a form of "virtual migration" (Aneesh 2006) that may demand particular transformations of the self without physical mobility. More generally, at the center of the transformation of labor and mobility is the rise of digital platforms: from online retail, over taxi and food delivery services, through to crowdworking platforms for digital labour. While the platform-driven digitisation of labour and life is beginning to receive attention within the social sciences, there is a lack of studies with ethnographic depth, especially concerning the practices of mobility and the migration projects produced by this transformation of the world of work.
The panel welcomes papers on the basis of exemplary ethnographic cases, on globally distributed digital labour, on digital platforms, and digitised labour on the "last mile" of parcel and delivery services, on citizenship and labour rights, on changing gender relations and household structures. More specifically, we invite papers that engage with the transforming and the often paradoxical and complex relationship between labour and migration in this regard.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research on digitalisation and outsourcing of healthcare diagnostics in radiology, I propose a rethinking of the concept of automation through the changes in the relation between production and social reproduction.
Paper long abstract:
The digitalisation of healthcare has allowed for the international outsourcing of imaging diagnostics depending on times zones and labour costs. I draw on research in teleradiology offices in Sydney and Bangalore, where outsourcing chains built upon the digital infrastructures of specialised information systems get entangled with new relations and dependencies within the workforce. Some of these relations (re)inforce hierarchies of international inequality by weaving together race and national qualification. As the US-certified radiologists are turned into a valuable resource for the companies, their productivity is maximised through a digitally organised workflow, as well as through practices of implicit emotional labour and care work performed by other workers in the companies. I focus on the care relations embedded in these hierarchies between the workers and analyse them in connection to the role of social reproduction in sustaining the operations of the digital and non-digital infrastructures for teleradiology. This opens the possibility of rethinking the notion of labour automation beyond the problem of control and through examining the field of (social) reproduction as a field of capitalist valorisation in a new paradigm of self-generation and expenditure.
Paper short abstract:
A growth in digitally mediated labour offers new opportunities and potential risks for refugee livelihoods. This could change the way the 'refugee' is framed in legal and conceptual terms, as the relationship between forced migration and labour is being transformed.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore the possible contribution of digitally mediated labour to the provision of decent work and livelihoods among refugees. As the expanding online gig economy is especially prevalent in urban areas, more than 60 percent of the world's refugees now live in cities. These combined factors of urbanised refugee economies and the digitisation of work is rapidly changing how displacement and labour are connected. In Beirut, for example, the UN's World Food Programme runs a Tech for Food project that trains refugees to become freelancers on online work platforms. Other initiatives allow refugees to give online language lessons or act as translators. What Mark Graham calls a 'truly planetary' labour market certainly offers new livelihood opportunities for those who are categorically excluded from formal labour markets. At the same time, this economic restructuring may trigger a shift from seeing refugees through the lens of humanitarian aid and legal protection to a condition of forced displacement that is increasingly defined in economic and market-oriented terms. This could change the way the figure of the refugee is framed, and reconfigure the relationship between forced migration and labour in fundamental ways.
Combining analysis of ethnographic research and major conceptual work on displacement and refugees, this paper seeks to innovate possible new ways of looking at forced displacement through the lens of digital labour, and through labour from the perspective of the displaced.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the relationship between digital labour, mobility and social reproduction. It aims to understand how the platform-driven digitisation of labour transforms household structures, gender relations and mobility practices, focusing on crowdsourced labour performed from home.
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses the relationship between digital labour, mobility and social reproduction. It aims to understand how the platform-driven digitisation of labour transforms household structures and gender relations. Moreover, it places changing labour arrangements and mobility practices within debates around the crisis of social reproduction.
The focus lies on crowdsourced labour, performed from home and mediated by online-platforms which organise and control the labour process. This type of digital labour is particularly interesting from the perspective of social reproduction: The completion of micro-tasks on a self-employed basis does not only contain the promise of a better work-life-balance, it is also potrayed as a chance for people who cannot leave the house due to care obligations or physical restrictions. It allows taking care of relatives and simultaneously remaining a wage labourer - especially in contexts that lack public health- and childcare or a public pension system. While this type of online-labour might replace certain forms of physical mobility, it facilitates virtual migration that makes workers subject to legal and cultural frameworks of other countries.
The paper discusses different theoretical frameworks such as the feminisation of labour, the Marxist concept of piece work or the distinction between productive/reproductive work, and asks how they help us to understand new combinations of domestic, care and wage labour. This serves as a theoretical base for an in-depth ethnography on crowdworkers which we will conduct as part of a research project on digital labour at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on Indonesian "click farmers" who produce and sell followers on social media platforms; aspirational and experimentally-oriented young men highly cognizant of the instable nature of their labor. The ethnography allows for an engagement with debates concerning digital labor.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on Indonesian "click farmers" who produce and sell followers, likes, and views on social media platforms such as Instagram. Click farms evoke industrial settings with exploited workers, which some observers argue are the new sweatshops and a major problem of unregulated labor specific to the global South (DePillis 2014). Although evidence suggests that the majority of click farmers are based in Asian countries with low per capita incomes and high degrees of digital engagement, interviews with more than 25 Indonesian click farmers reveals that they are generally aspirational, entrepreneurial, and relatively independant young men who are highly cognizant of the instable and fluctuating nature of their labor. This suggests that the labor that underpins click farming is neither organized in geographically concentrated industrial settings nor directly exploitative. The paper thus flips the received wisdom concerning digital labor in the global South on its head through an ethnographic description of the diverse strands of mobility that organize click farming, ranging from the mobility of click farmers to particular geographical hubs of digital economies, the forms of translocal and transnational engagement that underpins their labor, and their aspirations for social mobility. In other words, the paper approaches click farmers' engagement with social media platforms as a mobile form of experimentation that has been made possible through the rise of the digital economy. It thus aims to use ethnographic description in order to shape a mode of analysis located between overly celebratory and critical approaches to digital labor.
Paper short abstract:
What does it mean to migrate linguistically? This paper considers how and why "ghostwriters," experts in virtual and verbal assimilation, adopt the personae of students, doctors, product reviewers, and political activists -- for pay. It engages work on outsourcing, ethics, and digital cultures.
Paper long abstract:
In a neoliberal economy in which "life-hacking" often means "outsourcing" that which does not immediately advance one's goals, ghostwriters are finding a growing niche. This paper offers preliminary findings from my research with people who perform what I am thinking of as textual piecework: writing projects, often remunerated by the word, page, or task, that will be credited to paying client. Ghostwriting is hardly a new profession, and in some respects, its 21st century manifestations, while often transacted across borders and via online platforms, seem not that different from ones prior: ghosts write for students who require a term paper, for public figures hawking memoirs, and for patrons who desire the prestige of a publication, but lack the skillset to bring it to completion. However, I propose that contemporary ghostwriting practices are transforming, and are shaped not only by the speed, competitive pricing, and relative anonymity of internet-based commerce, but also by contemporary discourses of productivity and self-branding. Thus, while composing academic essays may remain many a ghostwriter's bread-and-butter, my preliminary research suggests that ghostwriters are increasingly involved in the maintenance of social media accounts and the scripting of "how-to" content devised to bolster a client's reputation as an expert or influencer. Considering these different types of ghostwriting in tandem allows for a fuller account of how language, competence, and discretion may be bought and sold in the 21st century marketplace.
Paper short abstract:
Based on a long-term immersion in the working lives of consultants and software engineers, this paper critically examines how the arrival of cloud-based labour reshuffled expertise practices within a Norwegian-based digital service firm providing software to the global oil and gas industry.
Paper long abstract:
This paper critically examines how the arrival of cloud-based labour reshuffled expertise practices within a Norwegian-based firm providing software to the global oil and gas industry. Shedding light on a case of the digitization of expert knowledge, the investigation describes the internal practices of a small-scale firm, which shifted its focus from developing expert reports that assess the operational risks for oil and gas extracting firms to selling software packages performing similar analyses. The purpose of the extended case study is to trace the implementation process of the cloud infrastructure and the accompanying transformations of working life and migration. Committed to a holistic contextualisation, this study is based on participant observation at industry events, including conferences, workshops and trade shows, access to repositories on the developer platform GitHub during a three-month secondment in a digital service firm, and 30 expert interviews. The firm under investigation established a cloud-based distribution of digital services, connecting the taskscapes of software engineers, consultants and clients. The infrastructural changes within the firm had far-reaching consequences for the mobility and expertise of its employees. This investigation revealed that low-salaried, Ukrainian-based software engineers were hidden but crucial actors in the software development cycle, modifying the code through the outsourced cloud environments. Based on the evidence studied within a digital service firm, I suggest that the implementation of cloud technologies initiated new digital divisions of labour and significantly reduced the physical migration of software professionals in favour of transnationally connected taskscapes facilitating an accelerated circulation of data.