Short Abstract

This panel explores how platforms, AI systems, and other digital technologies, in hybrid and remote contexts, shape emerging values, ethics, and hierarchies of ‘good work’ as they transform workers’ experience of autonomy, productivity, and care.

Long Abstract

As platforms, AI, and other digital technologies give rise to hybrid and remote labour organizations and structure how labour is experienced, assumptions about what constitutes “good work” are being redefined. Existing studies of digital work focus on how platforms produce “precarious labour” in a neoliberal and post-Fordist setting, represented by gig labour and invisible data labour (Irani 2019; Gary and Suri 2019). This panel complicates the structural critique by tracing how the workers’ daily encounters with the infrastructures that organize their work continuously reshape their work ethics and values.

Anthropologists have shown that labour is embedded in social and moral relations (Polanyi 2018) and that distinctions between work and "life” are historically contingent and culturally diverse (Hann and Hart 2011). Building on this lineage, this panel situates digitally mediated labour within shifting vernaculars of work ethics (Hann 2018). Bringing together ethnographic work on hybrid and remote, digital labour, this panel invites contributions exploring how people across sectors and geographies negotiate what counts as meaningful, ethical, or valuable work today. We will open up critical dialogues on how infrastructures of automation and connectivity not only transform how and where labour takes place, but also how workers imagine their productive and moral selves. We will examine: (1) how workers engage with various digital systems across hybrid and remote settings, (2) how they negotiate and contest values of autonomy, productivity, and care, and (3) how people assess fairness, competence, and deservingness in environments shaped by AI, data-driven evaluation, and flexible yet distant connectivity.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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