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- Convenors:
-
Rene Gerrets
(University of Amsterdam)
Patricia Kingori (The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford)
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- Chair:
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Kristine Krause
(University of Amsterdam)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Focusing on the goods and bads of outsourcing this panels asks: what is made (in)visible in delegating parts of work to a different geographical location, social group or species? Are there limits to what is outsourceable? What kind of relations are formed/disrupted? What costs occur along the way?
Long Abstract
What have hiring a live-in care worker, paying somebody else to walk your dog, training rats to identify mines in former civil war regions in common with surrogate mothers and copy editors in India, or car parts production in Mexico? These all involve modes of outsourcing in which specific tasks are delegated to places or actors who assumedly can perform the work at a lower cost or risk. The examples share an element of geographical arbitrage - strategically juggling distance, income differences, legal codes and labour costs to reduce production costs. Power disparities, unequal geographies of capital accumulation and privilege, shadows of colonial and center/periphery hierarchies and histories loom large here, in particular when concerning ‘3D’ jobs (dirty, dangerous and demeaning). Fragmenting also matters in the examples: parts of a greater whole are delegated elsewhere, (often rendering the greater whole challenging to apprehend).
We invite ethnographically and/or theoretically informed papers which deal with the following (or other) outsourcing-related questions, taking also dynamics of increasing polarization into account: What is made (in)visible in delegating parts of work to a different geographical location, a different social group or species? Are there limits to what is outsourceable? What is the difference between delegation and outsourcing? Can we outsource “upwards” to a higher status group, more highly skilled personnel, or/and economically richer place? What kind of infrastructures are indispensable for outsourcing? What forms of detachment/attachment happen when work is outsourced that also entails emotional labour? What kind of relationships are formed/disrupted through outsourcing? What frictional losses and transaction costs occur along the way?
We are specifically interested in the following lines of inquiry:
• offshoring and outsourcing of (in)tangible work
• the strategic value and risks of compartementalizing work in tangible/intangible, productive/emotional
• the everyday ethics, or goods and bads of outsourcing.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Giant pouched rats are being trained in Tanzania to serve as second-line tuberculosis (TB) diagnostic tools. I ethnographically show how lab technicians and scientists invoke unequal political economies of scientific practice in global South to advocate or reject rats as medical diagnostic tools.
Paper long abstract
Giant pouched rats are being trained in Tanzania to serve as a second-line tuberculosis (TB) diagnostic tool in Tanzania and Ethiopia. Trained rats can sniff and detect traces of TB infection in sputum samples collected from people in a fraction of the time it takes through other methods. The suitability of trained rats as a diagnostic tool in the global fight against TB is often evaluated in comparison to two other technologies commonly used to diagnose TB: the microscope, which allows a lab technician to see and count the number of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) present in a sputum sample collected from a person who are suspected of carrying a TB infection; and GeneXpert MTB/RIF, a nucleic amplification technology used for detecting the presence of MTB DNA in the same sample. I present and ethnographically analyze how lab technicians and microbiologists in a Tanzanian laboratory evaluate TB-detecting rats alongside the microscope and the genetic sequencer. I show that these evaluations are not restricted to issues of diagnostic specificity and sensitivity but also invoke the unequal political economies of scientific practice in the global South. I also show findings from this multispecies study may contribute analytical frameworks to an anthropological approach to increasing human-computer interactions.
Paper short abstract
We explore how outsourcing and informal delegation shape care and maintenance work in hospitals. Based on ethnography in Swiss and Austrian hospitals, we examine how value is negotiated across formal hierarchies, migration trajectories, and labor fragmentation.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on ethnographic research from the Global Hospital project to examine outsourcing and delegation as de/valuation processes that shape everyday hospital work. In Swiss and Austrian hospitals, cleaning and catering are often outsourced, while nursing care is increasingly performed by internationally recruited staff. These “intermediarisation” processes fragment labor and reinforce hierarchies over what is valued as “skilled” and “core” work.
We explore both formal outsourcing, such as maintenance subcontracting, and informal delegation, such as nurses asking cleaners or aides to assist with care tasks when time is scarce. These practices reveal how responsibilities blur in everyday routines, with significant implications for how hospital work is defined and de/valued.
Care and maintenance workers, mostly women and/or migrants, are disproportionately affected by in/formal outsourcing. Understaffing, substandard pay, and casual contracts lead to overwork and precarious labor market integration. Care and maintenance workers are inter/mediated through recruiting, outsourcing, and delegation on the one hand and entangled through cooperation, conflict, and more-than-medical ways of doing healthcare together on the other. We explore how workers themselves navigate these dynamics.
By linking outsourcing with informal delegation and international recruitment and by looking across professional boundaries, we discuss “outsourcing” in hospital spaces as multifaceted and entangled with other, more informal forms of delegation and international recruitment practices. We approach outsourcing not just as a managerial strategy, but a lived process of de/valuation shaped by relational work and embodied expertise, examining the frictions, dependencies, and tensions that arise when labor is fragmented.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the outsourced global health image as the stabilized product of 'text-to-image' paradigm: When freelance photographers and generative AI systems are systemically tasked to turn the pre-written text into recognizable, iconic imagery commodified by organizations.
Paper long abstract
Images are central to the functioning of the neoliberal global health (GH) industry: they raise public awareness, educate communities, and secure funding for interventions. Yet, only a few wealthy GH organizations maintain photographers on long-term contracts. Instead, most GH imagery is outsourced to precarious freelancers, hired on short-term assignments to rapidly reproduce the recognizable global health visual canon.
Central to this outsourcing are ‘briefs’--prescriptive bullet points drafted by communications departments (typically in the Global North) and passed to photographers (increasingly in the Global South). However, briefs are no longer the only way text is converted into imagery; GH organizations are increasingly adopting AI-generated visuals created through textual ‘prompts’.
Drawing on interviews with GH photographers and communications experts, this paper argues that global health visual culture has been modulated by a ‘text-to-image’ paradigm of outsourcing. In this model, both human photographers and generative algorithms translate external text--briefs and prompts--into highly controlled visual output. By examining the role of GH organizations in shaping this process, I argue that briefs essentially function as proto-prompts, and that photographers, acting as algorithmic agents, together with generative models, have been trained to replicate the established iconicity and stabilize visual stereotypes.
Finally, this paper interrogates the common justifications for this outsourcing such as the uncritical fetishization of ‘local photographers’ as decolonial agents or the framing of synthetic imagery as a ‘green’ and ‘identity protecting’ solution--to reveal the pragmatic, economy-driven underpinnings serving the interests of institutions and their broader political economies.
Paper short abstract
Based on the first qualitative study conducted on abortion mobilities for the Swiss context, this presentation provides analysis of the internal and international delegations of abortion work.
Paper long abstract
Based on the first qualitative study conducted on abortion mobilities for the Swiss context, this presentation provides analysis of the internal and international delegations of abortion work. Based on the experiences and perspectives of sexual and reproductive health professionals and experts, this research found that Swiss women cross national and international borders to achieve better access to abortions. Furthermore, these travels imply that some abortion tasks are internally delegated to certain Swiss clinics performing abortion after the legal framework of 12 weeks following the last period, but also internationally (in abortion clinics in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Spain). I show that these types of delegation are influenced not only by the Swiss legal framework but also by doctors’ discretion, economic inequalities and insurance issues, and a lack of access to surgical abortion methods in the second trimester of pregnancy.
Paper short abstract
This article examines enumerators’ experiences during Gen Z protests in Nairobi and Kampala, showing how they were outsourced to do emotional labour and to manage risk, while negotiating a tension between physical and emotional safety, the demands of high-quality data, and financial security.
Paper long abstract
In 2024, we accompanied forty-five enumerators in Kampala and Nairobi as they were hired to collect data for a quantitative survey study, commissioned through European funding and conducted in collaboration with East African research institutions. As it so happened, the entire period of four weeks of data collection coincided with the rise of the Gen Z protests in Kenya and, to a lesser extent, Uganda. The survey team initially suspended data collection, monitored the situation as it unfolded, and eventually decided to partially and conditionally resume data collection. In practice, while formal oversight of the project remained with the survey organizing team, under emergency conditions authority and responsibility for assessing risk and determining when work could proceed was outsourced to local enumerator groups on a day to day basis. Based on ethnographic fieldwork involving accompanying the enumerators in the field and follow-up conversations with them, this presentation will explore their lived experiences and unpack the often-invisible emotional labour and risk assessment during fieldwork. Enumerators were constantly negotiating a persistent tension: choosing between physical and emotional safety, the demands of high-quality data collection, and financial security. Because their primary mandate was to complete interviews, cancellations often meant starting the process anew, while a day out of the field could result in a day without pay. As a result, enumerators navigated precarious labour conditions while regulating both their own emotions and those of the participants in an effort to balance institutional demands with the lived realities of the communities they work in.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in India, this study explores outsourced labour involved in global academic publishing by mapping the invisible actors, and analyzes its implications on global knowledge evaluation.
Paper long abstract
In academic publishing, “technical work” such as copyediting or typesetting is often outsourced to countries like India and Philippines. However, what is considered “technical” has expanded quite a lot in recent years. One of the most significant yet overlooked transformations amongst major publishers concerns the outsourcing and offshoring of editorial and peer review activities. While outsourcing is often framed as a cost-saving strategy or a means of fostering global collaboration, it raises important questions about power, colonial relations and labour conditions. Drawing on ethnographic field research in Indian outsourced companies, this study explores the global division of labour in academic publishing beyond the familiar triangle of editor, author and reviewer. Focusing in particular on labour related to peer review, the study traces the multiple, often invisible actors who participate in manuscript evaluation, reviewer selection and editorial decision-making. Contrary to the dominant image of an individual reviewer and editor in the process, our findings show that both the “reviewer” and “editor” are fragmented into a range of discrete tasks distributed across global labour markets. These tasks, frequently performed by outsourced workers in India, reconfigure how knowledge in academic publishing is evaluated, mediated and governed. Informed by postcolonial STS literature and global labour studies, our research tries to map the invisible and precarious labour sustaining academic publishing and questions its implications for the research system and those involved in it.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines outsourcing and monopolizing as state strategies that define payable labour and unpayable care. Drawing on surrogacy and live-in care in the Netherlands, it shows how care is simultaneously delegated, restricted, and morally contained.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines outsourcing and monopolizing as two interconnected ways through which states govern care, labour, and responsibility, defining what counts as payable labour and what must remain unpayable care. While outsourcing disperses work across social, legal, or geographical boundaries, monopolizing care refers to the restrictive regulation and moral containment of certain forms of care that limit their circulation as labour.
Drawing on ethnographic research on surrogacy and live-in care in the Netherlands, the paper shows how these strategies operate simultaneously. Live-in care is structurally outsourced, often to migrant workers, yet legally segmented and only partially recognized as labour. Surrogacy, by contrast, is tightly monopolized through legal and moral frameworks that prohibit commercial exchange and frame reproductive care as exceptional and altruistic. In both cases, the state plays a central role in setting the limits of outsourceability by determining which aspects of care may be delegated and remunerated.
Responding to the panel’s focus on the goods and bads of outsourcing, the paper argues that outsourcing cannot be understood without attending to parallel processes of monopolization. Rather than opposing dynamics, they are mutually constitutive mechanisms through which care is governed, inequalities are reproduced, and responsibility is unevenly distributed.
Paper short abstract
Uterus transplantation enables pregnancy through the transfer of a uterus from donor to recipient. This paper examines UTx as a practice of delegating reproductive labour across bodies and countries asking what becomes visible or obscured as risk, care and responsibility are redistributed globally.
Paper long abstract
Uterus transplantation (UTx) has emerged as a groundbreaking reproductive technology for women with absolute uterine factor infertility (UFI), involving the transplantation of a uterus from a donor to a recipient, enabling pregnancy. This paper approaches UTx as a broader practice of delegating reproductive work across bodies, families and healthcare systems, and situates it within wider debates on outsourcing.
Conceptualising UTx as a form of reproductive outsourcing highlights how the work of pregnancy, along with medical risk and ethical responsibility, is fragmented and redistributed. The ability to carry a pregnancy is detached from one body and reattached to another through complex clinical, legal and ethical frameworks. In this process, certain forms of labour (e.g., surgical, institutional etc.) might be visible, while others, particularly those of donors and their families, may become obscured. Placing UTx in a global health context further reveals how outsourcing logics intersect with unequal geographies of care. As the procedure expands beyond highly regulated research settings, concerns arise around access, consent, reproductive tourism and the potential commodification of reproductive organs. These dynamics raise questions about whose bodies bear risk, whose reproductive aspirations are prioritised, and whose contributions remain invisible.
This paper asks about the ethical limits of what can be outsourced in medicine by examining UTx as a practice of delegating reproductive labour and business of transplanting uteruses. It argues that without attention to power, inequality and visibility, UTx risks creating new patterns of extraction while reframing them as technological progress.
Paper short abstract
Cybersecurity is increasingly outsourced to a crowd of "ethical hackers" operating remotely. By logging onto bug bounty platforms, anyone can potentially start earning money by finding vulnerabilities for organizations remotely. This has reshaped hacker communities and cybersecurity practices.
Paper long abstract
The rapid digitization of the global economy has birthed a unique vulnerability, prompting organizations to increasingly rely on the crowdsourcing of cybersecurity as a defensive measure. Bug bounty programs represent a sophisticated mode of outsourcing where the task of identifying system vulnerabilities is delegated to a global, self-employed crowd of "ethical hackers". This arrangement serves as a prime example of geographical arbitrage, strategically juggling distance and labor costs, often attracting a precarious workforce from abroad to reduce organizational risk.
This paper explores the subtleties of outsourcing security, a field traditionally defined by strict internal confidentiality. By fragmenting security into discrete tasks, organizations engage in a form of compartmentalization that makes the "greater whole" of the information system difficult for the external worker to fully apprehend. Drawing on qualitative investigations into the bug bounty industry, I analyze how this delegation transforms the hacker ethos, evolving it from a counter-cultural identity into a standardized, professionalized form of platform labor.
Furthermore, I examine the unexpected effects of this shift, such as the emergence of a form of work characterized by extreme uncertainty, where hunters search for vulnerabilities without a guarantee of payment. By focusing on the organization, nature, and status of these workers, the paper questions the limits of what is outsourceable. Ultimately, I argue that while bug bounties are framed as effective tools for transparency, they simultaneously entail the risk of reinforcing unequal international divisions of labor and disrupt traditional security relationships, raising critical questions regarding the everyday ethics of digital delegation.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Bulgarian steel plant, the paper approaches outsourcing as a mechanism that fragments labour, produces hierarchies, and redistributes bodily and financial risk, revealing how global inequalities are made tangible at the workplace.
Paper long abstract
Different groups of workers employed by multiple companies converge daily in and around the steel plant in Pernik, a Bulgarian industrial town. Following privatisation in the late 1990s, restructuring processes fragmented workers once employed under the same company. A part of the workforce remained in the main company while a significant amount of the workers is employed by outsourcers. This form of proximate outsourcing produced new categories of labour, hierarchies of value, and regimes of (in)visibility. Outsourcing in this case takes place locally, given that both workers of the main company and of the outsourcers work and live closely, resulting in proximate distances, in buildings next door and/or across the same production line. Although employees work in proximity, ownership and control are dispersed globally, bringing new multi-scalar geographies of power that further link the workplace to transnational corporate relations.
Drawing on long-term fieldwork, the paper analyses outsourcing as a technology that (re)organises labour relations and shapes divisions across skill and institutional boundaries. It explores how outsourcing is coupled with age, gender, and ethnic inequalities and how these divisions are informed by differential exposure to danger and multiple types of risk. By foregrounding safety and vulnerability, the paper conceptualises outsourcing as a mechanism for redistributing risk and producing hierarchies of bodily and financial risk exposure. Focusing on outsourcing that operates in spatial proximity to the main company allows the paper to show ethnographically how global inequalities are rendered tangible in everyday labour practices, revealing embodied experiences and inequalities of capitalist restructuring.
Paper short abstract
Tracing Greece's shift from coal to solar, I analyze energy regimes as layered landscapes of outsourcing. Risk and responsibility is delegated "downward" to territory, "upward" to the state, and "inward" to households, creating uneven and contested configurations of visibility and vulnerability.
Paper long abstract
Based on long-term ethnography in Western Macedonia, Greece, this paper conceptualizes energy transitions as historically layered landscapes of outsourcing. Tracing the region’s shift from state-owned carbon-based electricity production to solar mega-projects and energy cooperatives, I analyze outsourcing not as unidirectional spatial relocation for profitability, but as a core political mechanism for defining and redistributing risk, responsibility, and labor across public, private, and domestic realms.
Indeed, each energy regime rearticulates outsourcing in distinct but overlapping ways. The restructuring of a state-owned carbon company transformed public provision into outsourced operations, fragmenting both accountability and labour while displacing risks onto subcontractors and local populations. Contemporary solar developments intensify this logic by outsourcing socio-ecological costs downward to the territory and migrant labour while simultaneously outsourcing infrastructural and systemic costs and responsibilities upward to state-owned grids and public investment/subsidies. Finally, energy cooperatives, mostly based on kinship networks, extend outsourcing into the sphere of social reproduction. As households assume long-term financial risk, organizational labor, but also moral responsibility for energy provision, the "limits of the outsourceable" are tested, blurring the line between energy production and making a living.
By mapping these transformations within a single territory, the paper advances an analytical understanding of outsourcing as a dynamic process of evasion where responsibility is continually displaced rather than resolved. Recurrent uneven energy regimes produce contradictory configurations of visibility, where the omnipresent energy source (carbon mines and solar panels) relies on the invisibility of the labor, debt, and environmental degradation required to sustain it.