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Long abstract:

Under widespread digitization, a number of notions in theories of practice have emerged as having been taken for granted for far too long. In my talk, I will focus on one such notion, the position of social situations within practice theory. Viewing situations as presupposable staging ground for the enactment of social practices (Bourdieu) is proving more and more difficult when situational breakdown lies only one failed video conference call away. In developing a more theoretically advanced view, important groundwork has been laid by criticizing an underlying Goffmanian bias toward situations of physical copresence, instead proposing to make sense of contemporary situativity as synthetic layering (Knorr Cetina). I argue that in order to further our understanding of “digitized” practice we can seek alternative notions of situativity in the practices of participants themselves. Drawing on ongoing research into practices of cybersecurity, I will offer some suggestions on how to move forward. Cybersecurity, positioned at the heart of digital infrastructural work, makes for an especially interesting empirical case: It provides “seen but unnoticed” (Garfinkel) ongoing conditions for telecommunication between participants (together with the situational accomplishments of the latter). Simultaneously, cybersecurity is politically contested, highly reflexive and at times critical of its own digital boundary work allowing the creation and managing of “virtual” situations. Finally, in an outlook into the military entanglements of cybersecurity and its practical consequences as well as its critiques, I will argue in favor of a conceptual and epistemological preference for constructivist, rather than ontological, understandings of digital practices.

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Short abstract:

Looking at digital work(places) from a practice-theoretical perspective allows us to identify them as a translocal mesh of socio-material arrangements. Using an ethnographic study, the "acts of framing" required in digital practices are analysed as a necessity and an opportunity for transformation.

Long abstract:

With the proceeding digitalisation of more and more areas of society, including work, there is an ongoing debate about which role materiality, bodies and their arrangements play in digital practices. This contribution offers a subjectivation-theoretically extended practice-theoretical perspective (Alkemeyer e.a. 2015), which makes it possible to neither assume disparate, dematerialised and disembodied digital work practices nor to ignore the particularities of digital/digitalised social practices. Thus, digitalised work practices come into view as translocal "assemblages" (Schönian 2011) of spatially distributed socio-material settings and participants of practices. The digital workplace is therefore not a place, it is a composite "synthetic situation" (Knorr Cetina 2009). Practice-theoretically there is also no such thing as digital work, but these are rather practices in a contingent performative production process that are constantly actualised anew and situationally. For this reason already, the digitalisation of work(places) cannot be understood as an "inevitable fate that organisations and employees have to face".

I will present results from a research project that ethnographically examines the production of digital university seminars (Holzkamp 2021). It shows that the translocal socio-material setting confronts the participants of the digital practice with various moments of dissolution of boundaries ("Entgrenzung") of the digital practice of seminar making. This, I argue, must be captured and compensated for by the participants of the practice through additional acts of framing (with Goffman’s "frames", 1980). I would like to propose that this necessity for framing can also be understood as a possibility - for undermining, appropriating and transforming digital work practices.

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Long abstract:

I draw on six years of ethnographic fieldwork observing frontline officers in England. Throughout, I observed the arrival of new technologies (e.g., Taser, body-worn cameras) intended to make policework easier and more transparent. But practices changed in ways not envisaged. Far from simply improving accountability, videos required that officers’ statements about incidents align with the recorded data. Inscribed in reports, these statements became immutable and mobile, informing other officers and configuring their future encounters.

This paper reviews a single incident in depth. An officer, confronted with what she believes to be a violent male, draws her Taser as he reaches for a metallic object. As other officers arrive at the scene, things calm down. Her action could now be seen as rash. When the man is arrested, the female officer must write a statement justifying her use of Taser. She checks her observations with colleagues (and with me as the observer). Crucially, she also checks the camera footage. She constructs a statement that aligns with the electronic evidence. This construction is shared widely in police intelligence databases. It becomes the reality of what happened, and also takes on legal status.

This paper argues that recent enthusiasm in policing for technological solutions is naïve to their use in practice. New technologies do not simply record or enable. They are adopted and adapted to fit the needs of officers. Similarly, officers have to adapt to that technology, aligning their accounts and actions to construct a reality that withstands future scrutiny.

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Long abstract:

Similar to other areas of work, waste collection in Germany is increasingly being digitized. This includes ideas of dynamic route planning and mobile order management, in which sociomaterial assemblages (e.g. sensor technology, tablets and SAP systems), as well as agendas of sustainability and work facilitation play a key role. In the context of everyday working environments, however, waste workers follow, contest or re-define the scripts of specific technologies in order to complete their work tasks and to reach their goals. This paper explores how sociomaterial entanglements (Orlikowski 2007), in the sense of co-constituted knowledge, objects and routines in everyday manual and embodied work experiences, intersect with (big and little) work futures. More specifically, our ethnographic analysis of digitalized work in a German public waste collection enterprise focuses on the 'doings and sayings' of company employees in that it considers specific forms of practices and (tacit) knowledge as crucial for the transformation of work. Theoretically and empirically our paper seeks to make contributions to practice theory’s role in examining materiality in digital work: how do the imagined digital forms of work and related technology assemblages shape the often enduringly manual and embodied work experiences of company employees, and vice-versa?

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Long abstract:

Crowdwork denotes forms of labor in which people work digitally on tasks offered by digital platforms. Crowdworkers are formally self-employed and can choose which tasks they take on. The platforms use different (digital) means of worker control (e.g. nudging mechanisms, non-monetary incentives) to encourage crowdworkers to be active on the platform and to ensure the quality of their work. Such technological implementations on platforms and the corresponding strategies of platforms have been widely discussed in previous research. What is often overlooked, however, is the crowdworkers' scope for obstinate practices.

This is where practice theory comes into play. The presentation will discuss how practice theories can be used to analyze the dialectical relationship between self-determination and external control by focusing on the the tactics and „arts of doing“ (de Certeau) of individuals. In our research project on crowdwork (https://www.hsu-hh.de/bbp/en/research/crowdwork/), we interviewed German crowdworkers on different platforms in which (among other topics) their work practice and its embeddedness in their daily lives were addressed. Based on these interviews and with reference to practice theories, we focus on how the work practices of crowdworkers diverge from the expectations of the platform operators. In particular, the ways of dealing with the digital control techniques are distinguished and analyzed.

Crowdwork serves as an empirical example to illustrate the potential of practice theories to analyze the dialectic of self-determination and heteronomy in digital labor processes. The presentation concludes with a brief reflection if and how the findings can be generalized to other digital work contexts.

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Long abstract:

The proliferation and utilization of smartphone apps designed to improve occupational health, safety, and wellbeing (OHS&W) has increased in recent years. Despite this surge, there is a paucity of research exploring the reasons for adoption of such apps, leaving a gap in our understanding of the motivations behind organizations' decisions to integrate these apps into their work processes.

To unravel the motivations and decision-making processes related to the use of OHS&W apps, we conducted an interview study involving ten qualitative interviews with key stakeholders in medium to large organizations, ranging from 150 to 130,000 employees across diverse sectors. The analysis employed a bottom-up approach, drawing on socio-material theory (Orlikowski 2007, Latour 1992) and institutional logics (Jones et al., 2013) to inform a thematic analysis of the interview data.

In the study, we find that organizations orient themselves towards multiple logics to guide their decisions to implement and use OSH&W apps. Or conversely discontinue their use of apps. These include logics of individualization, democratization, resource-optimization, and fashion. The four logics are intrinsically linked to perceptions of what constitutes a 'good organization' and a 'good work environment’, and also interlink and intertwine in the narratives provided by the informants. Examining the contested nature of these logics provides valuable insights into the reasons behind the adoption or rejection of OHS&W apps, shedding light on the diverse perspectives within the professional landscape and the evolving nature of the work environment influenced by technology.’

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Long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a large interest in new models of remote and hybrid work that has both continued and has been transformed in the post-pandemic work environment. Studies have been done on the benefits and drawbacks of these new ways of working including on flexibility, productivity, well-being and work-life balance. An additional area of interest has been how remote and hybrid work have affected people with disabilities and the accessibility of remote and hybrid work and the digital technologies involved in enabling it (Eriksson et al., 2023).

From a practice theory perspective, this accessibility should not be located in the devices and platforms themselves, nor only in the relation between an individual user and their devices, but in the practical “access work” enacted by all participants as a result of their “sociomaterial entanglement” (Orlikowski, 2007). Access work that traditionally has been invisible to a large degree and characterized by an unequal distribution of power and responsibility (Branham & Kane, 2015).

This paper draws from an interview study in Sweden with 26 people with disabilities about their working lives during the pandemic and explores the new forms and spatial distributions that “access work” takes in the remote and hybrid post-pandemic work environment. It shows how the responsibilities and power dynamics between managers, employees and participants has shifted and how it has been delegated to technosolutions.

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Long abstract:

Regardless of whether technical systems support, enable, accelerate, or take over work (related) tasks, and regardless of whether their use is prescribed, necessary or sought, they impact doings, sayings, sense-making, and presences. Thus, practices vary not only with the tasks and work relations but also with the ‘sociomaterial entanglements’ in question. However, consequences for emerging situations or the experience of human-technology(-human) relations are neither unilateral nor inevitable. Instead, we find a whole spectrum of effects and ways of dealing with, e.g., affordances. For instance, research about various kinds of communication media used in the context of collaborative remote work emphasizes the extension or augmentation of situations, e.g., through information, while others deal with deficiencies such as limited situational presence or ‘real world’ effect.

Technological developments will change this spectrum and require new or modified practices, e.g., when telepresence robotics (TPR) and virtual reality (VR) components are used for remote collaboration. Drawing on preliminary insights of using these technologies in combination (TeleVR), I will present, discuss, and theorize observed practices when remote users can act through a TPR in a real physical environment, which can appear and be experienced as extremely realistic through VR hard- and software.