Short Abstract

Service work is increasingly mediated by digital technologies. How are human and non-human work translated, augmented and automated? How are service assemblages reconfigured, and consumption experiences changed? What are the implications for labour, communication, affect and social interaction?

Long Abstract

Digital technologies are increasingly mediating service work: QR codes, tablets, restaurant delivery robots, gig economy apps, chatbots and artificial intelligence. These technologies have implications for labour, communication, affect, and social interactions. They involve translations between human and non-human work, reconfigurations of service assemblages and changes in experiences of consumption. Service work was famously conceptualised by Hochschild (1983) as the commercialisation of feeling by which employers exploit the emotional labour of employees, typically women, in front-facing roles that involve customer interaction. Communication is key to the performance of emotional service work. Service involves exchanging social cues and making complex and relational decisions in the back and forth flow of social interaction. As service is remodelled through automation and/or augmentation, human workers are repositioned in relation to service roles that they previously performed. At the same time, they must negotiate the emotional and communicative capacities and constraints of other service-performing actors. In some contexts, service work is automated. For example, when social robots are introduced, questions come up as to who and how the emotional and communicative work of service is performed. To what extent is this work carried out or shared by robots in service roles? In other contexts, emotional service work is augmented, such as in gig economy apps programmed to manage the user experiences of workers and consumers. What are the affective features and/or expressions of digital technologies in service work? We are inviting papers that report on and theorise the digital reconfigurations of service technologies, models, roles and practices. This panel will bring STS into conversation with human-machine communication and affect studies. We invite engagement that conceptualises these transformations from multiple approaches in terms of but not limited to assemblages, translations, power relations, stabilisations and reconfigurations of service models.