The quantified self: What counts in the neoliberal workplace - Phoebe Moore, Andrew Robinson, 2016
▻http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444815604328
Implementation of quantified self technologies in workplaces relies on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contributing to debates in new materialism, we demonstrate that workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity and health and well-being in art-houses and warehouses alike in both the global north and south. Workers experience intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs and anxieties about the replacement of labour-power with robots and other machines as well as, ourselves replaceable, other humans. Workers have internalised the imperative to perform, a subjectification process as we become observing entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies. Thinking through the implications of the use of wearable technologies in workplaces, this article shows that these technologies introduce a heightened Taylorist influence on precarious working bodies within neoliberal workplaces.
The Quantified Workplace: Tracking Affective Labour, for a Change | phoebevmoore
▻https://phoebevmoore.wordpress.com/2017/08/29/the-quantified-workplace-tracking-affective-labour-for-a-cha
In my book, The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts, I argue that all workplace transformations require extra work, but a different kind of work than what might be measured in hours clocked seen in the factory settings. People, in the context of constant transformations, are very often dealing with something scholars call ‘affective’ and ‘emotional’ labour. Hochschild (1983) first labelled the concept of ‘emotional labour’, illustrating self-management of emotion at work, whether it be through suppressing anger or frustration with customers or co-workers, or by providing entertainment and producing joy in others. Hochschild outlined such labour required of cabin crew and in debt collection work (1983). Later, Brook listed ‘nurses, Disneyland workers, retail and childcare workers, schoolteachers, psychotherapists, holiday representatives, call-centre workers, bar staff, waiters and many others’ (2009: 8) as requiring emotional labour. But Firth states that emotion ‘usually refers to an individuated physical feeling (not mental or intellectual) that is passive (not active) and has a more-or-less irrational relationship to the world and outer life’. Firth, building on a large existing literature, contrasts this to affective labour, which is a ‘necessary part of social and ecological assemblages, which passes through the unconscious field’ (2016, 131). These forms of labour, then, become a ‘moral’ obligation in the corporate context. Earlier, Negri (1999) looked at aspects of affect and posits that the use value of such labour cannot be quantified in contemporary conditions in the same way it was during previous eras, because such labour exists in a ‘non-place’, the immaterial. Labour is not directly ‘inside’ capital, nor is it a straightforward ‘nonwaged reproduction of the labourer, added to labour’s use value’ (Clough, 2007: 25) either. Regardless, these days, work seems to happen constantly, all the time, and is both nowhere and everywhere. Work is now all-of-life. So, how can tracking and monitoring for change management, such as seen in the study conducted here, be measured and understood?
#quantified_work #body-studies #quantified_self #self-tracking #affective_labour #emotional_labour #agile #change management
