Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

Web users with disabilities from Pakistan critique web design methods as members of online feedback communities. One practice in web design that draws criticism is the omission of accessible features from the coding of the user interface/user experience (UI/UX) in the initial stages of web design production. The initial web design is associated with “innovation,” while accessibility becomes the responsibility of those working on the financially constrained and often delayed stage of repair and maintenance. Such a social hierarchy of design-making propagates the exclusion of accessibility from both web design and design labor practices. Using critique from online feedback communities, two disabled Pakistani software designers highlight how accessibility norms define what innovation, responsibility, and expertise are within their domain of work. Drawing together anthropological work on accessibility and science and technology studies, this article analyzes how designers with disabilities build design systems by using critique from feedback communities, open-sourcing, and reshaping code in a boot camp, a graduate school lab, and a corporate accessibility lab. The social work of design-making and the material form of code therefore become tools to challenge inaccessibility and norms of innovation, responsibility, and expertise.

Luxembourg's implementation of a nationwide fare-free public transport (FFPT) policy in March 2020 transformed the everyday work and imaginaries of railway accompaniment personnel who had previously been responsible for fare control. It also sparked debate among both workers and the public about the value of their work. Dialoguing with discursive uses of devaluation as a shorthand for specific hopes and fears about the future of transit work, this article explores railway workers' experiences and perceptions of the transition and proposes a new framework for conceptualizing devaluation. Drawing from ethnographic research with the Luxembourgish national railway agency, Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Luxembourgeois (CFL), this article interrogates what it means for accompaniment personnel to give up the task of fare control by tracing the effects on their work rhythms, interactions with passengers, sense of authority, and visibility. In the absence of fare control, accompaniment personnel continue to produce value for a broader public and largely see their own work as valuable, yet there has been a rupture in the social validation of their labor, which produces feelings of devaluation.

As I read “Revaluing Work after COVID-19” (Collins, this issue), I wondered how was it that garment workers making the personal protective equipment (PPE) so desperately needed during the pandemic were never considered “essential workers.” As governments wrestled with the need to sustain their economies while safeguarding the health of citizens, keeping health infrastructures functioning, and ensuring the basic needs of populations could be met, they had to determine whose work was “essential.” As Collins (this issue) shows, these debates exceeded the “narrow technical meanings coming to signify workers who were putting their lives on the line to insure the well-being of the rest of us.” Amidst celebrations of other “essential workers” and craftivists sewing masks from the comfort of their homes, the non-essential essential labor of garment workers stayed on the margins of the historical memory of COVID-19. This essay thinks with Collins to consider how garment workers got lost in between the scales of the national and transnational.

India's textile and clothing worlds are marked by a distinctive model of creative interaction between “designers” and “artisans.” Referencing different skills and social positions, this designer–artisan dyad was relationally configured during India's post-colonial transition in the 1940–50s, imbued with distinctively modernist ambitions of national development. Such imperatives remain prominent in pedagogy at Indian design schools, where novice designers are routinely taught to develop relationships with artisans and position themselves as intermediaries between “village” traditions and world markets. At a moment when fashion industry institutions globally are grappling with colonial legacies, Threads: Sustaining India's Textile Traditions takes up the question of how, and on what terms, Indian fashion designers and textile artisans perceive value in their shared projects.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath instigated a series of debates about economic value. From early discussions about “who counts as an essential worker” to post-pandemic arguments about what constitutes the “infrastructure” needed to rebuild the economy, the pandemic led to reexaminations of the kinds of investments and activities necessary for the continuity of our social system. This article examines these debates through the lens of the labor theory of value as expanded by feminists and ecologists. Drawing on my 2017 book, The Politics of Value, I discuss how the political-economic upheaval that the pandemic unleashed laid bare the essential nature of care and social reproductive work, low-wage labor, public sector provisioning, and ecosystem services. The stark dilemmas of holding body and soul together during the crisis created an opportunity to rethink the artificial lines between the market and the rest of life, highlighting the essential nature of activities formerly unrecognized or considered nonproductive. The article discusses how we might take advantage of this opening to create new vocabularies and measurement practices that take into “account” and fairly reward formerly invisible and unvalued forms of labor.

Written in the swim and wake of the world financial crisis, Jane Collins's book The Politics of Value: Three Movements to Change How We Think about the Economy (2017) tells a history of the US economy and finance that is fundamentally and distinctively anthropological. By this I mean not that it draws on research outside of the so-called West or so-called market-based societies but that it begins its analysis by questioning the taken-for-granted assumptions upon which the economy is organized and work is valued.¹

In The Politics of Value, Collins told the history of the decline of “the embedded liberalism compromise” (Ruggie, 1982, 1991). A major catalyst and symptom of this decline was the rise of the preeminently disembedded concept of shareholder value, which allowed for the dislocation of social utility or a labor theory of value from share prices (Collins, 2016, 2017). Like a number of other scholars (Federici, 2018; Fraser, 2017; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Graeber, 2019; Hart et al., 2010), she focused attention on how valuation happens in capitalist economies and how definitions of value render certain problems and populations outside its frame, literally invisible or, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot would describe it, “unthinkable” (1991). Collins aims to expand the thinkability of forms of valuation that account for things like just distribution, social reproduction, and generational transfer.

The Politics of Value focused on three cases emergent in the mid-2010s, centered on ethical corporate practices, place-based and “slow” capital projects, and contention over labor in the context of public and civil service. Building on the insights of that earlier inquiry, especially the focus on valuation as political, Collins opens her 2023 article by saying, “Calling something valuable is always a discursive move, but it is part of a discourse about materiality. The conversations about economic value described in this paper all contend with the fact that our contemporary accounting practices fail to register activities essential for social life and that this failure has material consequences” (2023, 2). Materiality here has two related and important meanings: it refers to the tangible, apprehensible effects of valuation and revaluation, and also their relevance—how they matter for people. The COVID-19 pandemic, especially in its earlier phases, caused us to focus attention on what matters—thus bringing into view who the “essential workers” are, what is “essential” in the economy, and what infrastructure is required, in the first place, to meet social needs. Collins's emphasis on value as political and therefore contentious allows us to see how people prise open spaces where these questions can be seen, can be discussed, and can become thinkable in the first place.

This article explores the curious case of the ketab shenass (book knower), a figure unique to the Iranian publishing industry. Ketab shenass play a crucial role in the production of translated books, yet their labor is invisible and uncompensated. A comparison of their expertise to that of their closest counterparts reveals that anxieties surrounding the politics of mediation undergird the invisibility of the labor of the ketab shenass.

Alternatives to traditional waged and salaried work have become increasingly relevant in a post-pandemic U.S. labor market in which it seems that everyone hates their job. This article proposes that nonemployer businesses, business firms with no paid employees other than the business owner(s), constitute a distinct economic and cultural category of independent work in the U.S. economy, in addition to being a specific category of small business. Building from anthropological scholarship on entrepreneurship and on alternative forms of work, I argue that nonemployers are a recognizably discrete group from independent contractors because they think of their ventures as businesses. At the same time, nonemployer business owners expend their energy on building more holistic lifestyles rather than on wealth and capital accumulation. These findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in New York and North Carolina from 2017 to 2020. The stories I gathered illustrate that, by doing the work and running the business, nonemployer business owners control the practices and process of their work, and avoid both the precarity of other work arrangements and the stresses of growth-oriented entrepreneurship.