Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

This paper examines the project of US corporate diversity and inclusion as it is experienced by LGBTQ-identified employees on Wall Street. It draws on ethnographic research among junior bankers who participate in Wall Street’s LGBTQ recruitment events and employee networks. Attending to their claims that queer difference affords them valuable workplace skills, this paper situates these claims within the gendered ideals of Wall Street, models of entrepreneurial selfhood, and ethical projects of self-fashioning. It argues that diversity and inclusion is not simply a novel means for corporations to extract value from workers. On Wall Street, LGBTQ bankers use diversity and inclusion to, as they say, “bring their full selves to work” and fashion themselves as queer and financial subjects. Starting from their first experiences at the banks’ recruitment events, they are incited to pursue this project of self-fashioning by exemplary senior LGBTQ leaders. They learn that by managing queer difference as human capital today, they can achieve professional success in the future. In pursuit of this payoff, they engage with queer difference as an object of speculation.

In India, many women from former untouchable caste groups (Dalits) are domestic workers. Despite attempts at seeking formal, legal recognition, they continue to be seen by the state as part of a broad, ambiguous category of “informal workers” whose work is stigmatized and not legislated for. In this essay, I suggest that the discourses and practices of a neighborhood-level Dalit domestic workers’ union in Mumbai reconceptualize domestic work as “formal” work. The workers assert themselves as formal workers (kamgaar) owing to their long histories of work in specific neighborhoods, relationships of trust with employers, and their ability to negotiate long-standing employment with them. Though domestic work does not align with the state’s definition of formal work (for example, through the presence of written contracts), for the workers, it was their own qualities, origins, social positions, and relationships that defined the formality of work rather than the other way around. Centering respect and dignity in their own work, their union also facilitated the articulation of the caste and gender-based prejudices that have not only kept domestic workers outside the ambit of formal recognition but also have brought about routine encounters with violence and harassment for Dalit women in the local neighborhood.

In 2017, the Ukrainian Parliament approved a bill that marked the start of long-awaited health care reform. Yet it met opposition from the Trade Union of Health Care Workers, which organized a mass protest against the proposed reform. I argue that the union’s resistance can be understood as an accrual of insecurity experienced by providers of clinical labor in Ukraine’s changing health sector in the last several decades. Although no comprehensive overhaul of the health care system had taken place until 2017, there have been changes on the level of everyday practice; these changes have left health care providers disillusioned about the commitment and expertise of politicians to effect positive change in the health sector, forced them to combine several lines of work to generate enough income, and have left them and their patients vulnerable to the market. Supporters of the union found that the language of the reform lacked a commitment to social protections, and instead it focused on poor health indicators, eliminating inefficiencies, cost-saving mechanisms, and physicians’ failures in providing quality care. Trade union demands have attempted to refocus the narrative by drawing attention to the difficult conditions faced by clinical labor in Ukraine and the need to recommit to health care as a human right.

Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theories, this paper offers an ethnography of work focused on a professional ice hockey team in Finland, where hockey is the leading sport in terms of popularity and economic investment. It is an analysis of the everyday investments in developing individual players’ skills and in building teams capable of high levels of cooperation under conditions of unpredictability. By looking at team formation as an emergent set of practices, materialities, discourses, and affects, we are better able to account for how corporations of this kind mitigate the deterritorializing effects of player mobility through processes of reterritorialization. As such, the analysis offers insights into modalities of value creation in a corporate model that relies not only on the constant improvement of worker performance in ways that can be easily measured but also on intangible facets of worker collaboration that manifest as collective desire.

Coastal plain economies are dependent on seasonal, low-wage labor for tourism, fisheries, construction, and other sectors. Historically, labor in these sectors has come from multiple social and cultural backgrounds: natives, legal and undocumented immigrants, visiting mariners, students, guestworkers, etc. Anti-immigration sentiments around the world have forced undocumented immigrants further underground while increasing demand for legal guestworkers, encouraging the growth of subcontracting and nonmarket labor relations, making work more precarious and laying the groundwork for human participation in livelihood constellations—or several activities that individuals and households combine for income, health, and well-being. Focusing on Eastern North Carolina, this paper examines how these processes influence local economies and the lives of working people, using this analysis as an occasion to critique market-emphasis economic analysis.

This article describes apprenticeship as an ethnographic field method, exploring the forms ethnographic apprenticeship takes, the working knowledge passed through situated practice, and the impacts that working as a craft apprentice has on the work of anthropology. I draw on my experience as an apprentice luthier in West Virginia with two musical instrument makers to show how apprenticeship is a relational process contingent on context, its efficacy in communicating affective and embodied practices essential to understanding the meaning of craft labor to practitioners, and the implications for collaboration, reciprocity, learning, and documentation within ethnographic fieldwork and the discipline of anthropology.

Men who migrate to Delhi, India, from West Bengal to fulfill the male breadwinner expectation by operating cycle rickshaws claim that business is slow, which keeps their families’ expectations for remittances low and helps camouflage their slacking. Slacking is a crucial activity in light of the men’s belief that operating a cycle rickshaw dries out their bodies such that it reduces their sexual fitness. Their laziness supports the masculine goal of remaining sexually fit, and when they privilege this goal over the demand for productivity inherent in the breadwinner role, the standard analytic of productive versus reproductive labor becomes untenable. It is instead argued that the men’s behavior reveals a limited case of anti-productivism. Studies of anti-productivism are usually confined to Western workers, and those that take gender into account usually focus on workers’ gendered positions in society’s division of labor. This article shows how clashes between gender ideals at the somatic level can provoke an anti-productivist response. It also shows that tension between culturally particular ideas about the embodied consequences of labor performance and workers’ gendered body ideals can have profound effects on the workers’ orientation to their labor.¹