Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

This paper offers an ethnographic account of tensions around time that arose at a small nonprofit offering employment-assistance programs for newly arrived Iraqi refugees in a large American city. Iraqi refugees have been subjected to multiple interventions, each of which put them on a strict timeline for results. Their experience gives rise to critical insights into the abstract, managerial representations of time that coordinate each of these successive programs. Staff responded to these concerns by attempting to correct clients’ expectations about the future, but this effort remained bound to the same temporal standard and therefore produced further frustrations on the part of clients. Meanwhile, the one employee who attempted to implement an alternative project ended up being disciplined by her employer for misusing time on the job. Tracing this dynamic of tension, conflict, and reconfiguration across multiple standpoints, the paper demonstrates how humanitarian work unfolds through the same contradictions between abstract and concrete forms of time that characterizes commodity-directed labor under the capitalist mode of production as a whole. This finding complicates theoretical models of political subjectivity that have hitherto informed anthropological critiques of humanitarianism and points to abstract social time as a specifically capitalist mechanism of power at work.

This article explores the affective dimensions of precarious labor in Chile's grape-export industry in the centrally located Aconcagua Valley. Although the country's billion-dollar fruit industry is marked as an example of successful development, female seasonal workers (called temporeras) navigate hazardous working conditions and noncompliance of labor laws. Contrary to common assumptions of workers' alienation from labor, their personal identities are deeply entangled in their workplace. This article examines how management invokes temporeras' identities as mothers and care providers as a disciplinary mechanism. At the same time, workers articulate motherhood as a form of endurance. Although efforts by the Chilean government attempt to regulate the fruit-export sector, there is a dismal lack of enforcement of recent labor laws. As a result, temporeras bear the burden of safeguarding their physical well-being. I conclude by suggesting that social relations and the moral textures of everyday interactions provide the possibilities through which workers endure precarious labor.

In recent years, social innovation has received attention as a promising solution to societal challenges, not least because of its claims to create a symbiosis between social purposes and economic benefits. The often uneasy relation between social values and economic values is, however, not easily resolved in practice. Based on ethnographic research in the field of social innovation in Denmark, we argue that the relation between “the social” and “the economic,” representing different value logics, is essentially one of reversibility. The two each encompass their apparent opposite within themselves. This reversible relation elicits a number of challenging oscillations when social innovation is enacted in practice. We term this the hygienic problem of social innovation work. Too much or too little of either the social or the economic contaminates and obfuscates the endeavor of social innovation. As a result, people who do social innovation work seek to enact the “right” or “pure” relation between social and economic concerns. We suggest, however, that the potential of social innovation lies not in this search for purity. Rather, the instability of these categories prompts a continual exploration and creative rethinking of how the intersection of society and business may unfold.

The emergence of hailing and platform labor applications across industries has generated productive theorizing on new forms of worker control, exploitation, and data commodification. Yet, despite their significant use of labor brokerage platforms, care workers are overlooked in political and scholarly analyses of the current platform-based economy. In this article, I describe two facets of the United States home health-care industry to identify how the problems of platform labor—namely, loss of employee status coupled with decentralized oversight and routinization—germinated in the highly exploitative realm of home health care for decades prior to uberized and gig-economy capitalism. In so doing, I consider how technological oversight of remote care workers codifies care in accordance with managerial priorities and reimbursement protocols and I argue that for-profit home-care jobs in the United States presaged processes of precarity, decentralization, surveillance, codification, and data generation that now appear nearly ubiquitous across industries.