Workplaces have long sought to improve employee productivity and performance by monitoring and tracking a variety of indicators. Increasingly, these efforts target the health and wellbeing of the employee – recognizing that a healthy and active worker is a productive one. Influenced by managerial trends in personalized and participatory medicine (Swan 2012), some workplaces have begun to pilot their own programs, utilizing fitness wearables and personal analytics to reduce sedentary lifestyles. These programs typically take the form of gamified self-tracking challenges combining cooperation, competition, and fundraising to incentivize participants to get moving. While seemingly providing new arrows in the bio-political quiver – that is, tools to keep employees disciplined yet active, healthy yet profitable (Lupton 2012) – there is also a certain degree of acceptance and participation. Although participants are shaped by self-tracking technologies, “they also, in turn, shape them by their own ideas and practices” (Ruckenstein 2014: 70). In this paper, we argue that instead of viewing self-tracking challenges solely through discourses of power or empowerment, the more pressing question concerns “how our relationship to our tracking activities takes shape within a constellation of habits, cultural norms, material conditions, ideological constraints” (Van Den Eede 2015: 157). We confront these tensions through an empiric case study of self-tracking challenges for staff and faculty at two Canadian universities. By cutting through the hype, this paper uncovers how self-trackers are becoming (and not just left to) their own devices.
长期以来,工作场所一直寻求通过监控和跟踪各种指标来提高员工的生产力和绩效。这些努力越来越多地以员工的健康和福祉为目标——认识到健康和积极的员工是有生产力的。受个性化和参与式医疗管理趋势的影响(Swan 2012),一些工作场所已经开始试行自己的计划,利用健身可穿戴设备和个人分析来减少久坐的生活方式。这些项目通常采取游戏化的自我追踪挑战的形式,结合合作、竞争和筹款,激励参与者行动起来。虽然似乎在生物政治的箭袋中提供了新的箭头——即保持员工自律、活跃、健康和盈利的工具(Lupton 2012)——但也有一定程度的接受和参与。尽管参与者是由自我跟踪技术塑造的,但“他们也反过来由自己的想法和实践塑造他们”(Ruckenstein 2014:70)。在本文中,我们认为,与其仅仅通过权力或赋权的话语来看待自我追踪挑战,更紧迫的问题是“我们与追踪活动的关系是如何在习惯、文化规范、物质条件和意识形态约束的范围内形成的”(Van Den Eede 2015:157)。我们通过对加拿大两所大学教职员工自我跟踪挑战的实证案例研究来应对这些紧张局势。通过减少炒作,本文揭示了自动跟踪器是如何成为(而不仅仅是)自己的设备的。
{"title":"Becoming Your Own Device: Self-Tracking Challenges In The Workplace","authors":"S. Richardson, D. Mackinnon","doi":"10.29173/CJS28974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS28974","url":null,"abstract":"Workplaces have long sought to improve employee productivity and performance by monitoring and tracking a variety of indicators. Increasingly, these efforts target the health and wellbeing of the employee – recognizing that a healthy and active worker is a productive one. Influenced by managerial trends in personalized and participatory medicine (Swan 2012), some workplaces have begun to pilot their own programs, utilizing fitness wearables and personal analytics to reduce sedentary lifestyles. These programs typically take the form of gamified self-tracking challenges combining cooperation, competition, and fundraising to incentivize participants to get moving. While seemingly providing new arrows in the bio-political quiver – that is, tools to keep employees disciplined yet active, healthy yet profitable (Lupton 2012) – there is also a certain degree of acceptance and participation. Although participants are shaped by self-tracking technologies, “they also, in turn, shape them by their own ideas and practices” (Ruckenstein 2014: 70). In this paper, we argue that instead of viewing self-tracking challenges solely through discourses of power or empowerment, the more pressing question concerns “how our relationship to our tracking activities takes shape within a constellation of habits, cultural norms, material conditions, ideological constraints” (Van Den Eede 2015: 157). We confront these tensions through an empiric case study of self-tracking challenges for staff and faculty at two Canadian universities. By cutting through the hype, this paper uncovers how self-trackers are becoming (and not just left to) their own devices.","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.29173/CJS28974","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47744040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ricciardelli, Rose and Peters, Adrienne M.F (Eds.), After Prison: Navigating Employment and Reintegration","authors":"D. Dunford","doi":"10.29173/CJS29509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS29509","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.29173/CJS29509","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43889137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Historical accounts of the business response to basic income proposals imply that employer attitudes have been mixed. In the 1970s and 1980s, when an array of basic income schemes was proposed, some groups were supportive and others were opposed. This paper shows that, in a number of high-profile proposals in Canada and the US, behind the apparent dissensus among business groups lays a consensus stance against universalistic and unconditional guaranteed income schemes. The disagreement among business groups comes down to either (1) a basic misunderstanding of proposal details, or (2) the fact that the policy itself can take on a wide range of concrete forms. To the extent that business has exhibited support for guaranteed income policies, the actual policies in question tended to be “two-tiered” rather than unitary, selective rather than universal, and miserly rather than generous. The income maintenance policies that garnered some support among business groups would all include explicit or implicit work requirements for “able-bodied” adults. By contrast, generous, unconditional guaranteed income policies that reduce workers’ market dependence—namely, those that basic income advocates find desirable—found no audience in business circles. I close by exploring the mechanisms underlying the impact of basic income on bargaining relationships in the labour market and comment on the promises and pitfalls of a social policy that continues to be highly malleable.
{"title":"“If the Work Requirement is Strong”: The Business Response to Basic Income Proposals in Canada and the US","authors":"David Calnitsky","doi":"10.29173/CJS29357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS29357","url":null,"abstract":"Historical accounts of the business response to basic income proposals imply that employer attitudes have been mixed. In the 1970s and 1980s, when an array of basic income schemes was proposed, some groups were supportive and others were opposed. This paper shows that, in a number of high-profile proposals in Canada and the US, behind the apparent dissensus among business groups lays a consensus stance against universalistic and unconditional guaranteed income schemes. The disagreement among business groups comes down to either (1) a basic misunderstanding of proposal details, or (2) the fact that the policy itself can take on a wide range of concrete forms. To the extent that business has exhibited support for guaranteed income policies, the actual policies in question tended to be “two-tiered” rather than unitary, selective rather than universal, and miserly rather than generous. The income maintenance policies that garnered some support among business groups would all include explicit or implicit work requirements for “able-bodied” adults. By contrast, generous, unconditional guaranteed income policies that reduce workers’ market dependence—namely, those that basic income advocates find desirable—found no audience in business circles. I close by exploring the mechanisms underlying the impact of basic income on bargaining relationships in the labour market and comment on the promises and pitfalls of a social policy that continues to be highly malleable.","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.29173/CJS29357","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49574130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Macías-Rojas, Patrisia, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America.","authors":"E. Cruz, Katie Dingeman-Cerda","doi":"10.29173/CJS29511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS29511","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44805126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jonathan Fox, The Unfree Exercise of Religion: A World Survey of Discrimination against Religious Minorities.","authors":"Sadia Saeed","doi":"10.29173/CJS29465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS29465","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.29173/CJS29465","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47702761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critically reconsidering Durkheim’s sociology of suicide, we develop a quantitative analysis of individual level data contained in the Canadian Community Health Survey (2009-2012) to investigate the relationship between perceptions of social support and suicidality in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. We operationalize Durkheim’s general sociology to investigate relationships between people’s perceptions of the more objective aspects of social life (structural-institutional) and the more subjective dimensions of social life, on suicidal ideation. We find that people’s perceptions of the quality of social support available to them significantly affect susceptibility to suicidality, lending credence to key aspects of Durkheim’s general sociology of social pathology.
{"title":"“Who’s Got My Back?”: A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Suicidality and Perceptions of Social Support in British Columbia and Saskatchewan","authors":"M. Nakhaie, R. Datta","doi":"10.29173/CJS28332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS28332","url":null,"abstract":"Critically reconsidering Durkheim’s sociology of suicide, we develop a quantitative analysis of individual level data contained in the Canadian Community Health Survey (2009-2012) to investigate the relationship between perceptions of social support and suicidality in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. We operationalize Durkheim’s general sociology to investigate relationships between people’s perceptions of the more objective aspects of social life (structural-institutional) and the more subjective dimensions of social life, on suicidal ideation. We find that people’s perceptions of the quality of social support available to them significantly affect susceptibility to suicidality, lending credence to key aspects of Durkheim’s general sociology of social pathology.","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45656309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Elizabeth Quinlan, Andrea Quinlan, Curtis Fogel, and Gail Taylor. (Eds.), Sexual Violence at Canadian Universities: Activism, Institutional Responses, and Strategies for Change.","authors":"A. Hibberd","doi":"10.29173/CJS29469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS29469","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.29173/CJS29469","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46682406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"van den Berg, Axel, Charles Plante, Hicham Raïq, Christine Proulx and Samuel Faustmann, Combating Poverty: Quebec’s Pursuit of a Distinctive Welfare State.","authors":"S. Dinan","doi":"10.29173/CJS29464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS29464","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43871678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Snyder, Gregory, Skateboarding LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding.","authors":"Matthew Atencio","doi":"10.29173/CJS29468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS29468","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43257372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prashan Ranasinghe. Helter-Shelter: Security, Legality, and an Ethic of Care in an Emergency Shelter","authors":"Rylan Kafara","doi":"10.29173/CJS29466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29173/CJS29466","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46469,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Sociology-Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie","volume":"43 1","pages":"207-210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46131247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}