An official website of the United States government
Nearly one third of U.S workers are self-employed or independent contractors. Autonomy has long been identified as a driving motivation for independent workers, but it remains unclear how these workers experience agency in their day-to-day lives. In an interview and diary study with highly-skilled independent workers, we find that “autonomy” is not a monolithic or unidimensional experience; rather, there are multiple forms of autonomy, that we label “agencies” that workers value. In addition, the experienced value of these agencies generally supersedes the uncertainties associated with independent work, even during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. By creating a framework of experienced agencies in independent work, this paper expands our understanding of how autonomy is experienced in practice and the tradeoffs that independent workers make in service of seeking various forms of agency. For, we find that only when experienced agency disappears entirely, with little hope of returning, do these highly-skilled workers consider abandoning independent work and contemplate working for a traditional organization.
more »
« less
Autonomy on the horizon: comparing institutional approaches to disability and elder care
This article asks how people come to interpret themselves and others as autonomous given their multiple dependencies. We draw on a cross-case comparison of ethnographic studies with two populations for whom autonomy is both central and problematic: elderly patients in post-acute care, and young adults with disabilities in an independent living program. Analyzing the institutional efforts to make their clients “as independent as possible,” we find that staff members at each organization formulate autonomy as a temporal project through an ongoing calibration of open futures, ideal pasts, and situational competence. Constantly adjusting and fine-tuning where in time autonomy “really” is, workers arrange present dependence so that the contours of the future remain open for their clients. In other words, they make use of temporal markers to produce recognizable autonomous subjects whose dependencies are momentary. Theorizing this temporal project enables us to see more clearly how all of us engage in the constant business of “doing” autonomy, and to better understand the role of institutions in producing autonomous selves.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1802591
- PAR ID:
- 10281730
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Theory and Society
- ISSN:
- 0304-2421
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
We are storing and querying datasets with the private information of individuals at an unprecedented scale in settings ranging from IoT devices in smart homes to mining enormous collections of click trails for targeted advertising. Here, the privacy of the people described in these datasets is usually addressed as an afterthought, engineered on top of a DBMS optimized for performance. At best, these systems support security or managing access to sensitive data. This status quo has brought us a plethora of data breaches in the news. In response, governments are stepping in to enact privacy regulations such as the EU’s GDPR. We posit that there is an urgent need for trustworthy database system that offer end-to-end privacy guarantees for their records with user interfaces that closely resemble that of a relational database. As we shall see, these guarantees inform everything in the database’s design from how we store data to what query results we make available to untrusted clients. In this position paper we first define trustworthy database systems and put their research challenges in the context of relevant tools and techniques from the security community. We then use this backdrop to walk through the “life of a query” in a trustworthy database system. We start with the query parsing and follow the query’s path as the system plans, optimizes, and executes it. We highlight how we will need to rethink each step to make it efficient, robust, and usable for database clients.more » « less
-
Given a set of facilities and clients, and costs to open facilities, the classic facility location problem seeks to open a set of facilities and assign each client to one open facility to minimize the cost of opening the chosen facilities and the total distance of the clients to their assigned open facilities. Such an objective may induce an unequal cost over certain socioeconomic groups of clients (i.e., total distance traveled by clients in such a group). This is important when planning the location of socially relevant facilities such as emergency rooms. In this work, we consider a fair version of the problem where we are given 𝑟 clients groups that partition the set of clients, and the distance of a given group is defined as the average distance of clients in the group to their respective open facilities. The objective is to minimize the Minkowski 𝑝-norm of vector of group distances, to penalize high access costs to open facilities across 𝑟 groups of clients. This generalizes classic facility location (𝑝 = 1) and the minimization of the maximum group distance (𝑝 = ∞). However, in practice, fairness criteria may not be explicit or even known to a decision maker, and it is often unclear how to select a specific "𝑝" to model the cost of unfairness. To get around this, we study the notion of solution portfolios where for a fixed problem instance, we seek a small portfolio of solutions such that for any Minkowski norm 𝑝, one of these solutions is an 𝑂(1)-approximation. Using the geometric relationship between various 𝑝-norms, we show the existence of a portfolio of cardinality 𝑂(log 𝑟), and a lower bound of (\sqrt{log r}). There may not be common structure across different solutions in this portfolio, which can make planning difficult if the notion of fairness changes over time or if the budget to open facilities is disbursed over time. For example, small changes in 𝑝 could lead to a completely different set of open facilities in the portfolio. Inspired by this, we introduce the notion of refinement, which is a family of solutions for each 𝑝-norm satisfying a combinatorial property. This property requires that (1) the set of facilities open for a higher 𝑝-norm must be a subset of the facilities open for a lower 𝑝-norm, and (2) all clients assigned to an open facility for a lower 𝑝-norm must be assigned to the same open facility for any higher 𝑝-norm. A refinement is 𝛼-approximate if the solution for each 𝑝-norm problem is an 𝛼-approximation for it. We show that it is sufficient to consider only 𝑂(log 𝑟) norms instead of all 𝑝-norms, 𝑝 ∈ [1, ∞] to construct refinements. A natural greedy algorithm for the problem gives a poly(𝑟)-approximate refinement, which we improve to poly(r^1/\sqrt{log 𝑟})-approximate using a recursive algorithm. We improve this ratio to 𝑂(log 𝑟) for the special case of tree metric for uniform facility open cost. Our recursive algorithm extends to other settings, including to a hierarchical facility location problem that models facility location problems at several levels, such as public works departments and schools. A full version of this paper can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14873.more » « less
-
Abstract ‘Big Data’ digital technologies are beginning to make inroads into peasant agriculture in the Global South. Of particular importance is the subset of technologies that appropriate agricultural decision‐making, here theorized as surveillance agriculture. These technological regimes aspire to not only remove decision‐making from the farmer, but eventually to replace the farmer with, for instance, ‘autonomous’ tractors. This paper looks ahead to ask what a technological trajectory that aspires to autonomy for the tractor may portend for autonomy for the peasant farmer. It compares surveillance agriculture to other forms of surveillance capitalism, noting that it shares a will to not only sell products and services but to manipulate behaviour but differs in that the behaviour being manipulated is professional productive behaviour. The paper surveys the vested interests of the entities behind surveillance agriculture and asks how informational relations of production may be changed between farmers and these entities. It then examines the informational relations of production among peasant farmers that may be interdicted by surveillance agriculture, especially the group‐level decision‐making dynamics that make ‘individual autonomy’ a misnomer. But surveillance agriculture is resolutely individualized, which raises concerns for peasant decision‐making autonomy.more » « less
-
Project Overview Jurisdictional boundaries of governmental agencies often do not align with the geographic or social boundaries of the policy issues they are tasked with addressing. This spatial mismatch is especially common in relation to natural resources and the environment. Where it occurs, achievement of policy goals may require coordination across jurisdictions, which can lead to mutual benefits. Yet, governmental agencies may view coordination as costly or as leading to a loss of autonomy. This project examined coordination decisions made by local level governmental agencies in California, as they formed Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) and subsequently coordinated development of their first groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs) under California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). The project addresses the question of how agencies make decisions and manage interactions when under a coordination mandate that allots agencies the discretion to decide how to coordinate. More specifically, it investigates:What factors influence decisions regarding the geographic extent of and parties involved in development of new formal agencies for groundwater management,How do concerns about the potential risks of coordination affect the choice of coordination mechanisms,How does the structure of agency interactions affect their achievement of the objectives of the coordination mandate, andHow do agencies make sense of a coordination mandate and how does that sense-making process influence the decisions agencies make when deciding how to respond to the mandate?more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09434-4
