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While uncertainty remains about what a smart city “is,” significant advances have been made in the technologies and applications that will underpin their roll out. In this paper, we argue that a smart city or region is not truly “smart” unless it places sustainability and quality of life at the center of the planning, governance, and innovation processes. The public sector lacks the resources to operate at this nexus alone, yet legitimacy challenges must be overcome to effectively draw on the capacities of non-state actors. By focusing on the Greater Phoenix Smart Region Consortium (The Connective), established in March 2019, we illustrate the role non-state actors play within the smart cities/regions space and highlight new types of partnerships to address climate change as part of their smart city vision. The regional and multi-stakeholder, participatory approach of The Connective offers lessons for advancing nexus governance in other jurisdictions.
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Emotions and the Systematization of Connective Labor
A profusion of jobs has arisen in contemporary capitalism involving ‘connective labor’, or the work of emotional recognition. Yet the expansion of this interpersonal work occurs at the same time as its systematization, as pressures of efficiency, measurement and automation reshape the work, generating a ‘colliding intensification’. Existing scholarship offers three different ways of understanding the role of emotions in connective labor – as tool, commodity or vulnerability – depending on their view of systematization as useful, inseparable or dehumanizing. Based on 106 in-depth interviews and 300+ hours of observations, I found that vestiges of all three models lurked in the experience of providing connective labor, yet none fully captured the profound meaning practitioners reported finding in their work. Systems varied on three dimensions, reflecting the relative worth of worker, recipient or the work, extracting value from the forged connections, while the meanings workers derived shaped their perspective on its systematization.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1755419
- PAR ID:
- 10324605
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Theory, Culture & Society
- ISSN:
- 0263-2764
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 026327642110494
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211049475
