An official website of the United States government
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.
more »
« less
Designing within Capitalism
Why do social computing projects aimed at alleviating social inequality fail? This paper investigates this question through a qualitative interview study with 25 individuals working to address the problem of wage theft in the United States (US) context. Our analyses uncover failures at three levels or scales of interaction: one, failures at the individual level of technology adoption; two, relational failures (i.e., the anti-labor worker/employer dynamic in the US); and three, institutional or macro-level failures. Taken together, these various failings point to larger, structural forces that negatively fate pro-labor projects’ trajectories – i.e., capitalism. Capitalism's incarnations in the US play a significant and at times harsh grip in steering the path of social computing design projects. In this paper, we untangle the relationship between capitalism and social computing, providing an analytic framework to tease apart this complex relationship, the lessons learned from our empirical data, as well as ways forward for future, pro-labor, social computing projects.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10391168
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- DIS '22: Designing Interactive Systems Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 439 to 453
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This study examines the association between the division of cognitive housework and parents' relationship satisfaction. Background. Equity theory suggests that factors which either objectively (i.e., equal sharing) or subjectively (i.e., feeling appreciated) enhance partners' feelings of mutual benefit lead to greater relationship satisfaction. From an equity perspective, cognitive labor may be especially consequential for relationship satisfaction not only because it is boundless, burdensome work but also because it is invisible and often unappreciated. Drawing on equity theory, we argue that relationship satisfaction is highest when cognitive labor is equally shared. Method. We use cross‐sectional data on different‐gender partnered US parents from Wave 5 of the Study on US Parents' Divisions of Labor During COVID‐19 (SPDLC) and OLS regression to estimate associations between the division of cognitive housework and relationship satisfaction separately for mothers and fathers. Results. Equal divisions of cognitive housework are associated with the highest levels of relationship satisfaction for both mothers and fathers. This association is consistent across various measures and dimensions of cognitive housework, with few exceptions.Conclusion. Relationship satisfaction is highest when partners equally share cognitive housework, as sharing this labor may reduce burdens on one parent as well as increase the visibility and value of this often hidden form of domestic labor.more » « less
-
Attracting and retaining new developers is often at the heart of open-source project sustainability and success. Previous research found many intrinsic (or endogenous) project characteristics asso- ciated with the attractiveness of projects to new developers, but the impact of factors external to the project itself have largely been overlooked. In this work, we focus on one such external factor, a project’s labor pool, which is dened as the set of contributors active in the overall open-source ecosystem that the project could plausibly attempt to recruit from at a given time. How are the size and characteristics of the labor pool associated with a project’s attractiveness to new contributors? Through an empirical study of over 516,893 Python projects, we found that the size of the project’s labor pool, the technical skill match, and the social connection be- tween the project’s labor pool and members of the focal project all signicantly inuence the number of new developers that the focal project attracts, with the competition between projects with overlapping labor pools also playing a role. Overall, the labor pool factors add considerable explanatory power compared to models with only project-level characteristics.more » « less
-
Lewkowicz, M; Schmidt, K (Ed.)This paper draws on Michel de Certeau’s notion of "tactics" to explore the use of data in labor organizing research in CSCW [? ]. Taking a historical view, we first analyze a set of cases from 20th century US labor history that offer three distinct lenses on the risks of data-based advocacy campaigns: wagers, compromises, and concessions. Across our cases, we frame reformers’ use of data tactics as a rhetorical move, taken to advance incremental worker gains under conditions of precarity [90, 105, 154]. However, by continuing to rely on certain data-based arguments in the short term, we argue that labor reformers may have limited the frame of debate for broader arguments necessary to improve conditions in the long-term. These tensions follow us into data-based advocacy research in the present, such as the emerging "digital workerism" movement [70]. To ensure the continuation of responsible advocacy research in CSCW, we offer insights from social justice movements to suggest how members of the HCI and CSCW communities can work more intentionally alongside (or without) data methods to support worker-led direct action.more » « less
-
Most students readily see the value of studying computing as a path to a good job and know that the application of computing can generate business value. At the same time, we now face a world where pervasive computing is enabling a misalignment between business value and social value. However, computing also holds the potential to drive positive social change and to serve the greater good. This talk will discuss how some of the recent revisions to the computer science major at Dickinson College elevate this potential. A thread emphasizing computing for the greater good that now runs through our courses engages students in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) with explicit humanitarian goals (HFOSS). The missions of these HFOSS communities provide real examples of ways in which computing can be focused intentionally on creating a positive social impact. At the same time, learning and working with HFOSS tools, processes, artifacts and community members builds the hard and soft skills that students and employers want. Students are exposed to FOSS concepts and examples of HFOSS in our first course. A sequence of two ½ courses at the intermediate level familiarize students with FOSS communities and build their technical skills by engaging them in an authentic HFOSS project. This project is FarmData2, which we manage in collaboration with the Dickinson College organic farm. In a year-long senior capstone students research FOSS and HFOSS projects/communities that are of interest to them. They then form teams, choose projects and engage with their selected project communities “in the wild.” Details on some of the activities that students complete and examples of the types of contributions they have made both to FarmData2 and to the projects they have chosen in the capstone will be given. Analyses of pre/post course survey data and the types of projects selected in the capstone will be presented. These analyses suggest that (1) students gain an appreciation that they can use computing to contribute to the greater good, (2) that they become more likely to continue contributing to FOSS or HFOSS projects and (3) that engaging students in HFOSS holds potential for broadening participation in computing.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533559
