Future of Work (session 726)

When:  Aug 2, 2021 from 12:30 to 14:00 (FR)

Out with the new, and in with the old? Bourdieu, crisis, and the (in)equitable future of work
Author: Senia Kalfa; Macquarie U.
Author: Layla Jayne Branicki; The Open U. Business School
Author: Stephen Brammer; U. of Bath

The COVID-19 pandemic, as a multi-dimensional crisis, is having profound impacts on the field of work. Despite a proliferation of claims that it will usher in a new and better normal in workplaces, the crisis has generated a range of adverse impacts for employees and work, and it remains unclear how enduring any positive impacts of the crisis will be. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptual architecture, we examine the impact of the pandemic on the field of work through 43 in-depth phone interviews with human resource (HR) managers conducted between April and September 2020. Our evidence illustrates that COVID-19 has surfaced competing orthodox and heterodox discourses, the former based on employee monitoring and a separation of work from home and the latter on trust, flexibility and the blended workplace. We find that the HR managers we interviewed make sense of their new environment based on their habitus and on their capacity to decipher the newly established social context. We draw on Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis - a temporary state in which the opportunity of field-change sits at odds with actors’ habitus – to explain why the COVID-19 pandemic presents both the opportunity for a radical transformation towards a more inclusive future of work, and the risk of a regressive and exclusionary alternative. Our findings highlight the central role played by managers in their everyday work in determining how the current crisis will impact work as both a field and a lived reality.

Toward a Critical Attribution Theory: An illustrative case and agenda for future research
Author: Benedetta Colaiacovo; U. degli Studi di Milano
Author: Marco Guerci; U. degli Studi di Milano
Author: Silvia Gilardi; U. degli Studi di Milano

Organization and HRM research had count on different psychological theories to predict a people’s reactions to relevant events at work. In this perspective, a great interest has been devoted towards Attribution Theory (AT). However, a critical analysis reveals that the application of attribution theory in organization and HRM research has been informed by some assumptions of the neoliberal ideology. Therefore, this paper adopts a critical approach to provide an overview of how the application of mainstream attribution theory in organization and HRM studies has been oriented by instrumentality and individualism and propose a critical attribution theory as a viable alternative. Finally, an illustrative case is presented to show how critical attribution theory can be successfully applied with respect to digital technologies implementation.

The Ethics of Algorithmic Work: A Baradian Exploration of Inequalities in Digital Platform Labor
Author: Alice Ro Sofie Wickström; Aalto U., Department of Management Studies
Author: Ari Kuismin; Aalto U., School of Business
Author: Saija Katila; Dr.Sc. (Econ. & Bus. Adm.) Senior Lecturer

In this paper, we explore inequalities within digital platform labor, and algorithmic management through Karen Barad’s feminist materialist understanding of ethicality, how values matter and get materialized. Grounded in an entangled approach to the world, Barad focuses on the enactment of cuts that determine what comes to matter, and what is excluded from mattering, which shape bodies, discourses, subjectivities and relations. Following this, we analyze the algorithmic technology of a digital platform for takeaway deliveries, Foodora, and show how it orients workers’ bodies in particular disembodied, and at times even cruel, ways, while also privileging reactivity over relationality, and individuality over collectivism. We argue that the algorithmic function can be understood as an apparatus that ‘cuts-in’ and ‘cuts-out’ certain practices, dispositions and affects, which shapes how the work(er) comes to matter in a way which privileges capital over the laboring bodies. This implies that it is not a neutral, or equal, technology but a part of broader capitalist-entanglement that reproduces sameness, excludes difference and thus relational ethicality. We contribute to the growing critical literature on digital labor platforms by emphasizing the need to account for the agency of materiality, and to the sociomaterial literature in management- and organization studies by further elaborating on the ethical implications of relational thinking. We shed light on how algorithmic management, and digital platform labor, reflect and (re)produce already existing inequalities and injustices related to class and race, and explore how feminist materialist theorizing can open up for more ethical form(s) of knowledge-production.

The theology of gamification
Author: Nick Butler; Stockholm U.
Author: Sverre Spoelstra; Lund U., Shool of Economics and Management

Coined in 2002, the term ‘gamification’ refers to the application of game-elements to non-game contexts, most notably the sphere of work. Spearheaded by consultancy firms such as BunchBall and Badgeville, the aim of gamification is to make work seem like – or even become – its opposite: play. Two basic criticisms have been made about gamification. First, gamification is said to bear no resemblance to the true richness and variety of videogames. Second, gamification is said to be a neo-Tayloristic management technique that exploits workers beneath the surface of a videogame. Both criticisms imply that work could be made more meaningful and humane if only organizations were infused with a genuine play-spirit – either by designing better gamified systems or by developing subversive forms of counter-gamification. In other words, while the two main critical perspectives question the method or objectives of corporate gamification, they rarely challenge its most fundamental assumption: that true play will set work free. In this paper, we challenge this view. By teasing out the implicit theological dimensions of gamification, we raise ethical questions about the moral privileging of play over work in contemporary organizations.

Location

Event Image