This paper explores recent developments in anti-work theory to identify key learnings for ethnographers in industry. It focuses in particular on how anti-work perspectives allow us to rethink the managerial...
Tag: work
Human Skills as Essential Skills: Preparing Job Seekers Who Were Skilled through Alternative Routes for Inclusion in the Future Economy
INTRODUCTION Pundits, policy-makers, and ordinary people alike have recognized that the landscape of industries and work has rapidly changed, and coming advancements in technology and automation will end many...
Reimagining Livelihoods: An Ethnographic Inquiry into Anticipation, Agency, and Reflexivity as India’s Impact Ecosystem Responds to Post-Pandemic Rebuilding
The COVID19 induced lockdown in India and consequent migration of workers severely affected the economy. When the migrants returned to urban areas, newer challenges surfaced around the scale and nature of jobs...
Debugging Distributed Teamwork: New Research
An EPIC2020 Sponsored Panel presented by Atlassian The Atlassian Research & Insights team commissioned a research study that involved thousands of workers across the globe to see how COVID-19 and the sudden shift to working from home has affected them. Atlassian looked inward, too, to find out...
Boundary Crossings: Collaborative Robots and Human Workers
Agency and automation is explored through three case studies of the use of Cobots – collaborative robots – in three different auto production firms. The business challenges faced by these firms include labor shortages, quality control and reduction of waste. The Cobot solution resulted in...
Calibrating Agency: Human-Autonomy Teaming and the Future of Work amid Highly Automated Systems
This paper explores how the design of everyday interactions with artificial intelligence in work systems relates to broader issues of interest to social scientists and ethicists: namely human well-being and social inequality. The paper uses experience designing human interactions with highly...
The Adaptation of Everyday Work in an Age of Automation
Recent debates around the future of work have largely focused on how automated technologies are contributing to job loss or decline. However, in this paper, we draw from original ethnographic research with four types of automation-affected workers – insurance agents, pharmaceutical...
Designing Good Jobs: Participatory Ethnography and Prototyping in Service-oriented Work Ecosystems
Three service design projects, in hospitality, finance, and health care, highlight how to design for agency in the workplace, including the implementation of automated and data-driven tools. Inspired by Tacchi, Slater, and Hearn's work on ethnographic action research, Amartya Sen's capabilities...
Agency and AI in Consulting: Pathways to Prioritize Agency-Enhancing Automations
Amidst the advances of AI and automation, this paper provides a framework for ethnographic methods and insights to enhance human agency at work. Through analyzing data collected from ethnographic immersions in three different consulting firms (a professional services firm, a management...
Making Productivity Social Again: Melissa Gregg’s Counterproductive—Time Management in the Knowledge Economy
a book review by [contrib_author post_id='20941' name='Raymond June'], Workday Most of us struggle with managing our time while feeling perpetually swamped with work. White-collar professionals, myself included, have often turned like supplicants to time management tools ranging from self-help...