ANTHROMOB WORKSHOP 2019: MOBILITY AND THE FUTURE OF WORK (original) (raw)
Related papers
Many of the promises of mobility are constructed through the discourses and material practices of elite social groups whose social and economic value and privilege are reinforced through this construction. This paper examines the representation and use of mobile digital media for work in producing the meanings of mobility and in reproducing the invulnerabilities of professional elites. At the same time, there is a new kind of vulnerability that arises for professionals in the shift to mobile and flexible forms of work expressed in the daily activities of repair, articulation and improvisation conducted on work platforms and on the professional self. As knowledge work becomes increasingly detached from organisational spaces, times and structures, new forms of labour are required to support and stabilise the environments and performances of knowledge professionals. In this paper I explore these new vulnerabilities. Drawing on Callon’s (1997) concept of the “framing/disentanglement duo”, I argue that with the shift to a mobile and digital society, there is a corresponding exclusion or “framing out” of network relations previously delimited by and within the organisation. On the one hand, this reframing allows for the creation of new types of knowledge and professional identities. On the other hand, it conceals a major shift of burden from organisations to individuals, driving new forms of precarious work and reinforcing existing labour inequalities. The argument is made through findings from research on the digital technology practices of Australian professionals in local government and in a global telecommunication company trialling a new smartphone.
Mobile labour: An introduction
Mobilities, 2021
Taken together, the various articles that make up this special issue offer a variety of analyses in different social, cultural, material, political, economic, and historical settings from which to understand how discrimination, and segregation are formed in contexts of high mobility and intense labour, with a special focus on processes of racialization, but not excluding others like age and gender. The papers explore how mobility and labour converge to create and perpetuate racial categories, cultural profiling, and forms of exclusion. The contributions include both contemporary and historical studies, and their geographies encompass the arctic, the Middle East, Asia, the Atlantic, Europe and the seas themselves. These include analyses of labour lifestyles in arctic working camps, the racialization of Filipino workers in container ships, or the racialization of Chinese workers in Singapore, the livelihoods of expats between Europe and Dubai and how they cope with different racial categories, as well as an analysis of segregation in Cyprus and Italy, the roles of age differentiation in the future of mobile labour, and a historical perspective on mobile labour in the Atlantic in the 19th century. The main point is to show how mobility is a factor in amplifying categories of race, as well as gender and age. Mobility does not necessarily mean deleting or alleviating these. Highly mobile lifestyles, particularly in the context of labour mobilities, do not translate into a more liquid, transnational, or hybrid outset. What people do and how people move operate together to perpetuate certain categories and profiles – and, as we discussed, there are even new categories and profiles that are created by a moving lifestyle. This special issue only offers a starting point to consider and tackle these important issues.
The Aspirational Class ‘Mobility’ of Digital Nomads
The Routledge Companion to Media & Class, 2020
In the Routledge Companion to Media & Class, edited by Erika Polson, Lynn Schofield Clark & Radhika Gajjala: This chapter looks critically at the growing phenomenon of “digital nomads,” a new generation of workers who combine online labor and personal motility to maintain a lifestyle of permanent travel, working remotely in cultural and nature hotspots around the world. Although there have always been segments of the labor market whose work requires travel, seasonal migration, or expatriation, digital nomadism represents a novel mode of lifestyle-centric labor migration enabled by developments in technology, infrastructure, and employment models, but also, importantly, represents a new stage in the elevation of global mobility as a status asset. Through an examination of mediated discourses around the growing digital nomad movement, I show how the nomad identity is constructed and sold as an advanced mode of living through liberation from societal constraints. Although they make up a just a fraction of the millennial generation, the rarely-questioned status attached to their lifestyles in mainstream and social media indicates that a recognizable “mobile dream” is emerging based on travel and continuous movement, lack of place-based commitments, convergence of labor and leisure, and eschewing homeownership in favor of drop-in housing. In conclusion, I consider the notion of “location independence” that underlies the digital nomad movement, noting that this concept means taking for granted the privilege to imagine stepping into and experiencing other worlds—worlds that others have labored to produce and maintain.
Mobilities in contemporary worlds of work and organizing
2015
Within the globalised ‘network society’ (Castells, 2001), demands for mobility and movement have become predominant aspects of contemporary social life (Bauman, 2007; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Cresswell, 2006; Urry, 2007). Exerting an influence upon different social spheres, these demands have transformed the traditional relations of the realms of government and economy, the public and private, and work and life (Cohen et al., 2015; Donzelot and Gordon, 2008). In particular, present-day governmental programmes refer to and evoke discourses around free and unconstrained movements, forms of work and careers (Baerenholdt, 2013). These discourses promote the mobilisation and activation of working subjects and their human capital (Chertkovskaya et al., 2013; Costas, 2013; Foucault, 2008) as well as, more generally, the mobilisation of production, consumption, and communication in all sorts of social networks (Corbett, 2013; Elliott and Urry, 2010; Land and Taylor, 2010).