Work and Sensibilities: Commodification and Processes of Expropriation Around Digital Labour
The notion of digital labour has revitalized discussions around critical communication studies, but it has also been relevant to inquiries on the metamorphosis of labour relationships, and even in studies of everyday life in the context of Society 4.0. Ad
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Work and Sensibilities: Commodification and Processes of Expropriation Around Digital Labour Adrian Scribano and Pedro Lisdero
Introduction Connections between revolution 4.0, labour and the current process of social structuring involve transformations in practices and conceptualizations of the “world of work”. In this context, for example, the notion of digital labour has revitalized discussions around critical communication studies, but it has also been relevant to inquiries on the metamorphosis of work relationships, and even in studies of everyday life in the context of Society 4.0. Addressing questions emerging from those insights, this chapter explores some contributions from the sociology of the
A. Scribano (*) CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina P. Lisdero CONICET, Córdoba, Argentina © The Author(s) 2019 A. Scribano, P. Lisdero (eds.), Digital Labour, Society and the Politics of Sensibilities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12306-2_3
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body/emotions for understanding the practices and politics of sensibilities associated with digital labour.1 To do this, this chapter (i) explores various theoretical debates around the definition of digital labour, in order to underline the relevance of redefining forms of exploitation regarding related practices, (ii) develops arguments from the perspective of the sociology of bodies/emotions, which allows us to understand in what sense the technological mediation linked to the expansion of ICTs constitutes a reconfiguration of “the politics of the senses” (look, see, observe, touch etc.) and (iii) analyses cases of workers in ICT industries (based on testimonies and records of virtual ethnography) that allow us to connect their daily experience with certain mechanisms of expropriation and commodification of the vitality of bodies.
Digital Labour: A Critical Approximation from a Sociology of Sensibilities From the results of the multiple investigations carried out on the transformations of the “world of work” in the last 20 years, we cannot ignore the “global/local” component that goes through these phenomena. Behind these findings, some tensions can be recognized, as a reflexivity of practical knowledge that seeks to understand the complexity that the current “metamorphosis” implies. Thus, a first demarcation on the discussions that underlie the effort to understand work in the context of a global map in reconfiguration is linked to at least four initial tensions. First, the various investigations seem to realize that the complex “global/local” realities of work require for their understanding efforts that transcend the fragmentation of rigid disciplinary approaches, locked in their own questions. Quite the contrary, the radicality that involves thinking these objects, such as “digital labour”, demands a break with the “horizon” of the frames that defined labour in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This leads us to the second dimension we wanted to highlight, and that is part of a debate that has persisted throughout historic
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