Humans and Machines at Work: Monitoring, Surveillance and Automation in Contemporary Capitalism

Abstract

In the era of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, we increasingly work with machines in both cognitive and manual workplaces. This collection provides a series of accounts of workers' local experiences that reflect the ubiquity of work's digitalisation. Precarious gig economy workers ride bikes and drive taxis in China and Britain; domestic workers' timekeeping and movements are documented; call centre workers in India experience invasive tracking but creative forms of worker subversion are evident; warehouse workers discover that hidden data has been used for layoffs; academic researchers see their labour obscured by a 'data foam' that does not benefit them; and journalists suffer the algorithmic curse. These cases are couched in historical accounts of identity and selfhood experiments seen in the Hawthorne experiments and the lineage of automation. This collection will appeal to scholars in the Sociology of Work and Digital Labour Studies and anyone interested in lea rning about monitoring and surveillance, automation, the gig economy and the quantified self in the workplace. Machine generated contents note: Humans and Machines at Work: Monitoring, Surveillance and Automation in Contemporary Capitalism / Xanthe Whittaker -- Digitalisation of Work and Resistance / Martin Upchurch -- Deep Automation and the World of Work / Phoebe V. Moore -- There Is Only One Thing in Life Worse Than Being Watched, and that Is not Being Watched: Digital Data Analytics and the Reorganisation of Newspaper Production / Xanthe Whittaker -- Electronic Monitoring of Care Work -- The Redefinition of Paid Working Time / L.J.B. Hayes -- Social Recruiting: Control and Surveillance in a Digitised Job Market / Ivana Pais -- Close Watch of a Distant Manager: Multi-surveillance by Transnational Clients in Indian Call Centres / Winifred R. Poster -- Hawthorne's Renewal: Quantified Total Self / Rebecca Lemov -- "Putting It Together, That's What Counts": Data Foam, a Snowball and Researcher Evaluation / Penny C.S. Andrews -- Technologies of Control, Communication, and Calculation: Taxi Drivers' Labour in the Platform Economy / Julie Yujie Chen.