ETLab monthly talks: Work

Join the ETLab as they discuss research surrounding 'Work and Automated Futures'.

Dr Debora Lanzeni-  convenor

Debora is a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. She is an Associate Investigator at the Monash University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). Debora’s work explores ethnographically how emerging technologies come about and configure in contemporary societies. She is interested in Futures as a concept and orientation in researching new forms of work, design processes and data-driven practices. Her research focuses on tech professionals, digital learning, Industry 5.0 and technologies at work. Recent research outputs include Design Ethnography: research, responsibility and futures and An Anthropology of Futures and Technologies

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'The Glitch in the Sublime: The Operational Politics of the Glitch in Automated Warehouse Environments’

Dr Jathan Sadowski and Dr Chris O’Neill

Automated Precarity

ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making + Society

The rise of Amazon as a global force in eCommerce and warehouse logistics has been accompanied by a familiar invocation of the industrial or technological sublime as its corresponding aesthetics of domination (cf. Marx, 1964; Nye, 1994). Amazon’s first Australian robotic warehouse was announced in the press alongside rhapsodies to its vast quantities of steel, the tens of thousands of nuts and bolts consumed by its construction, the graceful, frictionless glide of the warehouse’s robots, and so on.
Critical technology studies has recently turned to the resistant potential of ‘the glitch’ as an epistemological frame and a ‘politics’ capable of disrupting the ‘totalizing’ vision of such automated environments. Here, glitches within automated digital environments are valorised as “[helping] unveil and disrupt power relations and dominant computational logics” (Alvarez Leon, 2022: 385). The problematic aspect of such an orientation is that in valorizing the glitch for its irruptive, disruptive, revelatory quality, the glitch may come to reinforce rather than threaten the ‘sublime’ framing of such systems.
In this paper we draw upon data from interviews with 19 warehouse workers from Melbourne and Sydney, in which the glitch emerged as a core theme of many workers’ understandings of the automated environment. Rather than offering resistant potential however, we found that glitches were operationalised within the successful functioning of the automated warehouse. We argue that in order to gain deeper purchase on the political stakes of contemporary automation, it is important to give an account of the glitch which does not unwittingly reinforce a hegemonic account of contemporary automation as sublime.

Alvarez Leon LF (2022) From glitch epistemologies to glitch politics. Dialogues in Human Geography 12(3): 384–388. DOI: 10.1177/20438206221102951.

Marx L (1964) The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nye DE (1994) American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Jathan Sadowski is an Associate Investigator at the Monash University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). Jathan is part of the Data Research Program of ADM+S,  as well as a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. He studies the political economy and social theory of digital technology, focusing on questions of power, governance, inequality, and labour. Jathan is the author of Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling our Lives, and Taking Over the World (The MIT Press, 2020).

Christopher O’Neill a postdoctoral research fellow in the Monash University node of the ADM+S whose work focuses on the technical mediation of the body. His doctoral research examined how sensor technologies for measuring the body from the mid-19th century to the present day have produced new modes of organisation in the workplace, the medical clinic, and the (smart) home. He has developed this line of research in subsequent projects, including in the measure of the face in facial recognition technologies, the place of the lived body in automated warehouses (such as Amazon), and the figuration of the human in ‘human in the loop’ frameworks of automated governance. Christopher’s work has appeared in Science, Technology and Human Values, New Media and Society, Information, Communication and Society, First Monday, and elsewhere.

'Digital Social Inequalities among Youths in Finland and Invisible Work in the Automating of Public Services in Finland'

Dr Marta Choroszewicz 

Finland represents an interesting case study for exploring digital inequalities among the Finnish youth as well as automation of public services. The vast majority of children and youths have access to a smartphone or computer from an early age. Digital and media literacy among Finnish youths are also among the highest in the world. Yet, contemporary statistics in Finland inevitably prove that, in fact, there has been an increase in the number and complexity in, for example, youth’s learning difficulties, even illiteracy. Moreover, digitalisation in Finland has been legitimised by promises of equality in access to education, welfare services, social interaction, participation and influence. Data analytics-based management and decision-making have been fuelled by numerous strategy papers, roadmap proposals, and digitalisation-friendly laws to boost the equally widespread optimism over the use of public data for social good.

Marta Choroszewicz is a University Researcher in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research focuses on the intersection of professional work, feminist theories, and science and technology studies. She specializes in the sociology of professions, technology and work, data technologies, and the digital welfare state. Marta's research primarily explores social inequalities in professions and the shift toward data-driven organizations. She has published extensively on topics such as agency, mechanisms of inequalities in professional work and careers, work-family reconciliation, the digital welfare state, data practices, and the development of data technologies and data-driven public organizations. As a researcher, Marta has also contributed to several large-scale projects, including Professionalisation of Public Service Interpreting (ProPSI), Data-Driven Society in the Making (DaDSoc), Data Literacy for Responsible Decision-Making (DataLit), and Capturing Digital Social Inequality (DEQUAL). Currently she is working in the DEQUAL project, in which she focuses on the Finnish youths’ digital agency and practices. Her work has appeared in various international and national peer-reviewed journals, including Information, Communication & Society, Human Relations, and Big Data & Society.  She has also co-edited book, Gender, Age and Inequality in the Professions (Routledge, 2019). In addition to her research, Marta has acted as a university lecturer several times, teaching courses on qualitative and quantitative methods, sociological theories, citizenship and wellbeing, and the sociology of gender and work. In the coming years, Marta will continue her research on the automation of public sector organizations, with a particular focus on invisible work, professionalism and algorithmic literacy.

‘Quiet digitalisation in construction: emerging materials and platforms’

Dr Ben Lyall

AUTOWORK 

In comparisons to other industries, and through dominant imaginaries of manual labour, the Australian construction industry has often been criticised as a slow innovator. In conducting interviews and short-term ethnographies across the industry however, we find a number of significant innovations being implemented, driven by the inherent practicality of an industry well attuned to time, labour, and material utilisation. While not adhering to the grand narratives of ‘transformation’ or paradigms like ‘Industry 4.0’ in areas of robotisation or automation, we see consistent change in how digital technologies are created and taken up. By remaining connected to the material and embodied elements at the core of building work, we also draw attention to how many innovations are also physical: digitalisation and datafication goes hand-in-hand with new compounds such as engineered wood or concrete mixes. Importantly however, ‘emergence’ is not an even process. Many in the industry note context-dependent challenges and opportunities, while continuing a long-standing practice of looking overseas for a sense of what the future might hold.

Ben Lyall is a digital sociologist and Lecturer (Faculty of Arts). He is interested in how social lives are impacted by digital infrastructures, smart devices, and policies associated with these. His work cuts across sectors of technology, wellbeing, health and safety, employment and social policy. Current projects include AUTOWORK, which explores the digitised, automated, and robotised work futures across multiple industries.