An Approximation of Freedom: On-demand Therapy and the Feminization of Labor
An Approximation of Freedom: On-demand Therapy and the Feminization of Labor
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DOI：
10.1145/3555166
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发表时间：
2022-11
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Linda Huber;Casey S. Pierce;S. Lindtner
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Linda Huber;Casey S. Pierce;S. Lindtner
平台劳动和零工工作已经成为理解以非正式化和数字化为标志的新生“工作未来”的关键场所。越来越多的研究强调，平台工作的体验不仅受到算法和用户界面的影响，还受到性别、种族、当地文化和劳动力等级制度的影响。从正在进行的关于医疗保健数字化转型的民族志研究中，我们展示了治疗师的平台劳动经验如何受到心理健康工作的历史和持续女性化的影响。平台重新定义了在医疗行业普遍存在的女性化劳动条件，但平台劳动对一些治疗师来说似乎是“有用的”，因为他们在一系列由女性化构成的不稳定的职业选择中导航。我们使用权宜分析来描述平台对现状的双重复制：首先，通过向个体工人提供近似的自由，帮助预防不可持续的工作条件危机;其次，通过重新定义相同的剥削逻辑，以使劳动力可扩展。这种权宜分析将重点从平台技术本身的影响转向使权宜解决方案成为生存所必需的条件。它还指出，必须对排斥和剥削的情况进行干预，这有助于为平台权宜之计创造一个市场。
Platform labor and gig work have become key sites for understanding a nascent "future of work" hallmarked by informalization and digitization. A growing body of research emphasizes how experiences of platform work are mediated not only by algorithms and user interfaces, but also by gender, race, local cultures as well as labor hierarchies. Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research on the digital transformation of healthcare, we show how therapists' experiences of platform labor are centrally shaped by the historical and ongoing feminization of mental health work. Platforms reinscribe feminized labor conditions that are pervasive in the healthcare industry, and yet platform labor appears as 'useful' to some therapists as they navigate a set of precarious career choices fundamentally structured by feminization. We use the analytic of the stopgap to describe platforms' two-fold reproduction of the status quo: first by offering an approximation of freedom to individual workers, helping to forestall a crisis of unsustainable work conditions; and second by reinscribing the same logics of exploitation in order to make labor scalable. This stopgap analytic reorients the focus away from the impact of the platforms technologies as such, towards the conditions that make stopgap solutions necessary for survival. It also points towards the importance of intervening in the conditions of exclusion and exploitation that help to create a market for platform stopgaps.