Systematizing Connective Labor

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This research investigates connective labor, a novel concept of service work, and examines the impact of contemporary trends in standardization and automation. Some jobs have relationships with people at the core of their work where these relationships require an emotional connection between workers and their charges. Teachers, therapists, primary care physicians, even prison guards each depend on relationships in service to a larger goal: children learning, patients healing, prisons secure. Connective labor captures the relational work between practitioner and recipient, using their emotional connection to produce an outcome. Existing research documents the importance of work involving relationships for valuable outcomes in arenas from schools to hospitals; these proven impacts of connective labor make its scarcity, uneven distribution or unreliable performance a social problem. Yet its emotional nature resists efforts to make it more systematic or automated. This research will provide new information to policymakers and the public about connective labor: its variation, its value, and the costs and benefits of making it more systematic, scaling it up, or delivering it by non-human agents. The project will also contribute to ongoing public debates and policy deliberations about automation and work involving relationships, by providing a new visibility for connective labor and the kind of standards and technology that support its excellence. The goals of the project are: to distill the common practices and principles that comprise connective labor, for practitioners as well as the program administrators and artificial intelligence (AI) engineers who would systematize their work; investigate how workers experience different kinds of systematization, from checklists to robotics; and evaluate how such systematization affects connective labor. Research includes 95 in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations with connective laborers in fields focused on security and/or control, e.g. police; with low-wage workers in home health care; and with what might be called systematizers, e.g., administrators. The results of the study will document characteristics of different kinds of connective labor, outline the risks and rewards of the various ways these are systematized, and explain differing stances towards this work.