An Analysis of Labour and Deindividuation in British Post-industrial Worksites

英国后工业化工作场所的劳动与去个性化分析

• 批准号: 2071261
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Manchester
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2018 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2071261
• 关键词: Analysis; Labour; Deindividuation; British; Post

The research will be the extension of an ongoing ethnographic project that I have been conducting since May 2016 with the workers of a large call-centre. The primary research site has been situated within the largest credit agency in Britain, the enterprise of which is the marketisation, administration, and maintenance of credit reports. The research focuses on subjectivity and precariousness within the UK's postindustrial economy. The research will combine ethnographic practice, phenomenology and economic theory.As anthropology has paid little attention to the "place of work", the proposed research will make a disciplined and committed effort to express labour as a central anthropological/economic indicator (Jimenez: 2003: 14). Contrary to Jimenez's thesis that grounds the performativity of labour as a reciprocal component in the embodiment of personhood, I explore the little-studied anthropology of deindividuation, which is the loss/lack of personhood within a collective environment. The aim of the research is not to simply document precarity in Britain but to use ethnography to understand deindividuation as an embodied subjective relationship between worker and occupational environment (in this case automotive technologies and developmental Artificial Intelligence).The concepts technics and "biosemiosis" [Kockelman:2011:719]) will be used to explore the performativity of precariousness through post-Fordist labour. The research seeks to demonstrate the subjective embodiment of labour through human-machine relations, so as to avoid giving prestige to human-centred ideological investments when it comes to sociality, but without completely disregarding the importance of mechanic and semiotic apparatuses. Labour can be theorised as constitutive of human-machine dependency and reconstitutive of machine-human domination. The project's materialist perspective seeks to reconcile the tension between phenomenological concepts proper (e.g. temporality) and normative constructions (hegemony) without displacing these in favour of an overemphasis on objects, infrastructures and technologies in social formations. Therefore, the topic of 'know-how' is of great interest to my research.The research explores ways is which 'knowhow' is manipulated and how this frenzied and induced form of production causes subjective formations that are prone to angst and insecurity. Thus far, the ethnography has noted the way subjects interiorise labour through their experience with operating interfaces and particularly programs that are purposefully designed to tweak a worker's efficiency output without the need for traditional management techniques and human intervention.Automated scripts, prompts, colour-coded indicators, time measuring commands and 'robotic nudges' are deployed by the organisation with little analysis of the effects on worker wellbeing. The research explores the nature of this interiority to explain a phenomenon that one worker has called 'epidemic anxiety', and what another operator has termed a 'lack of grounding in normal life'. The proposed research will advance existing ethnographic research to include different worksites in the North West of England. A consistent feature of the worksites will be the post-industrial localities where they operate. The transition of industrial organs of a national economy to areas of under-investment and social deprivation will offer an opportunity to record a socio-historical narrative of post-industrialism more broadly, and a critical investigation of workers' relationships with technology. A long period of fieldwork allows for noting of the intricacies of labour relations, workplace education, operational systems, interface technology and worker leisure time. Worksites will be sought that deal with abstract value-chains, for instance offices that deal with debt retention and forms of credit servicing.

这项研究将是我自2016年5月以来一直与一个大型呼叫中心的工作人员进行的民族志项目的延伸。主要的研究地点位于英国最大的信用机构，该机构的业务是信用报告的市场化、管理和维护。该研究的重点是英国后工业经济中的主观性和不稳定性。该研究将结合联合收割机民族志实践，现象学和经济理论。由于人类学很少关注“工作场所”，拟议的研究将作出纪律和承诺的努力，表达劳动作为一个中心的人类学/经济指标（希门尼斯：2003：14）。相反，希门尼斯的论文，理由作为一个互惠的组成部分，在人格的体现劳动的表演性，我探讨了很少研究的人类学去个性化，这是一个集体环境中的人格的损失/缺乏。这项研究的目的不是简单地记录英国的不稳定性，而是使用民族志来理解去个性化作为工人和职业环境（在这种情况下，汽车技术和发展人工智能）之间的体现主观关系。技术和“生物符号”的概念[Kockelman：2011：719]）将被用来探索后福特主义劳动的不稳定性的表现性。这项研究试图通过人机关系来展示劳动的主观体现，以避免在社会性方面给予以人为中心的意识形态投资以威望，但同时也没有完全忽视机械和符号装置的重要性。劳动可以被理论化为人机依赖的构成和机器-人类统治的重建。该项目的唯物主义观点试图调和现象学概念本身（如时间性）和规范性结构（霸权）之间的紧张关系，而不取代这些概念，转而过分强调社会形态中的物体、基础设施和技术。因此，我的研究对“技术诀窍”这个主题非常感兴趣。研究探索了“技术诀窍”被操纵的方式，以及这种疯狂和诱导的生产形式如何导致容易产生焦虑和不安全感的主观形成。到目前为止，人种志已经注意到，受试者通过他们的操作界面经验，特别是有目的地设计的程序，在不需要传统管理技术和人工干预的情况下调整工人的效率输出，从而使劳动力变得更好。自动化脚本，提示，彩色编码指示器，该组织部署了时间测量命令和“机器人轻推”，但很少分析对工人福祉的影响。这项研究探讨了这种焦虑的本质，以解释一名工人称之为“流行性焦虑”的现象，另一名操作员称之为“缺乏正常生活的基础”。拟议的研究将推进现有的人种学研究，包括在英格兰西北部的不同工作地点。这些工作场所的一个一贯特点是它们在后工业化地区作业。国民经济的工业机构向投资不足和社会剥夺领域的过渡将提供一个机会，更广泛地记录后工业主义的社会历史叙述，并对工人与技术的关系进行批判性调查。长时间的实地考察可以注意到劳资关系、工作场所教育、操作系统、接口技术和工人闲暇时间的复杂性。将寻找处理抽象价值链的工作场所，例如处理债务保留和信贷服务形式的办事处。