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

这项研究将是我自2016年5月以来一直与一家大型呼叫中心的工作人员一起进行的一个正在进行的人种学项目的延伸。主要的研究地点位于英国最大的信用机构内，其企业是信用报告的市场化、管理和维护。这项研究的重点是英国后工业化经济中的主观性和不稳定性。这项研究将结合人种学实践、现象学和经济理论。由于人类学对“工作场所”的关注很少，拟议的研究将作出有纪律的和承诺的努力，将劳动作为人类学/经济学的核心指标(Jimenez：2003：14)。与希门尼斯的论点相反，他认为劳动的表演性是人格体现中的一个相互组成部分，而我探索的是很少有人研究的去个人化人类学，即集体环境中人格的丧失/缺乏。这项研究的目的不是简单地记录英国的早熟现象，而是使用人种学来理解去个人化作为工人和职业环境(在这种情况下是汽车技术和发展中的人工智能)之间的一种具体的主观关系。技术和“生物败血症”[Kockelman：2011：719]的概念将被用来探索后福特主义劳动中不稳定的表现。这项研究试图通过人机关系来论证劳动的主观体现，从而避免在涉及社会性时给予以人为中心的意识形态投资以威望，但又不完全忽视机械和符号装置的重要性。从理论上讲，劳动是人与机器依赖的构成要素，也是机器与人类统治的重构要素。该项目的唯物主义观点试图调和现象学概念本身(例如时间性)和规范结构(霸权)之间的紧张关系，而不是取代这些概念，转而过度强调社会形态中的对象、基础设施和技术。因此，“专有技术”这个话题对我的研究非常有意义。研究探索了哪些“专有技术”被操纵的方法，以及这种疯狂和诱导的生产形式如何导致容易焦虑和不安全感的主观形成。到目前为止，人种学注意到了受试者通过操作界面的经验来内化劳动力的方式，特别是那些有目的地设计的程序，这些程序旨在调整工人的效率产出，而不需要传统的管理技术和人工干预。该组织部署了自动脚本、提示、颜色编码指示器、计时命令和“机器人轻推”，几乎没有分析对工人福祉的影响。这项研究探索了这种内在的本质，以解释一种被一名工人称为“流行病焦虑”的现象，以及另一名操作员所说的“正常生活中缺乏根基”的现象。这项拟议的研究将推进现有的人种学研究，将英格兰西北部的不同工作地点包括在内。工地的一个一贯特征是它们运营的后工业地区。一个国家的工业机构向投资不足和社会贫困领域的转型，将提供一个机会，更广泛地记录后工业化的社会历史叙事，并对工人与技术的关系进行批判性调查。长期的实地调查使人们注意到劳动关系、工作场所教育、运营系统、接口技术和工人休闲时间的错综复杂。将寻找涉及抽象价值链的工作地点，例如处理债务留存和信贷偿还形式的办公室。

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.