Systematizing Connective Labor

本研究调查了连接劳动，一个新的服务工作的概念，并探讨了当代标准化和自动化趋势的影响。有些工作与工作核心人员建立了关系，这些关系需要员工与其负责人之间建立情感联系。 教师、治疗师、初级保健医生，甚至狱警，都依赖于为更大目标服务的关系：儿童学习、病人康复、监狱安全。连接性劳动捕捉了从业者和接受者之间的关系工作，利用他们的情感联系产生结果。 现有的研究记录了从学校到医院的领域中涉及有价值成果的关系的工作的重要性;这些已被证明的连接劳动力的影响使其稀缺性，不均匀的分配或不可靠的性能成为社会问题。然而，它的情感本质抵制使其更加系统化或自动化的努力。这项研究将为政策制定者和公众提供有关连接劳动的新信息：它的变化，它的价值，以及使其更加系统化，扩大规模或由非人类代理人提供的成本和收益。该项目还将通过为连接性劳动力以及支持其卓越性的标准和技术提供新的可见性，为正在进行的关于自动化和涉及关系的工作的公共辩论和政策审议做出贡献。该项目的目标是：为从业者以及将其工作系统化的程序管理员和人工智能（AI）工程师提取构成连接性劳动的常见实践和原则;调查工人如何体验不同类型的系统化，从清单到机器人;并评估这种系统化如何影响连接性劳动。研究包括95次深入访谈和人种学观察，对象是专注于安全和/或控制领域的连接劳动者，例如警察;家庭医疗保健中的低工资工人;以及所谓的系统化者，例如，管理员。研究结果将记录不同类型的连接劳动的特征，概述这些系统化的各种方式的风险和回报，并解释对这项工作的不同立场。

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.