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

这项研究将是我自2016年5月以来与一个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。主要研究地点位于英国最大的信用机构内，该机构的业务是信用报告的市场化、管理和维护。研究重点是英国后工业经济中的主观性和不稳定性。研究将结合民族志实践、现象学和经济学理论。由于人类学很少关注“工作地点”，因此拟议的研究将做出有纪律和承诺的努力，将劳动表达为人类学/经济的中心指标（Jimenez: 2003: 14）。希门尼斯的论文将劳动的表演性作为人格体现的相互组成部分，与此相反，我探索了很少被研究的去个性化人类学，即在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不稳定性，而是利用民族志来理解去个性化是工人和职业环境（在这个例子中是汽车技术和发展中的人工智能）之间体现的主观关系。技术和“生物符合学”的概念[Kockelman:2011:719])将被用来通过后福特主义劳动来探索不稳定性的表现。该研究旨在通过人机关系证明劳动的主观体现，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，但同时又不完全忽视机械和符号学装置的重要性。劳动可以被理论化为人机依赖的构成要素和人机统治的重构要素。该项目的唯物主义观点试图调和现象学概念（例如时间性）和规范结构（霸权）之间的紧张关系，而不是取代它们，以支持过度强调社会形态中的对象、基础设施和技术。因此，“诀窍”这个话题是我研究的一个非常感兴趣的话题。该研究探讨了“专有技术”是如何被操纵的，以及这种疯狂和诱导的生产形式是如何导致容易产生焦虑和不安全感的主观形成的。到目前为止，民族志已经注意到受试者通过操作界面的经验将劳动内在化的方式，特别是那些有目的地设计来调整工人效率输出的程序，而不需要传统的管理技术和人为干预。该组织部署了自动脚本、提示、彩色编码指示器、时间测量命令和“机器人推动”，几乎没有分析对员工健康的影响。这项研究探讨了这种内在的本质，以解释一种现象，一名工人称之为“流行性焦虑”，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，包括英格兰西北部不同的工作地点。工地的一贯特点将是它们工作的后工业地区。国民经济的工业机构向投资不足和社会剥夺地区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、界面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地点，例如处理债务保留和信贷服务形式的办事处。

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.