Tracking Affective Labour for Agility in the Quantified Workplace

Phoebe V Moore

doi:10.1177/1357034x18775203

Abstract

Sensory and tracking technologies are being introduced into workplaces in ways Taylor and the Gilbreths could only have imagined. New work design experiments merge wellness with productivity to measure and modulate the affective and emotional labour of resilience that is necessary to survive the turbulence of the widespread incorporation of agile management systems, in which workers are expected to take symbolic direction from machines. The Quantified Workplace project was carried out by one company that fitted sensory algorithmic devices to workers’ computers and bodies, which, this article argues, identify workers’ so-called agility and reveal management practices that track affective and emotional labour, categorized in the project as stress, subjective productivity and wellbeing. Capital’s accelerated attempts to capture more areas of work and workers’ capacities facilitate the conversion of labour power into a source of value but also results in alienation and abstraction. Participants’ resistance to participation in the Quantified Workplace reveals tensions in the labour process when affect is measured in processes of corporate change.

Highlights

In the early 20th century, when Taylor sought to identify the precision of the work of a ‘first class man’ and the Gilbreths looked for the ‘one best way’ to lay bricks, trade unions became very suspicious
Work design methods accept the supremacy of machines in their apparent capacity to measure work; normalise the risks of continuous workplace transformations in ‘agile’ management systems; and use increasingly invasive tracking and surveillance technologies to decipher measurement of more types of labour, including affective labour, not to pay for it, but to identify to what extent workers can cope with accelerations of change in digitalised workplaces
The article first outlines an emerging research area I have called Quantified Work, claiming that what this literature has not yet done in full is to look at specific management practices which work to quantify affective and emotional labour

Summary

Introduction

In the early 20th century, when Taylor sought to identify the precision of the work of a ‘first class man’ and the Gilbreths looked for the ‘one best way’ to lay bricks, trade unions became very suspicious. To contribute to this emerging literature, which sits within ‘quantified self’ and body-studies debates, and to address the gaps outlined, the argument focusses on worker selfmanagement and self-discipline for agility, as explicit forms of management and work design practice enhanced by quantifying and machinic technologies of measure.

Results

Conclusion