This article focuses on the concept of labor in co-creation, arguing that its definition needs to be expanded to include a process of intensity. Intensity foregrounds the different degrees in which participants involve themselves in a craft, and also the elements of time, effort, and affectivity. Using game modification as a case study, the article analyzes how automated, computerized systems of evaluations, embedded into webpages, can create grounds for a self-understanding of productive abilities. Maneuvering through the three registers of industry, websites, and game modders, it examines the discourses of evaluative systems and details how participants use these technologies to self-manage and calibrate their labor. Interviews showed that the increasingly competitive drive for optimal standards of production comes at a cost to the well-being of participants. Studies of labor therefore need to consider the "intense" aspect of participatory production, and the impact it may have on its participants.

This experimental investigation explores differences in reciprocal norms between friends and strangers and the effects of culture on reciprocity. Based on altruistic and strong reciprocity theories, a hybrid trust-dictator game tested the influence of relationship (i.e. friends vs. strangers), treatment (i.e. positive vs. negative) and culture (i.e. collectivistic vs. individualistic) on reciprocation. The results show that participants reciprocated more positively when treated positively in general. However, the results demonstrate intercultural differences in reciprocal norms, specifically in the negative treatment condition. Participants from the individualistic culture provided stronger punishment to the norm violator, compared to participants from the collectivistic culture. We discuss implications of the impact of relationship and culture on reciprocation with respect to the olive branch response.

The cultural rise of ''big data'' in the recent years has pressured a number of occupations to make an epistemological shift toward data-driven science. Though expressed as a professional move, this article argues that the push incorporates gendered assumptions that disadvantage women. Using the human resource occupation as an example, I demonstrate how normative perceptions of feminine ''soft skills'' are seen as irreconcilable with the masculine ''hard numbers'' of a data-driven epistemology. The history of human resources reflects how assumptions of a biological fit with an occupation limit what women can convincingly describe as her skillsets. However, challenging this cannot stay within the confines of the occupation itself. To undo sexist thinking, it is necessary to understand the broader networks of patriarchal power that dictate how value is defined in corporate environments, especially within other high status professions in business.

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Examining career guides, this essay seeks to understand how the notion of passionate work is presently framed as an injunction, a commonsensical good thing we should aspire to find. How does the discourse of passion respond to labor conditions after the crisis, and what are among the possibilities it forecloses? This essay contains three overtures. First, I analyze how career guides change the pain of job loss to a space of empowerment. Directing readers to the optimistic proposal that their work can be better, career guides advise that the negative effect of the present needs only to be endured by the private individual so that a better future can be produced. Second, I consider what meanings passion produced by the instruments of career guides have, thinking about its relationship to neoliberal subjectivity. Last, I examine career guides that provide a counter-discourse of passion, looking into the values it cultivates in readers.