Digi-Housekeeping: The Invisible Work of Flexibility

Abstract

From an analysis of everyday practices of flexible working captured in video diaries, a form of pervasive but invisible support work is identified and presented. Labelled ‘digi-housekeeping’, this is work that is required to maintain the digital tools that enable flexible working, and incorporates the tasks of clearing, sorting, preparing, provisioning and troubleshooting. Through the sociocultural processes of responsibilization, personalization and work extension, interpreted here as emblematic of wider neoliberal contemporary work arrangements, digi-housekeeping is devalued and made invisible, characterizing these tasks as not ‘real’ work. Classifying these tasks as not ‘real’ work is a new kind of boundary work that supports the continuing displacement of work activities onto individual workers. It is argued that such tasks need to be made visible in order to address feelings of work intensification.

Workers’ visibility and union organizing in the UK videogames industry

“…Many of the oft-cited examples of workers' protesting in the digital entertainment sector are concerned with their visibility, for instance with gaining recognition and being credited in the final product, or keeping a position of anonymity when expressing discontent (Deuze et al, 2007). By putting the notion of visibility as a key methodological concern, the article contributes to a broader debate on (in)visibility and labor in the digital age (see Cherry, 2016;Gruszka & Böhm, 2020;Petre et al, 2019;Ticona & Mateescu, 2018;Uldam, 2017;Whiting & Symon, 2020). The article builds from the questions raised by previous researchers and investigates a unique case study of workers' collective organizing and their counter-strategies to tackle the issues that affect their workplace, while dealing with varied approaches to the production, distribution, and promotion of their work via platforms and social media.…”

Lifting the curtain: Strategic visibility of human labour in AI-as-a-Service

“…Within a digital setting, there have been a number of discussions about how human labour has become less visible when mediated. For instance, critical attention has been paid to unpaid ‘digital labor’ (Scholz, 2013) and the ‘digi-housekeeping’ necessary to maintain flexible working arrangements (Whiting and Symon, 2020). Recent research has also discussed how much work becomes invisible in data intensive science, particularly referring to cleaning and archiving datasets (Plantin, 2019; Scroggins and Pasquetto, 2020).…”

Anti/Postwork Feminist Politics and A Case for Basic Income

“…This should include the educational efforts that develop a worker's general skills and aptitudes, as well as the time dedicated to developing communicative capacities, aesthetic embodiments, and even social networks that firms draw from but do not pay for. It should include as well the invisible `housework' of setting up and maintaining the `personal' digital devices that we also use for the job (Whiting and Symon 2020).Taking this more expansive measure of the reproductive labour necessary to produce labour power, we need to account for all the social, cultural, technological, and subjective infrastructures on which the more narrowly conceived structure of productionthat is, work covered by the wagedepends. After all, why would it be legitimate, even from within the ideological logics of capital, for an employer to make profit from the skills and capacities that a worker had expended time and money to acquire?…”