Tracking Affective Labour for Agility in the Quantified Workplace

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.

Urban Emotion Sensing Beyond ‘Affective Capture’: Advancing Critical Interdisciplinary Methods

“…Some expressed concern that our measures should simultaneously reflect their embodied states, their reported feelings (via survey) and their reflections on these in an interview situation: "There were times when I was, like, oh I'm a bit tired now but there wasn't an option of 'tired' and there was a time when I was a bit annoyed and there wasn't, you know, 'irritated' or 'annoyed' or that kind of thing, but I suppose it's very difficult to narrow down exactly what words you're going to put on there." (Birmingham Participant 3, female, age [35][36][37][38][39][40].…”

“…These methods build on much earlier traditions of psychophysiological research in workplace settings, including a large number of studies on bus and lorry drivers, which brings together an interest in both mobility and work [36]. With novel enthusiasm for employee biosensing and emotion monitoring in the workplace the ways in which these technologies and the forms of data ownership and analysis associated with them become entangled in complex regimes of power, surveillance and control are rarely considered [37,38]. They themselves are part of the very working conditions and organisational climate which are known to shape work stress.…”

Affect & Labor

“…New media and devices force workers to engage in "affect regulation and emotional distance" as they deal with the overflow of work into multiple spaces and times, as well as with new problems such as "collegial over-exposure and enforced intimacy" derived from the expectation of networking as part of the job (Gregg, 2011 p. 12). As new technologies continue to mediate workthink social media and its culture of reviews-research can explore how self-discipline and workers' sense of worth is transformed and enacted through increasingly personalized management and tracking practices (see Moore, 2018).…”

Integrating Social Scientific Perspectives on the Quantified Employee Self

“…The most negative scenario can be painted if we consider a 'new normal' context where legal responses are slow, productivity is hard to measure digitally (e.g., knowledge work), and pressures to adopt technologies are high, along with stigma for opting out (Moore and Piwek 2017). Newer forms of work design and management practices like 'agility' draw on tracking technologies to create new employee experiences, but ones invaded and colonized by additional 'affective labor', such as showing resilient emotional responses to challenging working conditions (Moore 2018). Ultimately, workers become more aware of their bodies and emotions and what cannot easily be measured as affecting their performance, raising the question of how they might organize to resist 'what cannot be measured' (Moore and Robinson 2016).…”