The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts

Routledge Advances in Sociology

by Phoebe V. Moore

Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and people analytics by metrics? The Quantified Self in Precarity highlights how, whether it be in insecure ‘gig’ work or office work, such digitalisation is not an inevitable process – nor is it one that necessarily improves working conditions. Indeed, through unique research and empirical data, Moore demonstrates how workplace quantification leads to high turnover rates, workplace rationalisation and worker stress and anxiety, with these issues linked to increased rates of subjective and objective precarity. Scientific management asked us to be efficient. Now, we are asked to be agile. But what does this mean for the everyday lives we lead? With a fresh perspective on how technology and the use of technology for management and self-management changes the ‘quantified’, precarious workplace today, The Quantified Self in Precarity will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Science and Technology, Organisation Management, Sociology and Politics.

Genres: Sociology

234 pages, Paperback

First published September 21, 2017

Reviews

[Ari Stillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book approaches the topic of the quantified self, which pertains to the ways that technology is used to measure and numerically understand ourselves detailed in Deborah Lupton's book, from the perspective of workers. Covering the history of efforts to quantify work leading up to the present, including Taylorism and its successors, she explains how opportunities or directives from management to track workers are often framed as helping them be more efficient and for the worker's benefit, but in reality such measures are used to assess workers and penalize them if their efficiency is less than desired. Even well-being, which is the output for health-tracking technology, is presented as benefiting workers but the ulterior motive is to ensure they are healthy enough to work and maintain the company's bottom line.

In this vein, Moore presents tracking technologies in the workplace as insidious and compromising the autonomy that workers enjoy. Quantifying efficiency isn't motivating but stress-inducing – increasingly feelings of precarity. While she overstates the case that tracking unseen labor is the source of worker alienation, it is fair to say that tracking contributes to it, as doing so takes a further step away from identifying with one's production.

Remarking on the forms of resistance workers take to capitalism, Moore describes how capitalism reinvents itself and adapts to accommodate forms of resistance with new policies and technology to deter resistance. Even flexible working hours, branded as liberation from a fixed schedule, lend themselves to excess work through blurring the boundaries of life and work.

Moore's biggest issue with tracking technology is with affective labor and embodiment which, mired in academic jargon, makes it difficult to penetrate her argument. Because affective labor goes unseen and workers in numerous professions have to put on a face to hide what they're experiencing, technology aimed at tracking this violates their dignity by exposing what workers don't wish to expose. The risk of quantifying the self subsumes the qualified self and therefore obfuscates empathy when numbers seem to tell the story for the worker. While tracking technologies can tell us what is happening, they fail to tell us the why behind the numbers. As a result of the humiliating a/effect tracking technologies have on workers, she ends with a call for ways that workers can resist quantification to maintain their dignity.

[LaanSiBB]

I was hoping more discussion on the behavioralism, inventive mathematics and their applications, but overall valid to today's world, just that the title has already said it all, no need to waste a week to read this book.

[Slow Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gives very succinct overview of the social tendencies of today's cybernetic control societies--precarity is the word of the day. A future where everyone has 5 concurrent gigs and no full time employment, health care, benefits etc seems more than plausible if the current path is followed on and on