Breda Gray - Made To Work: Mobilising Contemporary Worklives

Made to Work analyses the conditions of mobile knowledge work (MKW) in contemporary worklives, contrasting and drawing parallels among three highly significant sectors of the knowledge economy: academia, information communication technology (ICT) management, and digital creative start-up work.

It introduces the concept of corollary work to characterise the elusive work underpinning the configuration of workers, informational, technological, relational and infrastructural resources in (re)producing liveable worklives.

It ultimately illuminates the myriad strands of corollary work that enable MKW to take place and contributes to emergent debates on how exploitation, at least in the domain of MKW, can be named, resisted and creatively subverted. In so doing, it opens up a conversation about the complex ways in which contemporary worklives are made to work, and about potential interventions to bring about more just worklife conditions in the future.

Breda Gray is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Limerick (Ireland).

Luigina Ciolfi is Professor of Human Centred Computing at Sheffield Hallam University (UK).

Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho is Associate Researcher at the Institute of Information Systems and New Media of the University of Siegen (Germany).

Series Editors: Monika Bscher, Peter Adey

This series explores the transformations of society, politics and everyday experiences wrought by changing mobilities, and the power of mobilities research to inform constructive responses to these transformations. As a new mobile century is taking shape, international scholars explore motivations, experiences, insecurities, implications and limitations of mobile living, and opportunities and challenges for design in the broadest sense, from policy to urban planning, new media and technology design. With world citizens expected to travel 105 billion kilometres per year in 2050, it is critical to make mobilities research and design inform each other.

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Edited by Maria Alice de Faria Nogueira and Camila Maria dos Santos Moraes

Made to Work

Mobilising Contemporary Worklives

Breda Gray, Luigina Ciolfi and Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Changing-Mobilities/book-series/CHGMOB.

Mobilising Contemporary Worklives

Breda Gray, Luigina Ciolfi and Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho

First published 2020

by Routledge

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2020 Breda Gray, Luigina Ciolfi, Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho

The right of Breda Gray, Luigina Ciolfi, Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gray, Breda, author.

Title: Made to work : mobilising contemporary worklives / Breda Gray,

Luigina Ciolfi, Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |

Series: Changing mobilities | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019057561 (print) | LCCN 2019057562 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367109325 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429023958 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge workersSocial aspects. | Knowledge economy. | Information services industryEmployees. | Knowledge management.

Classification: LCC HD8039.K59 G73 2020 (print) | LCC HD8039.K59 (ebook) | DDC 331.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057561

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057562

ISBN: 978-0-367-10932-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-02395-8 (ebk)

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Breda Gray is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Limerick (Ireland). She has published extensively on gender, migration, work, identity and emotion in international peer-reviewed journals including: Mobilities; Work, Employment and Society; Sociology; British Journal of Sociology; The Sociological Review, International Migration Review; Gender, Place and Culture; International Review of Social Research; and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. She is co-editor of Special Issue of Mobilities on mobile methodologies and editor of Special Issue of Irish Journal of Sociology on transnationalism.

Luigina Ciolfi is Professor of Human Centred Computing at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). An experienced scholar in the fields of HCI and CSCW, she researches the understanding, practicing and designing of digital interactive systems from a sociotechnical perspective. She has published her work in journals such as Human Computer Interaction, Mobilities, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, CoDesign, CSCW Journal, and in prestigious conferences such as EUSSET ECSCW, and ACM CSCW, Designing Interactive Systems, and CHI. She is co-author (with Eva Hornecker) of Human-Computer Interactions in Museums. She is a Member of EUSSET and Senior Member of the ACM.

Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho is Associate Researcher at the Institute of Information Systems and New Media of the University of Siegen (Germany). His interests span, amongst others, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing, and Mobile and Nomadic Work Practices. He has published several relevant articles on related topics in prestigious international journals and conferences such as JCSCW, IEEE Access, EUSSET ECSCW and ACM CSCW and served as a guest editor for the JCSCW Special Issue on Work Practices, Nomadicity and the Mediational Role of Technology. He is a professional member of the EUSSET and the ACM, and has been serving as a EUSSET Competence Network Co-Chair since early 2018.

As researchers on this study and authors of this book, we see ourselves as both observers and participants, constantly seeking to identify patterns while recognising many as personally familiar, and always producing the social world of which we speak. As academics, of course we share much with the accounts of the academic study participants, but there are also crossovers with the worklife patterns of non-academic participants. In writing up this multi-stranded study, we try to adopt an orientation of with-ness as we travel alongside these fellow mobile knowledge workers, in exploring worklife practices, possibilities and potentials. Yet, there are also times when this is a study of mobile knowledge work when mobile knowledge work is made an object of study. This objectifying move is self-conscious as we try to identify emergent patterns and examine how they are upheld and reproduced by particular sociomaterial knowledge/power relations and practices. As such, we are positioned both inside and outside the study while totally implicated with it insofar as both the study and this book enact mobile worklives as a particular reality. Of course we are indebted to all those workers who shared their experiences with us and whose worklives shape the narrative, issues and quandaries addressed in this book.