Center for Organizational Research (COR)

A talk of interest to the COR community…

 

Dr. Jacki O’Neill

Researcher

Microsoft Research, India

Date:  Friday, March 10, 2017

Talk:  2:00 PM

Location:  6011 Donald Bren Hall

Refreshments: 3:15 PM, to be served in the 5th floor lobby.

Talk Title: Uberization and the Future of Work

 

ABSTRACT:

Recent changes in the world of work, such as the proliferation of crowdwork and so-called peer economy apps, have enabled new models of on demand labour. The emergence of such apps, not to mention the popularity of Uber, have led some to proclaim that Uberization is the future of work. Uberization is a popular term loosely used to encompass one or more of three workplace trends: 1) taskification, where work is performed as a series of individual tasks, often farmed out to 2) a non-contracted workforce, sometimes rather euphemistically called micro-entrepreneurs or partners, who work in 3) a technologically-mediated labour market (typically a third party platform provider), which manages the work and workforce algorithmically. In this presentation I will use my years of studying both traditional and platform-based workplaces to examine this vision of the future of work from the perspective of the workers in these labour markets. Using ethnographic data, I will ask what’s it like to work in these new digital economies? What are the implications for independence, flexibility, and motivation and job satisfaction? What is it like when ones workplace is, at least in part, a third party platform which delegates management to algorithms? What are the implications for coordination work and worker evaluation? Probing current practice enables us to explore opportunities to design a future of work which supports and enhances worker’s practice, producing better outcomes not just for the workers, but also for customers and platform providers

BIO:

Dr Jacki O’Neill is an experienced Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher. She uses ethnomethodologically-informed ethnography to inspire the design of innovative technologies, which aim to be both useful and usable since they take into account users situated practices. She joined the Technologies for Emerging Markets (TEM) area at Microsoft Research India in Jan 2014. She was previously a Principal Scientist and Ethnography Champion for Xerox’s Innovation Group, based at Xerox Research Centre Europe. She is passionate about the design of technologies which capitalize on people’s skills and capabilities, whether at work, at home, for health, education or play.

Her current research interests span the future or work, digital currencies and financial inclusion, transportation and accessibility. Her background in designing workplace technologies to support and enhance work practices has, in the last 5 years, led to investigation of new technologically-mediated workplaces, from crowdwork platforms to so-called ‘peer economy’ applications (Uber, Ola, etc.). Opportunities for intervention come at the platform-level (designing for workers’ situated practice, capitalizing on local knowledge, etc.), at the market level (e.g. designing workable peer-to-peer platforms for a true peer economy, i.e. designing out the digital middleman), and at the career level (supporting career development, mobility and so on). The digital currency research examines mobile money and its relation (or otherwise) to financial inclusion. She is in the process of designing and building and app to build auto-rickshaw drivers financial capability.

She has more than 40 peer-reviewed articles, 10 patents and 8 patents pending and has served on the Program Committees of conferences such as CHI, CSCW, Co-op, Group, ECSCW, ICTd and India HCI for many years. She is Paper Chair of Interact 2017.

Dear COR Community,

You are cordially invited to join us for a conversation on “Infrastructures, Markets and Labor.”

 

The Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) and the Center for Organizational Research (COR) present:  Conversation with Martha Lampland and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (Sociology and Sciences Studies, University of California, San Diego)

Thursday, March 9, 2017

3:30-5:00 p.m.

Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway, room 3323

 

THE SCIENCE OF COMMODIFICATION IN HUNGARY OR, WHAT KIND OF INFRASTRUCTURE IS REQUIRED TO ASSESS THE VALUE OF LABOR?

 

Martha Lampland, Professor of Sociology and Science Studies, UC San Diego.

 

How does one quantify the value of an event or put a price on a possibility? This problematic drove mid-20th century work scientists in Hungary to devise scientific means of assessing the value of labor. European work science, a field predating Taylorism and scientific management in the U.S., focused initially in the latter half of the 19th on energy expenditure and bodily movement, but grew in the 20th to encompass occupational psychology and business management. In the 1920s and ‘30s, agrarian work scientists in Hungary intent on increasing labor productivity at large manorial estates (latifundia) devoted themselves to figuring out how to assess the value of labor at a time when there was no labor market in agriculture and virtually all wages were paid in kind. They faced numerous difficulties collecting data and enrolling wealthy landowners in their scientific project. The situation changed when the Communist Party took power in 1948, at which time their advice was solicited to help create a scientifically vetted wage scheme for cooperative farms. As a consequence, I have argued, the commodification of labor—the process whereby a wide variety of tasks conducted by disparate groups in many places were rendered commensurate for the purposes of hiring employees and paying them for their services—was achieved under the tutelage of a socialist party/state, rendering market processes superfluous.

 

MARTHA LAMPLAND is Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1987. She has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a Fulbright Teaching Fellow at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and a Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Lampland served as managing editor of the _Journal of Historical Sociology _(1996-2002). Lampland has published on a range of topics in Hungarian history and society: labor, gender, instinct and class, state formation, decollectivization, jokes, state planning, and the pragmatics of numbers. Her most recent book, _The Value of Labor.

The Science of Commodification in Hungary (1920-1956), _was published in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press.

 

AUTOMATING MARKETS: INFRASTRUCTURES, ENGINEERS, AND THE RE-MAKING OF KINSHIP IN GLOBAL FINANCE

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Science Studies, UC San Diego.

What happens when we imagine markets through the lens of relations? One possibility is to evoke metaphors of kinship and family as ways of understanding the elements of markets and their changes though time. This is precisely the perspective adopted in this book, where I explore the automation of British and American finance by examining how entrepreneurial engineers changed stock markets from a space of face-to-face interactions to domain algorithms and high speed electronic signals. By analyzing how market technologists created systems that altogether changed the organizations they inhabited, the book also shows how novel relations emerged within the market, substituting old structures of exchange, trust and belonging with new devices and techniques. The process was not seamless, though, and involved struggles for control, legitimacy, and resources within and out with the market and its many organizations.

JUAN PABLO PARDO-GUERRA is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Pardo-Guerra has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and was faculty at the London School of Economics and Political Science before joining the University of California, San Diego, in 2015. His work centers on technologies in finance, but also touches upon art markets, big data, and evaluation practices. His forthcoming book, _The Orders of Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Automation of Global Finance_, will be published by MIT Press.

For more information, please contact IMTFI, imtfi@uci.edu or 949-824-2284

An excerpt from Martha Lampland’s recent book, and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra’s forthcoming book, are available upon request: please email Ursula Dalinghaus, udalingh@uci.edu

A talk of interest to the COR community…

TALK TITLE: When Two Bodies Are (Not) a Problem: Gender and Relationship Status Discrimination in Academic Hiring

SPEAKER:     Lauren Rivera

Associate Professor of Management & Organizations

UNIVERSITY:        Northwestern University

Kellogg School of Management

TIME:        10:30 am – 12:00 pm

WHERE:        SB1 5200

Lyman Porter Colloquia Room & Executive Terrace

ABSTRACT:  Although junior faculty search committees serve as gatekeepers to the professoriate and play vital roles in shaping the demographic composition of academic departments and disciplines, how committees select new hires has received minimal scholarly attention. In this paper, I highlight one mechanism through which committees evaluate applicants and contribute to gender inequalities in academic careers: relationship status discrimination. Through a comparative, ethnographic case study of junior faculty search committees at a large R1 university, I show that committees actively considered women’s—but not men’s—relationship status when selecting hires. Drawing from gendered scripts of career and family that present men’s careers as taking precedence over women’s, committee members believed that heterosexual women whose partners held academic or high-status jobs were not “moveable” and excluded such women from offers, when there were viable male or single female alternatives. Conversely, male applicants’ relationship status was discussed infrequently, and all female partners were seen as moveable. Consequently, I show that the “two-body problem” is a gendered phenomenon embedded in cultural stereotypes and organizational practices that can disadvantage women in academic hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications of such relationship status discrimination for sociological research on labor market inequalities and faculty diversity.

Dear COR community,

You are cordially invited to attend a colloquium co-sponsored by COR and the Department of Sociology.

IMAGINED FUTURES AND CAPITALIST DYNAMICS

Prof. Jens Beckert, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany

Friday, February 10

12:00-1:30pm

SSPB 1208

Abstract: In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How do actors assess the future if this future is open and uncertain? Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Since they are not confined to empirical reality, fictional expectations are a source of creativity in the economy. In the talk Beckert will develop the notion of fictional expectations and relate it to the operation of investments, innovation and consumption. The talk is based on Beckert’s new book “Imagined Futures. Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics” (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Speaker bio: Jens Beckert is professor and director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany. His research examines the role of economy in society, especially based on studies of markets, organizational sociology, sociology of inheritance, and sociological theory. His books in English include Beyond the Market: The Social Foundations of Economic Efficiency (Princeton University Press, 1996), Inherited Wealth (Princeton University Press, 2008), and Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (Harvard University Press, 2016). He is (co)editor of The Worth of Goods: Valuation and Pricing in the Economy (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Constructing Quality: The Classification of Goods in Markets (Oxford University Press, 2013), among others. Prof. Beckert is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and currently serves as one of the editors of the European Journal of Sociology.