Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

Futures of Transit Work: Contesting Devaluation and Neoliberal Automation in Bus Transit 公共交通工作的未来：公共交通中的贬值和新自由主义自动化

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2026-04-07 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70018

Hunter Akridge, Sarah E. Fox

{"title":"Futures of Transit Work: Contesting Devaluation and Neoliberal Automation in Bus Transit","authors":"Hunter Akridge, Sarah E. Fox","doi":"10.1111/awr.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.70018","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Being a bus operator has long meant access to middle class wages, quality benefits, and union membership, forms of security increasingly rare amid growing precarity. But transit is in trouble. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and decades of disinvestment, bus operators face mounting time pressure, frequent violence, and eroding job security. They are framed as inefficient, a narrative used to justify weakening their labor protections and degrading dignity on the job. We highlight the on-the-ground effects of this racialized devaluation through first-hand accounts from bus operators across the U.S. and Canada. Their embodied critique of the current crisis makes visible the harms of neoliberal transformations, including emerging technological change. A driverless future is being advanced, one that would further degrade bus operators' dignity and devalue their labor. We introduce the concept of <i>neoliberal automation</i> to describe this trajectory and describe how it is being contested. Transit workers are rejecting automation framed by austerity and displacement, offering instead visions of a labor future centered on dignity, safety, and democratic control over technological change.</p>","PeriodicalId":43035,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology of Work Review","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2026-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/awr.70018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147683447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Notes From the Editorial Collective 来自编辑集体的注释

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2025-10-31 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70016

Tarini Bedi, Letizia Bonanno, Jasmine Folz, Rachel Smith

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“Don't Complain”: Labor Anxiety, Racial Ideologies, and Moral Micromanagement in Rural South Carolina “不要抱怨”：南卡罗来纳农村的劳动焦虑、种族意识形态和道德微观管理

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2025-10-30 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70015

Sydney Pullen

{"title":"“Don't Complain”: Labor Anxiety, Racial Ideologies, and Moral Micromanagement in Rural South Carolina","authors":"Sydney Pullen","doi":"10.1111/awr.70015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.70015","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>South Carolina's Black Belt counties are perennial targets of economic development programs. Economic development personnel focus on industrial recruitment and workforce development to remedy the economic woes of the region. They advertise an available, non-union workforce and free workforce training programs for industries considering locating in South Carolina. These training programs emphasize “soft skills,” a term used by employers, economic development personnel, and workforce development agencies to refer to traits or behaviors an employer desires in a worker, but that are not directly related to a specific job. This research situates the neoliberal turn towards “soft skills” in its historical context in the U.S. South. I draw on Clyde Woods' concept of “moral micromanagement” strategies to compare 20th-century industrial education and 21st-century soft skills training programs, demonstrating that soft skills training programs represent a continuity of racial ideologies and racialized labor regimes. Placing soft skills training within a longer history of moral micromanagement indicates that labor management practices associated with soft skills have as much to do with old ways of disciplining labor as new and highlights the co-constitution of labor anxiety and racial ideologies.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":43035,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology of Work Review","volume":"46 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145501100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Connected Horizons: Exploring Online Work Aspirations Among Western Digital Nomads and Lao Youth 连接的视野：探索西方数字游牧民族和老挝青年的在线工作愿望

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2025-10-22 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70014

Eeva Kesküla, Phill Wilcox

{"title":"Connected Horizons: Exploring Online Work Aspirations Among Western Digital Nomads and Lao Youth","authors":"Eeva Kesküla, Phill Wilcox","doi":"10.1111/awr.70014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.70014","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article explores the aspirations for digital work among two seemingly disparate groups: Lao rural–urban migrant youth and Western digital nomads. Based on ethnographic research in Laos and Thailand, we argue that despite differing socioeconomic backgrounds, both groups share strikingly similar aspirations for autonomy and self-reliance through online work. This challenges existing theories that emphasize the local context of aspirations, suggesting that global connections and neoliberal values increasingly shape desires for a “good life” centered on digital labor. We analyze how these aspirations are formed through encounters with digital technologies, online communities, and global narratives of success, highlighting the role of the internet as both a source of inspiration and a means of achieving these goals. By examining these convergent aspirations, we advance the understanding of how global connections influence the formation and expression of aspiration in the digital age. These findings highlight the importance of exploring the complex interplay between individual aspirations, global connections, and evolving notions of digital work.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":43035,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology of Work Review","volume":"46 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145501044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Visualizing Transborder Lifeworlds in the Polish-German Border Region 波兰-德国边境地区跨界生活世界的可视化

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2025-09-23 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70010

Iepke M. Rijcken, Piotr Goldstein, Maksymilian Awuah

{"title":"Visualizing Transborder Lifeworlds in the Polish-German Border Region","authors":"Iepke M. Rijcken, Piotr Goldstein, Maksymilian Awuah","doi":"10.1111/awr.70010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.70010","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The work of migrants and transborder commuters in rural and peripheralized localities is often considered invisible or, in fact, actively ignored. This multimodal essay reflects on transborder lifeworlds in the Polish–German border region, drawing on insights from using photography and sound recording as a research method. In the hands of anthropologists and sociologists of work, these methods can be powerful tools for foregrounding intersecting lifeworlds, hidden hierarchies, and power dynamics that shape the places under study. Engaging with both visual and auditory dimensions enables researchers to re-visit their observations and share them with others, opening up new perspectives and re-interpretations, transcending what may have escaped attention or what they perceive differently because of their positionality. Through the curated photographs and soundscapes, this essay offers an intimate, sensorial engagement with everyday life that extends beyond words. Paying attention to crossing, interacting, and overlapping border-zone lifeworlds is essential not only for the study of local context but also for mobility and migration scholarship focusing on labor mobilities to rural and peripheralized regions and the in/visible power relations tied to broader global systems.</p>","PeriodicalId":43035,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology of Work Review","volume":"46 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/awr.70010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145501106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

New Ways of Life: Cultivating Balance at a Tech Start-Up During Lockdown 新的生活方式：在封锁期间在一家科技初创企业培养平衡

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2025-09-22 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70012

Lily Rodel

引用次数: 0

Life-Making on the Line: Capitalist Value, Social Reproduction, and the Politics of Call Centre Labour in Portugal 在线上的生活：资本主义价值，社会再生产，以及葡萄牙呼叫中心劳动力的政治

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2025-09-19 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70013

Patrícia Alves de Matos

{"title":"Life-Making on the Line: Capitalist Value, Social Reproduction, and the Politics of Call Centre Labour in Portugal","authors":"Patrícia Alves de Matos","doi":"10.1111/awr.70013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.70013","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores how value is generated in the Portuguese call centre sector by examining its reliance on the commodification of socially and historically rooted reproductive capacities. Previous research on call centres has often focused on the disembedding, disembodiment, depersonalisation, and desubjectification of human linguistic agency, frequently neglecting the familial, educational, and moral infrastructures that make labour power both viable and exploitable. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the extraction of value in this sector relies not only on linguistic output or emotional labour but also on historically embedded reproductive capacities, such as empathy, ethical judgment, and communicative skills. These capacities are shaped by intergenerational efforts aimed at social mobility and national modernisation. These reproductive investments, which are developed outside the wage relationship, are appropriated by capital through a labour regime that requires personalisation while enforcing standardisation. By integrating social reproduction theory with call centre studies, this article reframes call centres as critical sites where the tensions between production and reproduction become evident, contested, and productive of surplus value.</p>","PeriodicalId":43035,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology of Work Review","volume":"46 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/awr.70013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145501074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Redivisions of Work: Manufacturing Labor and Training in Switzerland's Knowledge Economy 工作的重新划分：瑞士知识经济中的制造业劳动力和培训

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2025-09-01 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70011

Johanna Mugler

{"title":"Redivisions of Work: Manufacturing Labor and Training in Switzerland's Knowledge Economy","authors":"Johanna Mugler","doi":"10.1111/awr.70011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.70011","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The promise of knowledge society is clean, creative, and expressive work. Technological advancements would relieve humans from the tedium and hardship of labor, and access to knowledge and expansion of higher education would diminish the existing social inequalities of industrial society. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Switzerland's mechanical and electrical engineering industry, this article illustrates how the work experiences of apprentices challenge the image of labor in a knowledge society ostensibly freed from all forms of material, technological, and social constraint. I demonstrate that the persistence of the tedium and potential danger of industrial work, of organizational hierarchies, the decreasing social validation of mechanical and manual labor, and expectations and aspirations to singularity make youth increasingly interested in other kinds of employment and training. The article takes the work and learning relations in the Swiss mechanical and electrical engineering sector as a symptom of emerging tensions around the division of labor and valorization of different forms of skills, and the meaning and motivations of work in late capitalism. I argue that future anthropological studies of work and education in de-industrialized settings might do well to examine the social critique of industrial work in concert with its aesthetic critique.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":43035,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology of Work Review","volume":"46 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145500834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Enterprising Citizens: Digital Self-Help Gurus in Post-Liberalization India 进取的公民：后自由化印度的数字自助大师

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2025-08-04 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70009

Riddhi Bhandari, Siddhi Gyan Pandey

{"title":"Enterprising Citizens: Digital Self-Help Gurus in Post-Liberalization India","authors":"Riddhi Bhandari, Siddhi Gyan Pandey","doi":"10.1111/awr.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.70009","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This paper analyzes the content of India's digital self-help gurus (SHGs), who are popular online figures in India, and engages a varied online audience across multiple social media platforms. We examine the role that the digital SHGs play to mediate cultural transformation following economic restructuring of the Indian economy that began in the 1990s and rapidly transformed the socioeconomic landscape. There was a shift to contractual and uncertain employment, and a simultaneous valorization of entrepreneurial citizenship. We propose that the digital SHGs facilitate this transformation by undertaking the work of mourning and the work of dreaming. Through their advice and content, they enable a letting go of the values historically attached with higher education and stable employment and help cultivate new attitudes toward skill accumulation, self-audit, and responsibilization—core tenets of enterprise culture—to posit entrepreneurial citizenship as a desirable goal. However, entrepreneurial citizenship can be exclusionary and offer unstable belonging. The digital SHGs assuage these fears and anxieties by normalizing failure and prescribing perseverance to cultivate the entrepreneurial self.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":43035,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology of Work Review","volume":"46 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145500962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Neuroaquilombar the Black and the Autistic to Decenter White-Neurotypicality in the Workplace: Normal Is Just Another Word for White 从黑人和自闭者到白人：工作场所的神经典型性：正常只是白人的另一种说法

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Anthropology of Work Review Pub Date : 2025-06-22 DOI: 10.1111/awr.70000

Mayne Souza Benedetto, Kátia Moraes

{"title":"Neuroaquilombar the Black and the Autistic to Decenter White-Neurotypicality in the Workplace: Normal Is Just Another Word for White","authors":"Mayne Souza Benedetto, Kátia Moraes","doi":"10.1111/awr.70000","DOIUrl":"10.1111/awr.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article is part of the special issue “Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work” (AWR July 2025; 46(1)) edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. Neutrality, epitomized as Whiteness, confers privileges that hinge on being neurotypical, equating neutrality with both Whiteness and the perception of normalcy. For individuals who are both autistic and non-White, navigating this construct often means enduring intersecting forms of oppression. This article examines these dynamics through the personal narratives of a Black neurotypical woman and an autistic Latina in the workplace. Drawing on Critical Racial Studies, Critical Autism Studies, Whiteness Studies, and ethnographic research, we highlight the urgent need for collaboration across these fields. To advance this effort, we introduce the term <i>neuroaquilombar</i>, representing a deliberate approach to cultivating collective spaces that affirm cultural identity for Black and non-White populations while embracing neurological diversity as a natural aspect of humanity. Through collaborative autoethnography as <i>escrevivências</i>, we reflect on the challenges of conforming to capitalist productivity standards in a society structured for the success of the White, able-bodied majority. By recounting our workplace experiences, we aim to deepen understanding, foster connections that humanize diverse experiences, and issue a call to action for advocates in both spheres. Additionally, we seek to showcase new forms of engagement that transcend the extractive practices often associated with anthropological research conducted by non-disabled White scholars.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":43035,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology of Work Review","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144647565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0