skip to main content
10.1145/2818048.2820026acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescscwConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Standing Out from the Crowd: Emotional Labor, Body Labor, and Temporal Labor in Ridesharing

Published: 27 February 2016 Publication History

Abstract

CSCW researchers have become interested in crowd work as a new form of collaborative engagement, that is, as a new way in which people's actions are coordinated in order to achieve collective effects. We address this area but from a different perspective - that of the labor practices involved in taking crowd work as a form of work. Using empirical materials from a study of ride-sharing, we draw inspiration from studies of the immaterial forms of labor and alternate analyses of political economy that can cast a new light on the context of crowd labor that might matter for CSCW researchers.

References

[1]
Marc Augé. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso, London, UK.
[2]
Michael S. Bernstein, Greg Little, Robert C. Miller, Björn Hartmann, Mark S. Ackerman, David R. Karger, David Crowell, and Katrina Panovich. 2010. Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside. In Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 313-322. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1866029.1866078
[3]
Susan L. Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. 2005. Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work (GROUP '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-10. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1099203.1099205
[4]
Marisoa Dalla Costa, and Selma James. 1972. Women and the Subversion of the Community. Falling Wall Press.
[5]
Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus. 2007. Learning to immaterial labour 2.0: MySpace and social networks. Ephemera: Theory and politics in organization 7, 1: 88106.
[6]
Andy Crabtree, Thomas A. Rodden and Steven D. Benford. 2005. Moving with the Times: IT Research and the Boundaries of CSCW. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 14, 3:217-251.
[7]
Fred Davis. 1959. The cabdriver and his customer: facets of a fleeting relationship. American Journal of Sociology, 65, 2:158-165.
[8]
Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi. 2014. Heteromation and its (dis)contents: The invisible division of labor between humans and machines. First Monday 19:6.
[9]
Silvia Federici. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2004.
[10]
J.K. Gibson-Graham. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
[11]
Tarleton Gillespie. 2014. The Relevance of Algorithms. In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, CA, USA, 167-194.
[12]
Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth (eds). 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, USA.
[13]
Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
[14]
Keith Hart. 1973. Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana. Journal of Modern African Studies 11, 1:61-89.
[15]
Arlie Russell Hochschild. 1979. The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, USA.
[16]
Julie S. Hui, Michael D. Greenberg, and Elizabeth M. Gerber. 2014. Understanding the role of community in crowdfunding work. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 62-74. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2531602.2531715
[17]
Eva Illouz. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity, Cambridge, UK.
[18]
Lilly Irani. 2015. The Cultural Work of Microwork. New Media and Society 17:5, 720-739.
[19]
Lilly C. Irani and M. Six Silberman. 2013. Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 611-620. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2470654.2470742
[20]
Lilly Irani and M. Six Silberman. 2014. From critical design to critical infrastructure: lessons from turkopticon. Interactions 21, 4 (July 2014), 32-35. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2627392
[21]
Aniket Kittur, Bongwon Suh, Bryan A. Pendleton, and Ed H. Chi. 2007. He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 453462. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240698
[22]
Aniket Kittur, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Michael Bernstein, Elizabeth Gerber, Aaron Shaw, John Zimmerman, Matt Lease, and John Horton. 2013. The future of crowd work. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1301-1318. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2441776.2441923
[23]
Airi Lampinen, Victoria Bellotti, Andrés MonroyHernández, Coye Cheshire, and Alexandra Samuel. 2015. Studying the "Sharing Economy": Perspectives to Peer-to-Peer Exchange. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW'15 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 117-121. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2685553.2699339
[24]
Maurizio Lazzaratto. 1996. Immaterial Labour. In Marxism Beyond Marxism, Sari Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl (eds.).
[25]
Min Kyung Lee, Daniel Kusbit, Evan Metsky, and Laura Dabbish. 2015. Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16031612. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2702123.2702548
[26]
David Martin, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Jacki O'Neill, and Neha Gupta. 2014. Being a turker. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 224-235. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2531602.2531663
[27]
Amanda Menking and Ingrid Erickson. 2015. The Heart Work of Wikipedia: Gendered, Emotional Labor in the World's Largest Online Encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 207-210. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2702123.2702514
[28]
Gina Neff. 2012. Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
[29]
Tyler Pace. 2012. Creative self-expression in sociotechnical systems. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion (CSCW '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 359-362. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2141512.2141620
[30]
Andrew Ross. 2009. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. NYU Press, New York, NY, USA.
[31]
Joel Ross, Lilly Irani, M. Six Silberman, Andrew Zaldivar, and Bill Tomlinson. 2010. Who are the crowdworkers? : shifting demographics in mechanical turk. In CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2863-2872
[32]
Niloufar Salehi, Lilly C. Irani, Michael S. Bernstein, Ali Alkhatib, Eva Ogbe, Kristy Milland, and Clickhappier. 2015. We Are Dynamo: Overcoming Stalling and Friction in Collective Action for Crowd Workers. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1621-1630. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2702123.2702508
[33]
Kjeld Schmidt. 2011. The Concept of 'Work' in CSCW. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 20, 45:341-401.
[34]
Sarah Sharma. 2014. In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, USA.
[35]
M. Six Silberman, Lilly Irani, and Joel Ross. 2010. Ethics and tactics of professional crowdwork. XRDS 17, 2 (December 2010), 39-43. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1869086.1869100
[36]
Tiziana Terranova. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. Pluto Press, London, UK.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Labor issues from the perspective of drivers on the Uber and Lyft apps and the impact on riders who use wheelchairsTravel Behaviour and Society10.1016/j.tbs.2024.10089138(100891)Online publication date: Jan-2025
  • (2024)Double the Tasks, Double the Control: An Analysis of Workers’ Practices to Increase Visibility in Cleaning, Care, and Accommodation Platforms in SpainCritical Sociology10.1177/08969205241287418Online publication date: 11-Nov-2024
  • (2024)When the "Matchmaker" Does Not Have Your Interest at Heart: Perceived Algorithmic Harms, Folk Theories, and Users' Counter-Strategies on TinderProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36897108:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
February 2016
1866 pages
ISBN:9781450335928
DOI:10.1145/2818048
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 February 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Crowd labor
  2. affective labor
  3. immaterial labor
  4. ride sharing.
  5. sharing economy
  6. work practice

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

CSCW '16
Sponsor:
CSCW '16: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
February 27 - March 2, 2016
California, San Francisco, USA

Acceptance Rates

CSCW '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 142 of 571 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CSCW '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)160
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)17
Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Labor issues from the perspective of drivers on the Uber and Lyft apps and the impact on riders who use wheelchairsTravel Behaviour and Society10.1016/j.tbs.2024.10089138(100891)Online publication date: Jan-2025
  • (2024)Double the Tasks, Double the Control: An Analysis of Workers’ Practices to Increase Visibility in Cleaning, Care, and Accommodation Platforms in SpainCritical Sociology10.1177/08969205241287418Online publication date: 11-Nov-2024
  • (2024)When the "Matchmaker" Does Not Have Your Interest at Heart: Perceived Algorithmic Harms, Folk Theories, and Users' Counter-Strategies on TinderProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36897108:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Union Makes Us Strong: Space, Technology, and On-Demand Ridesourcing Digital Labour PlatformsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870028:CSCW2(1-36)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)El costo de la independencia: Latino house-cleaners in Technology-Mediated Labour MarketsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869998:CSCW2(1-32)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Digital Gig Work Under Unstable Energy Infrastructures: Invisible Workarounds and Alternative ImaginariesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869498:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Safer Algorithmically-Mediated Offline Introductions: Harms and Protective BehaviorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869488:CSCW2(1-43)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Unveiling Two-Fold Gamification: Exploring the Agency Of DeliveryWorkers in Urban IndiaProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3674829.3675066(117-126)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Exploring Videoconferencing for Older Adults with Cognitive Concerns Using a Dramaturgical LensProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675647(1-13)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Understanding the Technology-Mediated Home Phlebotomy Ecosystem in IndiaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374218:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media