Shaping Emotional Labor Practices in the Sharing Economy*

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-82
Author(s):  
Eliane Bucher ◽  
Christian Fieseler ◽  
Christoph Lutz ◽  
Gemma Newlands
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Labor Practices

Sex and Stigma

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Jane Blithe ◽  
Anna Wiederhold Wolfe ◽  
Breanna Mohr
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Independent Contractors ◽  
Job Tasks ◽  
Labor Practices ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Laws And Policies

Wrapped in moral judgments about sexual conduct and shrouded in titillating intrigue, legal prostitutes in Nevada’s brothels frequently face oppression and unfair labor practices while managing stigma and isolation associated with their occupational identities. Rooted in organizational communication and feminist theories, this book engages with stories of women living and working in these “hidden” organizations to interrogate issues related to labor rights, stigma, secrecy, privacy, and discrimination in the current legal brothel system. Widespread beliefs about the immorality of selling sexual services have influenced the history and laws of legal brothel prostitution. Moral judgments about legal prostitutes are so pervasive that many women struggle to engage in their communities, conduct business, maintain personal relationships, and transition out of the industry. At the same time, legal brothels operate like other kinds of legal entities, and individuals must contend with balancing work and nonwork commitments, organizational cultures, and managerial relationships. Although legal prostitutes are independent contractors, they often live in their workplaces and must adhere to scheduling requirements, mundane job tasks, and emotional labor, like employees in other organizational settings. Ethnographic observations in the brothels and interviews with current and ex-brothel workers, brothel owners, madams, local police, lobbyists, and others provide a broad data set for analysis. The book includes a photo-elicitation project, featuring images captured by legal prostitutes about their lives in the brothels. Thorough archival research fills in gaps left from inconsistencies, illegal practices, and laws about brothel prostitution. In addition, the third author works as a legal prostitute, providing a deep (and deeply personal) autoethnographic insider look at the industry. As such, this book serves as both an updated resource about the laws and policies which guide legal prostitution in Nevada, and an intimate look at life and decision-making for women performing sex work.

scholarly journals The conditioning function of rating mechanisms for consumers in the sharing economy

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 1090-1108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gemma Newlands ◽  
Christoph Lutz ◽  
Christian Fieseler
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Mixed Methods Research ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Behavioral Outcome ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Behavioral Conditioning ◽  
The Impact

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how rating mechanisms encourage emotional labor norms among sharing economy consumers. Design/methodology/approach This study follows a mixed-methods research design. Survey data from 207 consumers were used to quantify the impact of three distinct rating dimensions on a consumer behavioral outcome (emotional labor). In the second step, 18 focus groups with 94 participants were used to investigate the conditioning functions of ratings in more depth. Findings Rating mechanisms condition consumers toward performing socially desirable behaviors during sharing transactions. While consumers accept the necessity of bilateral rating mechanisms, they also recognize their coercive nature. Furthermore, the presence of bilateral rating mechanisms leads to negative outcomes such as annoyance and frustration. Originality/value This study contributes to sharing economy literature by examining bilateral rating mechanisms as a means of behavioral conditioning for consumers. This study points to improvements in platform design and informs theory on tripartite markets as well as trust.

Managing Emotional Labor in the Sharing Economy

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 16933
Author(s):  
Eliane Bucher ◽  
Christian Fieseler ◽  
Christoph Lutz ◽  
Gemma Newlands
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Sharing Economy

scholarly journals Understanding Fair Labor Practices in a Networked Age

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Kneese ◽  
Alex Rosenblat ◽  
danah boyd
Keyword(s):  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Professional Services ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Labor Practices ◽  
Volunteer Labor ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Freelance Work ◽  
Varied Work ◽  
Fair Labor

Internet-enabled technologies allow people to connect in unprecedented ways. Although everyday social practices are widespread and well known, these same tools are reconfiguring key aspects of work. Crowdsourcing and distributed labor technologies increasingly allow companies to outsource everything from mundane tasks (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) to professional services (e.g., oDesk). Sharing economy – or peer economy – tools (e.g., Airbnb) allow people to barter goods or services or get paid for these exchanges outside of the dominant business framework. These services have enabled new forms of contract or freelance labor and reduced risk for companies; however, there is often an increase in risk for the associated laborers. At the same time, divisions between what constitutes work, hobby, and volunteerism get blurred, especially as many organizations rely on volunteer labor under the assumption that it’s mutually beneficial (e.g., blogs and journalistic enterprises that republish work or see the offer of a platform as valuable in and of itself). While all of these labor issues have unmediated precedents (e.g., free internships), technology magnifies the scale of these practices, minimizes the transactional friction, and increases the visibility of unpaid and freelance work. Collectively, this raises critical questions about what fair labor looks like in a networked world, where boundaries dissolve and existing mechanisms of labor protection do not address the varied work scenarios now available.

Byproductive labor

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 637-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiloh Whitney
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Immaterial Labor ◽  
Reproductive Labor ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Labor Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Embodied Subjectivity

My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I develop through analysis of the phenomenology of various affective labor practices in dialog with feminist scholarship, both on gendered and racialized labor, and on affect and emotion. I motivate my theory in the context of literature on affective and emotional labor in philosophy and the social sciences, engaging the post-Marxist literature on affective and immaterial labor and emphasizing feminist critiques. I argue that affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing waste affects and affective byproducts. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants. I make three central claims: (1) affective labor invariably creates byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker; (2) the unique kind of affective expenditure I call “byproductive” (metabolizing affective surplus, containing affective waste, and producing depleted affective agency) is a defining feature of affective labor not circumscribed by the productive–reproductive distinction; and (3) the marginalized forms of subjectivity and depleted agency constituted through the intersections of this labor with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class are themselves byproducts of affective labor. Thus, theorizing affective labor as byproductive captures the uniqueness of affective labor and the forms of exploitation unique to it, but also explains the interaction of affective labor with forms of power that operate through subjection and marginalization.

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