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.

scholarly journals The Social Life of the “Forever Chemical”

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-163
Author(s):  
Daniel Renfrew ◽  
Thomas W. Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Toxic Event ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Polyfluoroalkyl Substances

This article examines the social life of PFAS contamination (a class of several thousand synthetic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) and maps the growing research in the social sciences on the unique conundrums and complex travels of the “forever chemical.” We explore social, political, and cultural dimensions of PFAS toxicity, especially how PFAS move from unseen sites into individual bodies and into the public eye in late industrial contexts; how toxicity is comprehended, experienced, and imagined; the factors shaping regulatory action and ignorance; and how PFAS have been the subject of competing forms of knowledge production. Lastly, we highlight how people mobilize collectively, or become demobilized, in response to PFAS pollution/ toxicity. We argue that PFAS exposure experiences, perceptions, and responses move dynamically through a “toxicity continuum” spanning invisibility, suffering, resignation, and refusal. We off er the concept of the “toxic event” as a way to make sense of the contexts and conditions by which otherwise invisible pollution/toxicity turns into public, mass-mediated, and political episodes. We ground our review in our ongoing multisited ethnographic research on the PFAS exposure experience.

Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Economic Theory ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Crucial Element ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theory Of Democracy

This chapter describes a “dramatistic,” “dramatic,” or “dramaturgical” approach to the study of social interaction. It asks whether the dramaturgical model insists on the theatricality of social life merely in the sense of insisting that people fill roles just as persons act parts in a play. This is the question of whether the crucial element in the dramaturgical picture is that cluster of insights that goes under the general heading of “role distance.” The chapter considers the peculiarities of rational explanation and about the role of reconstructions of “the thing to do” other than the role of explaining an action or series of actions by focusing on voting behavior in the terms proposed by Anthony Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy. It also examines some recent accounts of the phenomenon of suicide, along with the rationality principle, which Karl Popper calls “false but indispensable” to the social sciences.

Globalizations

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Osterhammel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
World History ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Characteristic Features

The revival of world history towards the end of the twentieth century was intimately connected with the rise of a new master concept in the social sciences: globalization. Historians and social scientists responded to the same generational experience that the interconnectedness of social life on the planet had arrived at a new level of intensity. The conclusions drawn from this insight in the various academic disciplines diverged considerably. The early theorists of globalization in sociology, political science, and economics disdained a historical perspective. The new concept seemed ideally suited to grasp the characteristic features of contemporary society. It helped to pinpoint the very essence of present-day modernity. Globalization opened up a way towards the social science mainstream, provided elements of a fresh terminology to a field that had suffered for a long time from an excess of descriptive simplicity.

scholarly journals A Pragmatist's Guide to Prediction in the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Verhagen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Simple Technique ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Out Of Sample ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Many

Making out-of-sample predictions is an under-utilised tool in the social sciences, often for the wrong reasons. Many social scientists confuse prediction with unnecessarily complicated methods, or narrowly predicting the future. This is unfortunate, because prediction understood as the simple process of evaluating a model outside of the sample used for estimation is a much more general, and disarmingly simple technique that brings a host of benefits to our empirical workflow. One needn't use complicated methods or be solely concerned with predicting the future to use prediction, nor is it necessary to resolve the centuries-old philosophical debate between prediction and explanation to appreciate its benefits. Prediction can and should be used as a simple complement to the rich methodological tradition in the social sciences, and is equally applicable across a vast multitude of modelling approaches, owing to its simplicity and intuitive nature. For all its simplicity, the value of prediction should not be underestimated. Prediction can address some of the most enduring sources of criticism plaguing the social sciences, like lack of external validity and the use of overly simplistic models to capture social life. In this paper, I illustrate these benefits with a host of empirical examples that merely skim the surface of the many and varied ways in which prediction can be applied, staking the claim that prediction is one of those illustrious `free lunches' that can greatly benefit the empirical social sciences.

Time and Scheduling

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Feld ◽  
Bernard Grofman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Time Budgets ◽  
Household Division Of Labor ◽  
Schedule Coordination ◽  
The Social ◽  
Boundary Maintenance ◽  
Traditional Approaches

This article examines time and scheduling dynamics, with particular emphasis on the potential consequences of scheduling constraints for social life. It asks why scheduling conflicts exist and why they are often enormously difficult to resolve, first by providing an overview of traditional approaches to the study of time in the social sciences. These include an extensive literature across a number of disciplines on how societies conceptualize time; research that has examined how the organization of time has changed over history; and studies on the female labor force, the household division of labor, and time budgets more generally. The discussion then turns to formal insights that explain why schedule coordination is such a problem and describes the macro-level social implications of scheduling conflicts, focusing on hierarchies, segregation, and boundary-maintenance dynamics.

scholarly journals The social life of time and methods: Studying London’s temporal architectures

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 604-631
Author(s):  
Ella Harris ◽  
Rebecca Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Temporal Logics ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Rhythms

This paper contributes to work on the social life of time. It focuses on how time is doubled; produced by, and productive of, the relations and processes it operates through. In particular, it explores the methodological implications of this conception of time for how social scientists may study the doubledness of time. It draws on an allied move within the social sciences to see methods as themselves doubled, as both emerging from and constitutive of the social worlds that they seek to understand. We detail our own very different methodological experiments with studying the social life of time in London, engaging interactive documentary to elucidate nonlinear imaginaries of space-time in London’s pop-up culture (Ella Harris) and encountering time on a series of walks along a particular stretch of road in south east London (Beckie Coleman). While clearly different projects in terms of their content, ambition and scope, in bringing these projects together, we show the ability of our methods to grasp and perform from multiple angles and scales what Sharma (2014) calls ‘temporal architectures’. Temporal architectures, composed of elements including the built environment, commodities, services, technologies and labour, are infrastructures that enable social rhythms and temporal logics and that can entail a politicized valuing of the time of certain groups over others. We aim to contribute to an expanded and enriched conceptualisation of methods for exploring time, considering what our studies might offer to work on the doubled social life of time and methods, and highlighting in particular their implications for an engagement with a politics of time and temporality.

Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater: Towards a Sociology of the Human-Animal Abuse ‘Link’?

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nik Taylor ◽  
Tania Signal
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Animal Abuse ◽  
The Social ◽  
Significant Interest ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Sociological Thought ◽  
Human Social Life

The prevalence of animals in society, and recognition of the multiplicity of roles they play in human social life, has invoked significant interest from certain subsections of the social sciences. However, research in this area, to date, tends to be at an empirical and inherently psychological level. It is the contention of the current article that we need to redress this imbalance if we are to create a legitimate space wherein sociology can be used to investigate human-animal relations/interactions. In order to achieve this, an examination of the foundations of sociological thought is needed. This is explored in the current article through the use of one substantive, highly topical, subject in human-animal studies: the human-animal abuse ‘link.’

After the cultural turn: For a textural sociology

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 552-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo de la Fuente
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Organizational Studies ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Surface Patterns ◽  
Cultural Turn

This article proposes the social sciences consider texture – rather than text − as the important legacy of the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences. The article considers texture in the literal sense of surface-patterns, as well as texture as a metaphor for the ‘dynamic’ and hard-to-capture qualities of social life. The article draws on the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the ‘practice turn’ in organizational studies and recent developments in geography and cultural research to map out different textural frameworks. While sociologists have lagged behind their counterparts in other fields in embracing a textural sensibility, the article considers the writings of Georg Simmel and the Yale School of Cultural Sociology as prominent exceptions to that rule. The article concludes by encouraging sociologists to consider the textural as a way into a ‘theoretical’ – as against a purely ‘methodological’ conception – of the qualitative.

The force of prescriptions

1984 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friedrich Kratochwil
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Issue Area ◽  
The Social

How do norms influence choices in social life? Conceptual distinctions among types of norms and suggestions in the work of Hobbes, Hume, and Durkheim help us investigate in greater detail the “woolly” concept of regimes in international relations. When we disaggregate the “set of explicit and implicit norms, rules, and decisionmaking procedures” in a given issue area and focus on the conceptual links between rules, principles (norms), and actions, we gain an understanding of the role of norms in social life that is more comprehensive than the understanding provided by traditional accounts. Furthermore, placing the present regime discussion within wider philosophical traditions enables us to develop a more critical approach to the building of theory in the social sciences, since the use of norms as explanatory devices challenges the predominant positivist outlook in several important respects.

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