Von der Berufung zum Job?

In our culture, helping people in need is essentially determined by Christian motivations. This applies not least to the time of the formation phase of the organised social form of diaconal action since the middle of the 19th century. Regardless of the many transformations that have resulted in helping becoming a profession for many people, religious motivations remain formative, but are no longer dominant. However, a latent openness of helping professions to normative, especially Christian semantics can be observed, to which diaconal leadership can be connected.

Algorithmic Logic in Digital Capitalism

This chapter details the key characteristics of algorithmic systems in their current hegemonic social form, which helps to shed a light on the reasons for their increasing social influence. These characteristics include: opacity/obfuscation, datafication, automation, and instrumental rationalisation. Because technologies are inevitably embedded in – and influenced by – the social context in which they develop, the author’s analysis considers these systems as a part of competitive and inherently unstable capitalist society, or to put it more narrowly, as a part of digital capitalism. This provides a critical analytic framework that points to the fact there is nothing ‘natural’ in these characteristics of algorithmic systems, while making it possible to delineate both the structural reasons for their development and their social consequences. On this basis it is claimed we can denote a specific algorithmic logic in digital capitalism that continuously reinforces itself.

Reactionary radicalism and the analysis of worker subjectivity in Marx’s critique of political economy

This analysis starts off from the contemporary relevance of the theory of ‘the radicalism of tradition’, arguing that it presents a challenge to Marxism because Marxist work has not sufficiently attended to elements of a theory of worker subjectivity scattered in the critique of political economy. This theory is located on a lower level of abstraction than is commonly assumed and can be applied to subjective dynamics in labour militancy. However, this requires that some basic categories in Marx’s critique are reconsidered, especially those that do not seem immanent to the capitalist social formation, categories that appear, and have mostly been read, as the ahistorical ground on which properly social forms arise. Therefore, apparently ahistorical categories pertaining to use value and concrete labour’s use value for capital are explored to reconstruct a theory relating capital’s positing of labour to contemporary militancies that appropriate tradition. In contrast to the view of tradition as external to capital, the view advanced is that ‘reactionary radicalism’ relates to how capital, as totalizing social form, abstracts tradition. Furthermore, tradition is radicalized through a negative subjectivity inherent to the commodification of labour power and the real subsumption of labour; proletarian experience is a precondition of radicalized tradition.

Co-creation in Macrotask Knowledge Work on Online Labor Platforms

Nordic working life studies have mostly focused on the precarious aspects of work mediated via online labor platforms. We follow a different approach and examine the potential of such work to benefit professionals by enhancing their job quality and learning. This qualitative, practice-based study applies the concept ‘co-creation’ to examine how a social form of creating value takes place in Upwork macrotask projects. It then investigates how platform features shape opportunities for co-creation. The data comprise interviews of 15 freelancers residing in Finland. The findings suggest that co-creation is possible in macrotask projects, but the platform does not seem to actively support co-creation. This paper provides insights into the discussion of job quality at platform work and how co-creation on platforms might be developed to support the Nordic labor market model.

Fighting words in the antipodes

© 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press. In this commentary, written in two bursts—the first completed in April 2020, and the second at the end of July—we explore how media metaphors of COVID-19 constitute the pandemic in Australia and New Zealand. We argue that the media’s rhetorical strategies play an important role not only in describing the illness, but in influencing and shaping individual and collective responses to the pandemic, with significant consequences for mental health and well-being in the context of crisis. We align this commentary with the tenets of the sociology of diagnosis, which argue that even though there are material realities of disease, their social form and conse-quence cannot be separated from the tangible nature of illness and its management. We also lean on Derrida’s approach to metaphor, which underlines how even observable viral entities such as COVID-19 are simultaneously material, abstract, and in flux. We describe the metaphors used by local media to describe the pandemic—including combat, bush fires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters—and we explore how and why these metaphors construct the pandemic locally and farther afield.

Fighting words in the antipodes

© 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press. In this commentary, written in two bursts—the first completed in April 2020, and the second at the end of July—we explore how media metaphors of COVID-19 constitute the pandemic in Australia and New Zealand. We argue that the media’s rhetorical strategies play an important role not only in describing the illness, but in influencing and shaping individual and collective responses to the pandemic, with significant consequences for mental health and well-being in the context of crisis. We align this commentary with the tenets of the sociology of diagnosis, which argue that even though there are material realities of disease, their social form and conse-quence cannot be separated from the tangible nature of illness and its management. We also lean on Derrida’s approach to metaphor, which underlines how even observable viral entities such as COVID-19 are simultaneously material, abstract, and in flux. We describe the metaphors used by local media to describe the pandemic—including combat, bush fires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters—and we explore how and why these metaphors construct the pandemic locally and farther afield.

Fine-scale habitat heterogeneity favours the coexistence of supergene-controlled social forms in Formica selysi

Background Social insects vary widely in social organization, yet the genetical and ecological factors influencing this variation remain poorly known. In particular, whether spatially varying selection influences the maintenance of social polymorphisms in ants has been rarely investigated. To fill this gap, we examined whether fine-scale habitat heterogeneity contributes to the co-existence of alternative forms of social organization within populations. Single-queen colonies (monogyne social form) are generally associated with better colonization abilities, whereas multiple-queen colonies (polygyne social form) are predicted to be better competitors and monopolize saturated habitats. We hypothesize that each social form colonizes and thrives in distinct local habitats, as a result of their alternative dispersal and colony founding strategies. Here, we test this hypothesis in the Alpine silver ant, in which a supergene controls polymorphic social organization. Results Monogyne and polygyne colonies predominate in distinct habitats of the same population. The analysis of 59 sampling plots distributed across six habitats revealed that single-queen colonies mostly occupy unconnected habitats that were most likely reached by flight. This includes young habitats isolated by water and old habitats isolated by vegetation. In contrast, multiple-queen colonies were abundant in young, continuous and saturated habitats. Hence, alternative social forms colonize and monopolize distinct niches at a very local scale. Conclusions Alternative social forms colonized and monopolized different local habitats, in accordance with differences in colonization and competition abilities. The monogyne social form displays a colonizer phenotype, by efficiently occupying empty habitats, while the polygyne social form exhibits a competitor phenotype, thriving in saturated habitats. The combination of the two phenotypes, coupled with fine-scale habitat heterogeneity, may allow the coexistence of alternative social forms within populations. Overall, these results suggest that spatially varying selection may be one of the mechanisms contributing to the maintenance of genetic polymorphisms in social organization.