An Analysis of Labour and Deindividuation in British Post-industrial Worksites

The research will be the extension of an ongoing ethnographic project that I have been conducting since May 2016 with the workers of a large call-centre. The primary research site has been situated within the largest credit agency in Britain, the enterprise of which is the marketisation, administration, and maintenance of credit reports. The research focuses on subjectivity and precariousness within the UK's postindustrial economy. The research will combine ethnographic practice, phenomenology and economic theory.

As anthropology has paid little attention to the "place of work", the proposed research will make a disciplined and committed effort to express labour as a central anthropological/economic indicator (Jimenez: 2003: 14). Contrary to Jimenez's thesis that grounds the performativity of labour as a reciprocal component in the embodiment of personhood, I explore the little-studied anthropology of deindividuation, which is the loss/lack of personhood within a collective environment. The aim of the research is not to simply document precarity in Britain but to use ethnography to understand deindividuation as an embodied subjective relationship between worker and occupational environment (in this case automotive technologies and developmental Artificial Intelligence).

The concepts technics and "biosemiosis" [Kockelman:2011:719]) will be used to explore the performativity of precariousness through post-Fordist labour. The research seeks to demonstrate the subjective embodiment of labour through human-machine relations, so as to avoid giving prestige to human-centred ideological investments when it comes to sociality, but without completely disregarding the importance of mechanic and semiotic apparatuses. Labour can be theorised as constitutive of human-machine dependency and reconstitutive of machine-human domination.

The project's materialist perspective seeks to reconcile the tension between phenomenological concepts proper (e.g. temporality) and normative constructions (hegemony) without displacing these in favour of an overemphasis on objects, infrastructures and technologies in social formations. Therefore, the topic of 'know-how' is of great interest to my research.

The research explores ways is which 'knowhow' is manipulated and how this frenzied and induced form of production causes subjective formations that are prone to angst and insecurity. Thus far, the ethnography has noted the way subjects interiorise labour through their experience with operating interfaces and particularly programs that are purposefully designed to tweak a worker's efficiency output without the need for traditional management techniques and human intervention.

Automated scripts, prompts, colour-coded indicators, time measuring commands and 'robotic nudges' are deployed by the organisation with little analysis of the effects on worker wellbeing. The research explores the nature of this interiority to explain a phenomenon that one worker has called 'epidemic anxiety', and what another operator has termed a 'lack of grounding in normal life'.

The proposed research will advance existing ethnographic research to include different worksites in the North West of England. A consistent feature of the worksites will be the post-industrial localities where they operate. The transition of industrial organs of a national economy to areas of under-investment and social deprivation will offer an opportunity to record a socio-historical narrative of post-industrialism more broadly, and a critical investigation of workers' relationships with technology. A long period of fieldwork allows for noting of the intricacies of labour relations, workplace education, operational systems, interface technology and worker leisure time. Worksites will be sought that deal with abstract value-chains, for instance offices that deal with debt retention and forms of credit servicing.