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The quantified self: What counts in the neoliberal workplace

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-09-26, 14:29 authored by Phoebe Moore, Andrew Robinson
Implementation of quantified self technologies in workplaces relies on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contributing to debates in new materialism, we demonstrate that workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity and health and well-being in art-houses and warehouses alike in both the global north and south. Workers experience intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs and anxieties about the replacement of labour-power with robots and other machines as well as, ourselves replaceable, other humans. Workers have internalised the imperative to perform, a subjectification process as we become observing entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies. Thinking through the implications of the use of wearable technologies in workplaces, this article shows that these technologies introduce a heightened Taylorist influence on precarious working bodies within neoliberal workplaces.

History

Citation

New Media and Society, 2015, 18(11), pp. 2774-2792

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND HUMANITIES/School of Business

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

New Media and Society

Publisher

SAGE Publications (UK and US)

issn

1461-4448

eissn

1461-7315

Copyright date

2015

Available date

2018-09-26

Publisher version

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444815604328

Language

en

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