The use of science and technology to optimise the output of workers for the profit of business is not a new phenomenon. For this session we welcome two sociologists who work on the quantification of the body and worker, Dr Mark Patterson, and Dr Karen Gregory. Dr Patterson will explore the history of measurement of the workers’ health and bodies which fed in the Scientific Management of the early 20th Century. The digital management of workers through standardised platforms again came to the fore with the emergence of the ‘gig economy’ after the 2008 economic crisis. Optimisation of gig economy work is at the basis of their business model,  but the workers have little say in how data about activities is used to calculate, control and punish them. Dr Karen Gregory explores the potential for ‘worker data science’ to resit and challenge the hidden decisions of the platforms they work on.  As we all become ‘platform’ workers, how can we we call take back of data to collectively improve our working conditions?

Speaker Biographies

Dr Mark Paterson, Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh

Mark Paterson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He has an interest in the history and science of bodily sensation, blindness, and technologies of the senses. Along with articles published in humanities and social science journals, he is author of books including The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (2007), Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (2016), How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (2021), and co-editor of Touching Place, Spacing Touch (2012). His research website is sensory-motor.com.  He was an IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, from September – December 2022.

Website: sensory-motor.com 

Dr Karen Gregory, Dept of Sociology, University of Edinburgh

Karen Gregory is  digital sociologist, ethnographer, and Programme Co-Director of the MSc in Digital Sociology.  She is a leading researcher in the field of work in the digital age, specialising both in the work of delivery drivers in the platform economy, and of academics in the contemporary university.   Her recent work explores ‘Worker Data Science’, how workers’ collectives are attempting to take back control of their work by collecting and using information about their own working patterns. She is currently co-lead the Digital Social Science Research Cluster at the Center for Data, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Cultural Economy. Before coming to Edinburgh, she was a lecturer at The City College of New York, where she developed and ran The City Lab @ The Center for Worker Education.

Website: https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/karen-gregory