TY  - JOUR
A1  - Coban, Alev
A1  - Wenten, Klara‑Aylin
T1  - Who cares for agile work? In/visibilized work practices and their emancipatory potential
T2  - Nanoethics
N2  - The future of work has become a pressing matter of concern: Researchers, business consultancies, and industrial companies are intensively studying how new work models could be best implemented to increase workplace flexibility and creativity. In particular, the agile model has become one of the “must-have” elements for re-organizing work practices, especially for technology development work. However, the implementation of agile work often comes together with strong presumptions: it is regarded as an inevitable tool that can be universally integrated into different workplaces while having the same outcome of flexibility, transparency, and flattened hierarchies everywhere. This paper challenges such essentializing assumptions by turning agile work into a “matter of care.” We argue that care work occurs in contexts other than feminized reproductive work, namely, technology development. Drawing on concepts from feminist Science and Technology Studies and ethnographic research at agile technology development workplaces in Germany and Kenya, we examine what work it takes to actually keep up with the imperative of agile work. The analysis brings the often invisibilized care practices of human and nonhuman actors to the fore that are necessary to enact and stabilize the agile promises of flexibilization, co-working, and rapid prototyping. Revealing the caring sociotechnical relationships that are vital for working agile, we discuss the emergence of power asymmetries characterized by hierarchies of skills that are differently acknowledged in the daily work of technology development. The paper ends by speculating on the emancipatory potential of a care perspective, by which we seek to inspire careful Emancipatory Technology Studies.
KW  - Agile work
KW  - Feminist science and technology studies
KW  - Matters of care
KW  - Emancipation
KW  - Background work
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/63675
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-636759
SN  - 1871-4765
N1  - Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. The research of one of the authors is supported by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung.
VL  - 15
IS  - 1
SP  - 57
EP  - 70
PB  - Springer Netherlands
CY  - Dordrecht
ER  -