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Cited by 308

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 69 of the 69 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Mechanisms of invisibility: rethinking the concept of invisible work

Hatton, Erin·2017·Work, Employment and Society
DOI 10.1177/0950017016674894
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Abstract

In the mid-1980s, Daniels coined the term ‘invisible work’ to characterize those types of women’s unpaid labour – housework and volunteer work – which had been culturally and economically devalued. Scholars have since applied this term to many types of labour, yet there is little clarity or consensus as to what ‘invisibility’ means and what mechanisms produce it. Through an in-depth analysis of this far-reaching literature, the present article seeks to reconstruct ‘invisible work’ as a more robust analytical concept. It argues that work is made invisible through three intersecting sociological mechanisms – here identified as cultural, legal and spatial mechanisms of invisibility. Though they differ in function and degree, each of these mechanisms obscures the fact that work is performed and therefore contributes to its economic devaluation. Ultimately, this revised concept of invisible work offers scholars a new analytic tool to untangle the systems that produce and reproduce disadvantage for workers.

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Citations

Cites

Show all 69 references

Research works printed but not linked: 37

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Cited by

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Metadata

Authors
Hatton, E.
Venue
Work, Employment and Society
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2017-01-17
Volume
31
Issue
2
Pages
336-351
ISSN
  • 0950-0170 (ISSN-L)
  • 1469-8722
DOI
10.1177/0950017016674894
OpenAlex
W2571697653
Cited by
308
References
69
FWCI
25.62
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Mechanisms of invisibility: rethinking the concept of invisible work. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0950017016674894
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Hatton, E. (2017). Mechanisms of invisibility: rethinking the concept of invisible work. Work, Employment and Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017016674894

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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