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Invisible Work
Abstract
Our folk understanding of “work” focuses on those activities you “have to do” to get paid for them. Women's work is correspondingly devalued, for it is either unpaid or limited by the demands of the unpaid work in the home. This understanding also includes a moral force. One should contribute to society by working. This paper shows the restrictiveness of these commonsense understandings and discusses the kinds of work that consequently disappear from view. I focus especially on the work involved in the social construction of daily life and in the maintenance and development of institutions. Finally, I present the rationale for expanding the concept of work to include many activities not previously considered in the folk concept: a keener awareness of the work involved in social constructions serves to dignify the labor and engender respect for the workers who do it.
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Cited by
Why emotion work matters: sex, gender, and the division of household labor
Erickson, R. J. (2005) · Journal of Marriage and Family · doi:10.1111/j.0022-2445.2005.00120.x · Cited by 478
Dean, L., Churchill, B., & Ruppanner, L. (2022) · Community, Work & Family · doi:10.1080/13668803.2021.2002813 · Cited by 322
Mechanisms of invisibility: rethinking the concept of invisible work
Hatton, E. (2017) · Work, Employment and Society · doi:10.1177/0950017016674894 · Cited by 308
Lifting the curtain: Strategic visibility of human labour in AI-as-a-Service
Newlands, G. (2021) · Big Data & Society · doi:10.1177/20539517211016026 · Cited by 66
Making it Work, or Not: A Longitudinal Study of Career Trajectories Among Online Freelancers
Blaising, A., Kotturi, Y., Kulkarni, C., & Dabbish, L. (2021) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3432925 · Cited by 57
Metadata
- Authors
- Daniels, A. K.
- Venue
- Social Problems
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1987-12
- Volume
- 34
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 403-415
- ISSN
- 0037-7791 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-8533
- OpenAlex
- W4239870940
- Cited by
- 490
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 7.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Daniels, A. K. (1987). Invisible Work. Social Problems. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.1987.34.5.03a00020
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
