Mittuniversitetet

Whilst labour geographers have had a long-standing interest in workers’ abilities to shape the economic landscape (Herod 1997; Castree 2007), some recent scholarly contributions have shifted attention from concerted, collective agency to individual and more loosely-organised expressions of agency (Rogaly 2009; Coe and Jordhus-Lier 2011; Hastings and MacKinnon 2017; Strauss 2020). In the present chapter, I will continue on this path, using the personal narratives of hospitality workers to explore how agency, practice, space, and time can be thought of together. More specifically, I propose that labour geographers could benefit from exploring the analytical distinction between ‘agency’, inspired by a Marxist/Realist approach, and ‘practice’, which largely draws upon post-structuralist thinking. Whilst many labour geographers’ conceptualisation of agency assumes a causal link between intentionality, observable acts, and concrete outcomes, theorists of practice are less concerned with determining causal links between intention, act, and outcome and instead direct their attention to the habitual (Bourdieu 1977 [2013]; Giddens 1984; Thrift 2008). My point here is not to say that labour geographers ought to choose between these concepts or that the concept of practice is to be preferred to that of agency. Rather, I want to examine how these two concepts may combine and open up new understandings of workers’ behaviour in a geographical context. For this task, I will draw upon interview data from a study of how hospitality workers counteract/avoid/cope with sexual harassment in the workplace. All interviews were carried out in Sweden, between the years of 2019–2020.

The chapter is organised into five principal parts. First, I review some of the literature on practice, contrasting it to a few key ideas on matters of agency produced by labour geographers. I identify some of the differences between ‘practice’and ‘agency’, as well as common ground in the use of these concepts. The next three parts are dedicated to a discussion around the (de) normalisation of sexual harassment in hospitality workplaces and how practice (in terms of tacit knowledge) intermingles with strategic, purposive action as waitresses strategise around their bodily resources, comportment, and clothing to counteract and/or cope with harassment. I conclude by making a few suggestions as to what a shift in focus from the theorisation of agency to thinking more profoundly about practice might signify for Labour Geography’s future trajectory.

This paper concerns migrants in Sweden working in various types of on and offline gigwork. It explores how the temporal and spatial flexibility afforded to gig customers ispredicated on temporal and spatial inflexibility for workers. The argument moves discussions beyond relational space by promoting a more fully dialectical view of space that understands it as simultaneously relational, relative, and absolute. Without such a view of space—which understands that space is not always open and fluid but just as often closed and fixed—it is impossible to understand the specific relations of labour that structure gig work, particularly offline gig work in such ways as to provide maximal flexibility for customers. This paper shows that the Marxian adage concerning how, in capitalism, space is annihilated by time, does not always hold. For workers doing cleaning and delivery gig work, the converse is oftentimes truer: time is annihilated by space. Gigworkers—and even more so migrant gig workers crowded in the above‐mentioned industries—experience the annihilation of time by space through the dual mandate that they must be available “just‐in‐time” and “just‐in‐place” to produce the spatiotemporal flexibility upon which the gig companies base their model and their success.

This introduction presents a framework for the contributions to the special issue At Your Service: The Mobilities, Rhythms and Everyday Lives of Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy. The article begins by providing an overview of the current literature on the gig economy and the growing attention towards its relationship to processes of migration. The introduction continues by outlining and discussing three themes that in different ways shape the contributions in the issue. First, we situate the issue in relation to contemporary and historical migration processes and regimes of mobility. Second, we discuss how the articles in this issue explore the rhythms of gig work in relation to the spatio-temporalities of migration regimes and cities increasingly built on a logic of fulfilment. Finally, we draw attention to the infrastructural role of migrant gig workers in midst of the contemporary social reproductive crisis. This perspective opens new avenues for future research with questions of social reproductive justice at its core.

This article, working within the ‘infrastructural turn’, combines social reproduction and Lefebvrian rhythm analysis to examine the everyday labour and life of migrant cleaners and delivery service gig workers in Stockholm. Using in-depth interviews, we demonstrate how this highly mobile and flexible workforce makes the city ‘tick’ by keeping its inhabitants clean, fed, healthy and cared for. Specifically, we highlight a contradiction: workers extricating free time for others through reproductive labour, are themselves systematically deprived of the (paid and unpaid) time necessary to meet their own reproductive needs. The conditions of work in the urban on-demand and just-in-time service economy, we show, produce spatiotemporal (dis)orders of living and labouring in the algorhythmic city, as workers are required to be both on standby, waiting, whilst also fulfilling customer orders at an ever-increasing speed. Migrant gig workers who appear on the doorstep, on demand and just in time, form a kind of human infrastructure, serving the urban population whilst nonetheless being subject to disinvestment – unrepaired and unmaintained. This article, then, contributes to the literature on gig work, migration and social reproduction, by theorizing the algorhythmic city as reliant on the constant transformation of gig labour into an urban infrastructure for social reproduction.

This paper revolves around women tourism entrepreneurs in the Pacific island nation of Samoa where an ancient way of living (fa’a Samoa) co-exists with colonial heritage and a growing tourism industry. By adopting a perspective sensitive to socio-cultural specificities, we examine the ways that the socio-cultural context both enables and impedes the empowerment of women managing tourism accommodations. In this venture, we draw on an ethnographic field study in the rural island of Savai’i, including semistructured interviews as well as informal conversations with locals, observations and the participation in everyday practices. We pinpoint and discuss the main sources of power and power-relations that women entrepreneurs need to command in order to run their businesses. Finally, we conclude that no (wo)man is an island, as we are all part of, and depend on, intrinsic social structures for our welfare.

This chapter discusses concepts such as ‘border’ and ‘territoriality’ in connection to (working) bodies, to explore the ways that a ‘pandemic body politics’ impacts on tourism workers and work spaces. Because of the exposure to the virus in high touch service sectors, and because of the loss of jobs and incomes, tourism and hospitality workers are affected by the pandemic in very direct ways. In that respect, bodies are not bordered entities, but permeable to both Covid-19 and the social and economic repercussions that follow. The pandemic has made it abundantly clear that social and worker protection is either missing or is insufficient, and insecure forms of employment will perpetually produce precarious bodies in this industry. In light of the above, I suggest a conceptualization of the working body as an open, permeable space in the making, and as an autonomous, unassailable space protected by law and international conventions.