Research Methods in Science Studies: Studying "On-Demand Work" in the 21st Century
SISP 240
Spring 2019 not offered
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Pocket computers, called "smartphones," have become a part of everyday life over the past decade. Earlier, during the early years of the Internet, eBay pioneered the "peer-to-peer" marketplace, in which a business doesn't have a place of business and hire employees, but provides software that links "users" to one another so that they can make exchanges, serving the roles of "customer" and "employee." The firm that creates the software takes a commission on the sale, or simply profits from the information it gathers about the users as they make the exchange. Massive amounts of economic activity have been generated using this model: through services like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, Uber, Postmates, TaskRabbit, and many other software-based labor markets that allow people to work when they choose, as little or as much as they choose. How do we study work and workers in these kinds of contexts? This course will train students in the use of qualitative social scientific methods to examine these new working populations and the work experience of people in them. We will draw, in part, from earlier studies of mobile workplaces (such as of the police on patrol), and more recent studies undertaken by scholars of science and technology in society that help us to look for labor even where it is not intuitively evident in the digitally networked context: such as in computerized gambling, software-facilitated dating, and activity on social media. Students will read a National Science Foundation research proposal and draft their own proposal for a study of work in the "on demand," "contingent," and "gig" economy of the twenty-first century. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS SISP |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (IDEA-MN)(IDEA) |
Major Readings:
Howard S. Becker, TRICKS OF THE TRADE: HOW TO THINK ABOUT YOUR RESEARCH WHILE YOU'RE DOING IT (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) (excerpts);
Andrew Abbott, METHODS OF DISCOVERY: HEURISTICS FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004) (excerpts);
Earl Babbie, THE PRACTICE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH, 13th ed. (Belmont, California: Centage Learning, 2010) (excerpts);
Cynthia McGuire Dunn and Gary Chadwick, PROTECTING STUDY VOLUNTEERS IN RESEARCH: A MANUAL FOR INVESTIGATIVE SITES (Boston: CenterWatch, 1999) (excerpts);
Kathy Charmaz, CONSTRUCTING GROUNDED THEORY: A PRACTICAL GUIDE THROUGH QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS (Los Angeles: Sage, 2006) (excerpts);
Emile Durkheim, THE RULES OF SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD (New York: Free Press, 1982 [1893-1912]) (excerpts);
Kirin Narayan, ALIVE IN THE WRITING: CREATING ETHNOGRAPHY IN THE COMPANY OF CHECKOV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) (excerpts);
S. Kingsley, M. L. Gray, and S. Suri, ACCOUNTING FOR MARKET FRICTIONS AND POWER ASYMMETRIES IN ONLINE LABOR MARKETS, Policy & Internet, 7(4) (2015) 383¿400.
Alex Rosenblatt and Luke Stark, ¿ALGORITHMIC LABOR AND INFORMATION ASYMMETRIES: A CASE STUDY OF UBER¿S DRIVERS,¿ International Journal of Communication (2016), 3758-3784;
Natasha Schull, ADDICTION BY DESIGN: MACHINE GAMBLING IN LAS VEGAS (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014) (excerpts)
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Examinations and Assignments:
fieldwork exercises, draft research proposal, final research proposal |
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