Introduction

The road outside my house acquired some new potholes last winter. If your job is to repair potholes, then your ability to do that is a composition of the skills you have, the materials at play, the weather and road use, the underlying soil structure, how pothole repair is (or is not) funded, the effectiveness of the private contractor or local government repair team that employ you. Many factors affect how long that repair will last. In this chapter, I think about what work does in the world. I will argue that we understand work better when we think about encounters with machines, with non-human others (soil, animals, weather) as well as with human others (colleagues, managers and customers) and with institutions. This greater insight comes from paying attention to the mundane and ordinary practices of bodies doing work in order to see how the world is shaped by work. From that, it is possible to ask questions about the normative implications of how work is done. That is because we bring into view the way ethics and politics are lived and felt in bodies, in the body of the worker and in how work changes the world. I try to avoid the omissions engendered by ethical theorising that takes the human out of the world. I think with and against ideas of dignity. Dignity at work places an apparently universal human figure at the front and centre of its reasoning. Rethinking dignity with a more rounded account of the assemblage of work makes for a more sensitive account of what bodies do when they work.

I do this by extending the idea of invisible and hidden work through a focus on materiality. That is, to thinking about how matter – objects and things, human and non-human – shapes and is shaped by social and cultural encounters. I will look at taken-for-granted infrastructures and technologies that provide the conditions for work, but which often seem invisible when trying to understand work. New technologies get introduced in order to forget a problem, so it can stop being a problem. But these technologies create problems. This discussion is an essential part of my argument about the importance of technology, environment and work.