Texas Permian Basin, 2018 (PC: K Griesbach)
Selected Publications (for all publications, see my CV)
Karnes City, Texas, 2021 (PC: K Griesbach)
“Unequal Reach: Cyclical and Amplifying Ties among Agricultural and Oilfield Workers in Texas.” 2021. Griesbach, Kathleen. Work and Occupations OnlineFirst.
What kinds of ties do agricultural and oil and gas workers form in the field, and how do they use them later on? Why do they use them differently? Scholarship highlights how weak ties can link people to valuable information, while strong ties can be critical for day-to-day survival. Yet many mechanisms affect how workers form and use social networks over time and space. Drawing on 60 interviews and observations with agricultural and oilfield workers in Texas, I examine how both groups form strong ties of fictive kinship when living together in the field far from home—pooling resources, sharing reproductive labor, and using the discourse of family to describe these relationships. Then I examine how they use these ties very differently later in practice. Oilfield workers often use their fictive kin ties to move up and around the industry across space, time, and companies: amplifying ties. In contrast, agricultural workers renew the same strong ties for survival from season to season, maintaining cyclical ties. The comparison highlights how industry mobility ladders, tempos, and geographies affect how workers can use their networks in practice. While both agricultural and oilfield workers become fictive kin in situations of intense proximity, structural differences give their networks unequal reach.
“Algorithmic Control in Platform Food Delivery Work.” 2019. Griesbach, Kathleen, Adam Reich, Luke Elliott-Negri and Ruth Milkman. Socius 5: 1-15.
Building on an emerging literature concerning algorithmic management, this article analyzes the processes by which food delivery platforms control workers and uncovers variation in the extent to which such platforms constrain the freedoms—over schedules and activities—associated with gig work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 55 respondents working on food delivery platforms, as well as a survey of 955 platform food delivery workers, we find that although all of the food delivery platforms use algorithmic management to assign and evaluate work, there is significant cross-platform variation. Instacart, the largest grocery delivery platform, exerts a type of control we call “algorithmic despotism,” regulating the time and activities of workers more stringently than other platform delivery companies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the spectrum of algorithmic control for the future of work.
Brownsville, Texas, 2021 (PC: K Griesbach)
“Dioquis: Being without Doing in the Migrant Agricultural Labor Process. 2020. Griesbach, Kathleen. Ethnography 21(4):481-505.
Being on call without being on the clock is an important but underappreciated source of insecurity among low-wage workers. Drawing on fieldwork with 20 agricultural workers of the Texas-Mexico border region, this paper identifies several stages where workers are made to wait without pay and links these stages to economic precarity. These intervals occur at the local bus station, a hub for recruitment and departure, at home in both the US and Mexico, during travel to distant work sites, and in seasonal lodging. Workers use the Spanish colloquial term ‘dioquis’, which they define as ‘being without doing’, to describe such uncertain periods of waiting which are required for them to work. Through dioquis, a liminal state, employers displace industry risk onto workers, leading to long-term instability. Expanding the implications of dioquis, the paper reveals the significance of temporal uncertainty for the marginalized across other contexts of work and waiting.
New York, 2017 (PC: K Griesbach)
Under Review
“Positioning Stories: Accounting for Insecure Work.” 3rd Revise and Resubmit
Prior research has found that people often account for economic insecurity in individualizing ways. We know less about how structural conditions inform workers’ interpretations. This paper draws on 120 interviews with Texas-based agricultural and oilfield workers and NYC-based adjuncts and on-demand delivery workers to ask, how do precarious workers account for the temporal and spatial instability they experience? I find that workers across industries account for structural instability in time and space—what I call positional uncertainty—by telling a mixture of stories. Depending on the specific tempo and geography of their work, workers account for spatial instability in stories about sacrifice and self-improvement; they interpret temporal instability in stories about addiction and the burden of time passing without progress. Workers combine these with stories interpreting the affective meanings and material realities of their work. Precarious conditions, particularly temporal and spatial instability, impede a cohesive narrative. Instead, workers move uneasily between positioning stories, mixing individualistic and structural interpretations. The findings show how narrative instability is an important consequence of precarity, as temporal and spatial instability contribute to a fragmentary mixture of stories that can also inform resistance.
“Theorizing Space in Precarious Work: Inequality within and beyond platforms.” Accepted pending minor revision.
The rise of platform-based gig work typifies the erosion of the spatial boundaries of work for a range of workers. While geographers have long theorized space as an integral part of capitalist work processes, intertwining and co-constitutive of social relationships, sociological research has often treated space as a backdrop for work processes rather than an active process driving contemporary work, inequality, and resistance. However, pioneering work in urban and rural sociology has emphasized the significance of place for understanding social processes, and particularly inequality. This review synthesizes insights from sociology and related fields to theorize space in precarious work. I first bring together common throughlines across disciplines: the intertwining of space, place, and social relations and the relevance of space and place for understanding inequality. Next, I relate spatial theories of capitalism to contemporary precarious work, within and beyond platforms. Finally, I suggest 3 promising avenues for scholars to incorporate space into research on contemporary work and inequality today: analyzing how inequalities across race, class, and gender intersect with the spatial features of new and old work structures; examining how contemporary work processes are reshaping rural and urban work processes; and identifying the spatial practices of contemporary organizing and resistance.
Texas Permian Basin, 2018 (PC: K Griesbach)