Patricia Garcia

Homelessness is a significant and growing crisis in the United States. In an effort to more efficiently and fairly distribute limited housing resources, jurisdictions across the US have adopted algorithmic prioritization systems to help select which unhoused people should receive resources. Given the impact of algorithmic prioritization on the lives of unhoused people, there is a need to more fully examine how these systems are implemented in practice by frontline workers such as social service workers. In this paper, we present a qualitative study that draws on interviews and artifact walkthroughs with fifteen social service workers to examine how they interacted with algorithmic prioritization systems as part of their job duties. We found that social service workers employed discretionary work practices to mediate between the rigid formats of algorithmic prioritization systems and the messy, situated realities of homelessness. We term these discretionary work practices 'intermediation' and provide four examples that illustrate how our interlocutors were able to maintain their commitment to advocacy and to express their expertise despite the automation of major aspects of their professional decision-making. These work practices, which we argue were motivated by care for clients, as well as a desire to preserve professional autonomy, lead us to conclude that discretion cannot easily be removed from bureaucratic systems and that removing discretion is not necessarily a desirable outcome.

This study offers a critical analysis of how the Indian gig platform, Urban Company (UC), mobilizes the promise of empowerment to assemble, discipline and algorithmically entangle its gig labor force. Much of the scholarship on gig work has described how the (mis)classification of gig workers as independent contractors allows gig corporations to abdicate their employment responsibilities, thereby disentangling the traditional employer-employee relationship. By contrast, UC promises to invest in it's Indian gig workforce, with offerings such as health insurance and financial loans to counter the enduring socio-economic precarity of the Indian labor market. However, through a critical content analysis of UCs' public media, we find that UC's organization of such ''social security'' benefits rests on an insidious system of algorithmic evaluation and classification. Access to benefits is conditional, determined by the platform's algorithmic control mechanisms, which classify workers as worthy or unworthy on a shifting basis. Mobilizing Agre's analysis of business discourses of ''empowered work'', we highlight how UC's algorithmic classification of workers creates a system of ''conditional empowerment.'' This system reflects a critical shift in the labor process, from rights-based labor regimes to a neoliberal social order where individuals must constantly prove their worth.

People experiencing homelessness seek support from homeless services systems that increasingly rely on prioritization algorithms to determine who is the most deserving of scarce resources. In this paper, we argue that algorithmic harms in homeless services require a reparative approach that takes the data work of care workers seriously. Building on Davis, Williams, and Yang's concept of algorithmic reparation, we present a qualitative study that examines the intertwining of data work and care labor of 15 care workers. We show how they wrestle with the ethics of algorithmic prioritization and develop workarounds that allow them to advocate for their clients. We contribute an empirical understanding of how care workers provide care under homeless services systems that equate data work with care labor to justify work intensification. Our findings have implications for understanding the future of care labor in datafied conditions and the social and political ramifications of algorithmically mediated care.

We examine how two prominent food delivery platforms in India, Swiggy and Zomato, produce a managed digital workforce using a combination of algorithmic control and traditional labor management strategies. Our findings draw from interviews conducted with 13 food delivery workers and a critical discourse analysis of news media coverage. We found that the two platforms combine piece wage restructuring, granular datafication practices, and the use of benevolent language as neoliberal social control mechanisms. We find that this combination of technological governance and strategic managerial practices is a mutually constitutive method of control that restructures labor processes, extracts workers’ compliance and consent, and prevents work disruption. We show that contemporary platform companies draw from strategies that have historically been deployed in industrial labor management. By examining how older and newer regimes of social control and exploitation are strategically intertwined in contemporary platform design, we contribute a historically situated understanding of platform labor that moves beyond dualistic interpretations of “traditional” labor management practices and more recent algorithmic modes of control. Our findings contribute to recent debates in tech labor and algorithmic control by examining how contemporary conditions of precarious work reactivate certain past forms of control and in doing so normalize extreme overwork, exhaustion, speedups, and injuries.

Norms and values in computing education are constantly changing as dominant narratives about the role of computing in society evolve over time. Within the current evolving landscape of computing education, researchers and practitioners have advocated for ensuring people from all backgrounds, and particularly women, non-binary, and Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people, are able to participate equitably within the field of computing. Yet, the values of computing educational experiences are narrowly framed within career outcomes, such as securing a career in computing, leaving many important experiences and ways of participating in the field out of the picture. To address this, we conducted reflective interviews with women who participated in broadening participation in computing (BPC) programs to understand their perceptions of computing and how it aligns (or not) with what they value about their experiences in computing learning environments. We investigate the following research questions: (1) How do women who participated in BPC programs describe their perceptions of computing? (2) How do those perceptions align or misalign with the program outcomes they valued? The findings from our study call attention to tensions arising from centering “computing careers” in BPC work and highlight the outcomes of participation valued by the women in our study, such as developing communities and relationships, gaining communication skills, and expanding perspectives on skills computer scientists should possess.

Homeless services systems provide unhoused individuals access to emergency shelter, subsidized housing, and other life-sustaining resources. In this paper, we present a qualitative study that draws on the experiences of fifteen social service workers to examine how recordkeeping practices sustain homeless services systems and unite a tangled web of institutions and actors, including public housing systems, nonprofit agencies, and local governments. We address the following research questions: How is the infrastructure of homeless services sustained by recordkeeping? How are social service workers affected by increasing recordkeeping demands? In what ways do social service workers work against or ‘find the play’ in this system? To address these questions, we collected interviews and conducted artifact walkthroughs with our study participants. We analyzed the data using an infrastructural lens and found that current recordkeeping practices within homeless services systems comprise an "infrastructure of last resort" that functions logistically, prioritizing efficiency and speed. We also found that social service workers “speak back” to logistification by making the homeless services infrastructure more legible to their unhoused clients through mediation and acts of translation that help to produce better resource outcomes. Our findings show how structuring recordkeeping in ways that privilege efficiency and speed disrupts social service work and interferes with social service workers’ ability to provide care for vulnerable individuals facing life-altering and life-threatening hardships.