Tracking the emergence of Affective Value: a performative study of the affective and agential capacities of digital technologies in value creation.

Abstract

In the context of an “Ethical Economy”, the sources of value creation are changing, thus value itself is changing, because of the disruptive influence that digital technologies and finance have on established ways of working. Here, the relevance of “intangible” resources such as knowledge, flexibility and brand as sources of value is becoming paramount for companies, as the capacity to sustain social networks for the creation of these “intangibles”, based on relational affects, is increasingly displacing labour time as new value measure. Affects are thus becoming the new measure and source of value, as digital technologies are making working practices shift. To understand how these affects are formed, so that in the future it will be possible to stabilise affects as a new general equivalent for value measurements, this research followed this sociotechnical phenomenon of change in the nature of value and working practices, by tracking how digital technologies are making affects emerge in working practices within academic and professional settings. I executed this work by adopting Gherardi’s post-epistemological approach to practices as theoretical framework, because of its focus on affects and material agency, and a research strategy focused on a post-qualitative methodology based on 44 reflexive and performative audio/video recorded interviews, accompanied by pictures and a reflexive diary as secondary methods of data collection, to help me resonate with the affects as embodied knowledge coming from this sources. After analysing the data through a Reflexive Thematic Analysis, I obtained a conceptual framework that explains how affects as value is emerging as digital technologies are interacting with four working practices, persuading, controlling, searching and choosing space time, in the context of four different posthuman conditions of working: working as working together, working as an individual activity, working as knowledge creation, working as situated activity.