Hope Labor: The Role of Employment Prospects in Online Social Production

This research introduces ‘hope labor’ as a motivation for voluntary online social production, defined here as ‘un- or under-compensated work carried out in the present, often for experience or exposure, in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow’. Drawing from interviews with SB Nation sports bloggers and Yelp consumer reviewers, this research expands current understandings of the motivations behind online social production. Structurally, we distinguish hope labor from other forms of free labor by emphasizing the temporal relationship between present and future work—a relationship that shifts costs and risks onto the individual. Hope labor is naturalized and normalized through neoliberal ideologies. It is seen as an investment that pays off for individuals based on merit, despite its deleterious impact on employment prospects in desired industries. Our theorization of hope labor can be seen as a complement or corrective to celebratory accounts of meaning making, creativity, and community in online social production.

[1]  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,et al.  Human, All Too Human , 1878 .

[2]  Neville Plaice,et al.  The Principle of Hope. , 1991 .

[3]  L. Reid.  Nice Work if You Can Get It , 1967, Nature.

[4]  Friedrich Engels,et al.  Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 . Communist manifesto , 1988 .

[5]  Media Sports, Culture and Power: Critical Issues in the Communication of Sport , 1989 .

[6]  D. Harvey,et al.  The Condition of Postmodernity , 2020, The New Social Theory Reader.

[7]  Bill Ryan,et al.  Making Capital from Culture , 1991 .

[8]  J. Thompson.  Ideology and Modern Culture , 1991 .

[9]  Catherine Casey,et al.  "Come, Join Our Family": Discipline and Integration in Corporate Organizational Culture , 1999 .

[10]  Gill Ursell.  Television production: issues of exploitation, commodification and subjectivity in UK television labour markets , 2000 .

[11]  Tiziana Terranova.  Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy , 2000 .

[12]  Pippa Norris,et al.  The Bridging and Bonding Role of Online Communities , 2002 .

[13]  Julian R. Kücklich,et al.  Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry , 2005 .

[14]  Y. Benkler,et al.  The Wealth of Networks , 2008 .

[15]  Hector Postigo,et al.  Of Mods and Modders , 2007 .

[16]  Vincent Mosco,et al.  Knowledge workers in the information society , 2007 .

[17]  Mark Andrejevic,et al.  iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era , 2007 .

[18]  Adam Arvidsson,et al.  The Ethical Economy of Customer Coproduction , 2008 .

[19]  Daren C. Brabham.  Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving , 2008 .

[20]  Paul Mandy.  A philosophy of hope , 2008 .

[21]  Rosalind Gill,et al.  In the Social Factory? , 2008 .

[22]  Nicole S. Cohen.  The Valorization of Surveillance: Towards a Political Economy of Facebook , 2008 .

[23]  Tim O'Reilly,et al.  What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software , 2007 .

[24]  Hope in the Age of Anxiety , 2009 .

[25]  Mark Andrejevic,et al.  Privacy, Exploitation and the Digital Enclosure , 2009 .

[26]  Vincent Mosco,et al.  The Political Economy of Communication Today , 2009 .

[27]  Mark Andrejevic.  Social network exploitation , 2010 .

[28]  Clay Shirky.  Tapping the cognitive surplus , 2010 .

[29]  A. Kaplan,et al.  Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media , 2010 .

[30]  D. Hesmondhalgh.  User-generated content, free labour and the cultural industries , 2010 .

[31]  Christian Fuchs,et al.  Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet , 2010, Inf. Soc..

[32]  Graham Murdock,et al.  Political Economies as Moral Economies: Commodities, Gifts and Public Goods , 2011 .

[33]  K. Kuehn.  Prosumer-Citizenship and the Local: A Critical Case Study of Consumer Reviewing on Yelp.com. , 2011 .

[34]  Graham Murdock,et al.  The handbook of political economy of communications , 2011 .

[35]  Nicole S. Cohen.  Cultural Work as a Site of Struggle: Freelancers and Exploitation , 2012 .

[36]  A. Ross.  In search of the lost paycheck , 2012 .

[37]  Gina Neff,et al.  Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries , 2012 .

[38]  Manufacturing sports blogs: The political economy and practice of networked sports blogging , 2012 .

[39]  Trebor Scholz,et al.  Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory , 2012 .