Jens Kjaerulff – författare

This book explores the significance of new information technology for socio-cultural change and provides ethnographic insight into the early days of remote working. It draws on long-term anthropological fieldwork among people in rural Denmark working from home via the internet. Going back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, the study demonstrates how remote and flexible working was mostly practiced informally, fostering incremental changes to the cultural domain of ‘work’. It captures the dilemmas arising from living with multiple arenas and the challenges of balancing work and family life – a predicament which motivates many to embrace remote working. The volume contains an updated introduction and conclusion where the author reflects on the historical moment of his fieldwork and on the impact of the recent Covid-19 pandemic on working practices. The book offers a valuable comment on how to empirically study the social and cultural significance of new information technologies, as well as how to think of and empirically research change anthropologically, situating information technology in a broader offline context of unfolding complex living. It will be of interest to scholars of social anthropology and digital ethnography, as well as others with a focus on social aspects of information technology and on work and organizational studies.

Approaching “work” as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary “flexible” capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism’s social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, “gift-like” socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.