Invisible Work

When Work is Invisible

Several factors in the nature of work tend to be associated with invisible work. One factor is when work is literally unseen by others in broader society. For sociologist Erving Goffman, work—like all social activity—is a performance for an audience. Traditionally, the private sphere of the household, family, and personal life is regarded as outside the view of a public audience, and thus outside the bounds of traditional understandings of work. Child care and housework, then, can be invisible work in that they are rarely performed before a public audience. A second factor is when work is unpaid. For example, even though volunteering takes place in public, the fact that volunteers are not paid can preclude their activities from being characterized as work. Daniels has suggested that women volunteers have difficulty being taken seriously as workers by wider society. Yet, unpaid work is important to consider, because from one-third to one-half of valuable economic activity remains unaccounted for in standard metrics of economic value like gross domestic product per capita, according to Veerle Miranda.

A third factor is when work is highly routinized. Star and Strauss note that work that is repetitively performed can fade into the background and become taken for granted. For instance, observers seeing assemblers in a factory, repetitively performing the same task of fitting parts together, might take assembly work for granted. Observers may thus recognize it as work, but not as important, high-value work worthy of attention, rendering such work effectively invisible. A fourth factor is when work is associated with marginalized groups. In particular, activities long associated with the role of women might go unnoticed because women have been historically relegated to a lower status in many cultures. Marginalization and invisible work can be correlated not only along lines of gender but also along lines of race and ethnicity. For example, the labor of black slaves in the United States prior to the Civil War may have been invisible work, unacknowledged because of slaves' lower status compared to those of other social groups.

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