How the thesis uses Wheeler & Glucksmann, and where the swapshop strains the concept

What the thesis currently does with W&G

The thesis cites W&G in three places:

• #796DZS Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / Consumption Work #LMKLTZ #796DZS Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) contend that secondhand markets involve consumption work – sorting, cleaning, repairing. “Consumption work”, for them, refers to the range of tasks required of consumers, before or after they consume, on which consumption itself is predicated – the work that must be done before or after the moment of exchange for consumption to be possible at all. Their framework encompasses technical dimensions – the allocation of tasks and skills to different people; modal dimensions – interdependencies of work across different social and economic arrangements; and processual dimensions – the connections of labour across the full span of a consumption process (Wheeler & Gluckmann, 2015: 35-36). In circular economy contexts, Hobson et al. (2021) argue, this work intensifies: responsible divestment requires more effort than simply throwing things away, and the additional demands fall disproportionately on those who are already doing most of the household management work. (framework chapter): introduces the working definition – “all work necessary for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods and services” – and the three dimensions (technical / modal / processual).

• #HM3BWV Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / Valuation work without the context of price #L5PE5X #HM3BWV The labour of divestment also varies by route. Selling online is preferred when an item retains monetary value, and it requires photographing, writing descriptions, communicating with buyers, arranging delivery or meetings. As one participant noted, for items that might still have some value, "you have to pull yourself together, photograph it and put it somewhere." Brīvbode lowers this work considerably: it is a known, walkable destination where divestment requires neither finding a buyer nor judging a recipient. In Wheeler and Glucksmann's terms, Brīvbode redistributes consumption work – absorbing some of it through volunteer labour while releasing participants from other forms of it. : Brīvbode “redistributes consumption work” – absorbs some, releases participants from other forms.

• #F2943E Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / The Work of Circular Consumption #F2943E #F2943E The Work of Circular Consumption chapter: structures three sub-sections explicitly around technical, modal and processual labour, plus the gendered division (sort vs. transport, Anna, Silvija) that maps directly onto W&G’s #C9T857 Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Gender and the three stages of recycling consumption work #C9T857 #C9T857 Gender and the three stages of recycling consumption work and #7NL6FH Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Gender and the three stages of recycling consumption work #C9T857 #7NL6FH If it is the case that women take main responsibility for the first two stages of recycling consumption work – given that studies persistently show that women continue to carry the burden of cooking in the .

The application is faithful and does the basic work it needs to do. But it stays close to a vocabulary list. There are three aspects of W&G’s own argument that the thesis doesn’t yet engage, and engaging them would either sharpen the contribution or force a productive qualification.

What W&G actually argue (and the thesis hasn’t fully thematised)

1. Consumption work is defined by its place in an instituted economic process. The whole point of the framework ( #K4CB2W Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Socio-economic formations of labour: Divisions of labour, socio-economic modes of work, instituted economic process #S2CJEK #K4CB2W The approach towards consumption work builds on the multidimensional conception of the division of labour (Glucksmann, 2009, 2013) formulated to initiate renewal of this foundational concept. The complexity and diversity of contemporary forms and connections between labour of different kinds cannot readily be captured by a taken-for-granted understanding of this basic concept. To meet the analytical challenge, first principles need to be revisited. Fundamentally, every new specialisation of work (a process of differentiation) entails new interdependencies and coordination (a process of integration). At a first level, three dimensions of differentiation and interdependency can be identified. The first remains the traditional one of technical specialisation, both intra-organisational and sectoral. The second concerns historically and socially varied forms of work conducted in different economic modes and their interdependencies: market and non-market, paid and unpaid, formal and informal. The third concerns the shifting differentiation and interdependencies of work across the economic processes of production, distribution, exchange and post-exchange. Any work activity can be analysed in terms of technical, modal and economic processual differentiation and integration. A simple example here might be the baking of bread which can involve different specialisations of skills; can be produced by industrial or craft actors, in the private or public sector, or unpaid in the household; and can be fully produced by manufacturers, sold by retailers and sliced by consumers, or part-prepared by retailers in store to be finally baked by consumers. , #97ML5B Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Socio-economic formations of labour: Divisions of labour, socio-economic modes of work, instituted economic process #S2CJEK #97ML5B The framework being developed here approaches this conception of IEP from the perspective of work or labour. Adding work into the framework (instituted economic process of labour, or IEPL) involves , #VHZZXC Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Socio-economic formations of labour: Divisions of labour, socio-economic modes of work, instituted economic process #S2CJEK #VHZZXC In summary then, the analytical framework of consumption work rests on a multidimensional conception of 'socio-economic formations of labour' (SEFL) rather than a simple notion of a single technical division of labour. Three dimensions of interdependence and differentiation of labour are distinguished, as represented in Figure 2.1: ) is to recover labour that completes a circuit of production–distribution–exchange–consumption. The household recycler is meaningful because she is producing feedstock that interdepends with MRFs, smelters, remanufacturers; “downstream becomes upstream” ( #L649QR Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Socio-economic formations of labour: Divisions of labour, socio-economic modes of work, instituted economic process #S2CJEK #L649QR Netherlands demonstrates how attempts at salvage relied on all the various phases of the operation, and the work associated with them, being developed in concert and integrated one with another. The absence of one phase or insufficient integration of the chain compromised the viability of entire venture. In contemporary England and Sweden, the consumer is situated at both ends of the circuit, at the end and the starting point of a continuous cyclical process of recycling, as producer of feedstock and as consumer of new recycled goods. Recycling creates new goods and markets, and in the process the downstream becomes the upstream. ). The work is rendered visible because it is part of a chain other workers (paid, in firms or municipalities) also work on.

2. The work is structurally non-negotiable. W&G repeatedly stress that consumption work is what consumers have to do for consumption to be possible at all – plumb the washing machine, sort the rubbish to get it collected. The bite of the concept comes from its compulsory character, externally defined “by regulation and controlled in a way that affords the consumer not many more degrees of freedom than a worker in shop or factory” ( #5G2TQW Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Self-service, co-production, prosumption, etc. #PVEUCS #5G2TQW In the case of recycling and waste disposal, it would, of course, be possible to view consumers as engaging in the co-creation or co-production of feedstock, in either a negative (work shift) or positive (benefiting from municipal heating systems) way. But this interpretation would take us only so far. The residue that ends in landfill and comprises an integral part of consumers' sorting work could hardly be seen in this way and would have to be excluded from the picture. More importantly, the tasks performed by the consumer are defined from the outside by regulation and controlled in a way that affords the consumer not many more degrees of freedom than a worker in shop or factory. To develop a co-creation take on recycling would also require situating the contribution of consumers not simply within a producer/consumer dichotomy, but rather within the particular system of waste management and division of responsibilities between state, private sector, not-for-profit organisations and households. And we are then back to the consumption work framework. ). This is also why W&G distance themselves from prosumption/co-creation ( #FXSYT2 Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Self-service, co-production, prosumption, etc. #PVEUCS #FXSYT2 Whether negative or positive, stressing exploitation or empowerment, these various accounts of co-production all differ in significant respects from the analysis of consumption work outlined above, despite some obvious empirical and analytical overlaps. Many remain descriptive, deriving from business and management approaches to advertising, marketing and branding. They are not attempting a broader analysis of the transformation of work, nor of reconfiguration of the division of labour across socio-economic modes or between instituted economic processes. Most operate within a dualistic producer versus consumer paradigm where production is undifferentiated and includes retail and exchange and all other market-based operations in addition to actual production itself, while the consumer is on the other side of a boundary, in the equally unpacked realm of consumption. The focus then is on the shift of work across this boundary. In the positive interpretation, consumers enter the producer camp, doing unpaid labour and dissolving the boundaries between paid and unpaid, and between production and consumption which become conflated. Yet, while the emphasis is on creativity and the positive nature of consumer input, there is little consideration of how power relations are affected. Internet companies continue to determine the contours of consumer-generated data and to make enormous profit from it. In the negative version, work is transferred out of the realm of production and dumped on consumers, but with little attention to the wider reconfiguration of the distribution and organisation of labour throughout the particular economic process. To say, for example, that IKEA transfers the tasks of assembly and distribution of furniture to consumers is true. But this it is only part of a much larger reconfiguration of the division of labour: the final flat-pack product is an entirely different one to traditional manufactured furniture and predicated on transformation of the work associated with design, tooling, manufacture and so on. Most of these analyses lack a historical dimension in their concentration on the present-day shift ): co-creation emphasises consumer agency and creativity; consumption work emphasises captured, compelled labour.

3. Modal analysis tracks shifts between state, market, not-for-profit and household. It’s a comparative-political-economy device: the same task (sorting plastics) lands on different actors depending on whether the system is liberal-marketised (England) or social-democratic with extended producer responsibility (Sweden) ( #DDQXJ2 Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Moral economy revisited #DDQXJ2 #DDQXJ2 Moral economy revisited ). The modal dimension is interesting precisely because of the boundary: how much work the consumer has to do depends on what the municipality, the WMC and the producer do.

Where Brīvbode strains or transforms the concept

This is where I’d push the chapter, because right now the friction between the framework and the case is buried.

(a) There is no instituted economic process to complete. In W&G’s case the household labour is articulated to a downstream industrial chain. In Brīvbode the chain ends not at a smelter but at another household (the thesis already notes this in #5ZQLP4 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / Modal labour across socioeconomic modes #A43655 #5ZQLP4 While Brīvbode is indirectly embedded in wider textile collection infrastructure, its operation as an informal volunteer initiative is modally different. The chain of work usually connects one household to another. Objects leaving one home pass through the swaphsop and arrive in someone elses home where a new set of consumption work tasks begin – storing, integrating, eventually deciding what to do when the object might no longer be wanted. ). There is no producer, no buyer, no waste authority whose work the volunteers’ sorting “feeds into”. The processual dimension therefore looks different: it is not labour distributed across phases of a production–consumption circuit, but labour distributed across the afterlife of commodities – the divestment-circulation-reacquisition arc that runs entirely after market exchange has stopped governing the object. This is closer to a Kopytoff/Appadurai biographical process than to a Polanyian instituted economic process. Worth naming explicitly.

(b) The work is largely non-compulsory. W&G’s consumers can’t get rubbish collected without sorting; Brīvbode’s participants can always throw things in the bin (Madara’s aunt would have, Aiga could have called a clearance firm – #DGLFX7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / Processual labour: exchange networks and gendered work #38335C #DGLFX7 Madara does divestment work for her aunt whose belief that worn objects carry the energy of previous owners prevents her from donating. In order to get to Brīvbode, the objects must pass through Madara first. "I know that most likely they would simply be thrown away or burned." The most laborious divestment case came from Aiga, who spent months coordinating the recirculation of her relatives' possessions after a relocation, making thirty trips to Brīvbode. A single call to a clearance firm would have resolved everything in one visit, Aiga says, but she chose the harder route because she could not allow things to be discarded: "Sometimes you really do want to just throw it out, but that inner feeling simply won't let me." This is consumption work as self-imposed ethical burden of activities that need to be done out of obligation. ). This is why the thesis keeps reaching for care, obligation and Bankovska/Graeber: the labour is structurally optional but ethically coerced. That’s a different mechanism than W&G describe – and it’s actually a contribution. The chapter could state it: in non-market reuse infrastructure, the necessity characteristic of consumption work shifts from external regulation to internalised moral economy. Compulsion comes from inside, not from the kerbside collection schedule.

(c) Modal analysis becomes a question about a missing market. W&G’s modal dimension lights up because labour moves between modes. In Brīvbode the labour stays almost entirely inside a household–volunteer–not-for-profit zone, with the state and market essentially absent. The modal point isn’t that labour has been “shifted” from one mode to another (W&G’s IKEA-isation logic, #3WVQWA Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Introducing consumption work #MCE5DZ #3WVQWA Two everyday examples provide a flavour of the issues involved, self-assembly furniture and the washing machine. Whereas in the past furniture was made and assembled by the manufacturer and sold and delivered by retailers in its final form, flat pack removes the assembling stage from paid employment and transfers it to the consumer. Transporting the goods from store to home also becomes the responsibility of the customer. The labour and costs of transport and assembly thus shift downstream and across socio-economic domain to the consumer. Insofar as the furniture has to be assembled in order to be useable, the consumer has labour to undertake after having bought the goods, but before they can be consumed and used. Consumers either accomplish it ), but that an alternative mode has been constituted in the first place. #SP2V6Q Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / Modal labour across socioeconomic modes #A43655 #SP2V6Q Some participants choose Brīvbode precisely because they do not want to perform labour for formal waste management institutions – they prefer the more relational, informal route. This is a modal choice: the same divestment work takes a different socioeconomic form depending on the route chosen, and Brīvbode's modal distinctiveness is part of what recruits and retains its participants. already gestures at this with “modal choice”; it could be made the centerpiece of the modal section. Participants are not absorbing labour offloaded from a formal system – they are building an informal mode that runs alongside the formal one and partly substitutes for it.

(d) This pushes Brīvbode work toward the prosumption/co-creation territory W&G explicitly reject. W&G insist their consumers are not creative co-producers but compelled labourers ( #FXSYT2 Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Self-service, co-production, prosumption, etc. #PVEUCS #FXSYT2 Whether negative or positive, stressing exploitation or empowerment, these various accounts of co-production all differ in significant respects from the analysis of consumption work outlined above, despite some obvious empirical and analytical overlaps. Many remain descriptive, deriving from business and management approaches to advertising, marketing and branding. They are not attempting a broader analysis of the transformation of work, nor of reconfiguration of the division of labour across socio-economic modes or between instituted economic processes. Most operate within a dualistic producer versus consumer paradigm where production is undifferentiated and includes retail and exchange and all other market-based operations in addition to actual production itself, while the consumer is on the other side of a boundary, in the equally unpacked realm of consumption. The focus then is on the shift of work across this boundary. In the positive interpretation, consumers enter the producer camp, doing unpaid labour and dissolving the boundaries between paid and unpaid, and between production and consumption which become conflated. Yet, while the emphasis is on creativity and the positive nature of consumer input, there is little consideration of how power relations are affected. Internet companies continue to determine the contours of consumer-generated data and to make enormous profit from it. In the negative version, work is transferred out of the realm of production and dumped on consumers, but with little attention to the wider reconfiguration of the distribution and organisation of labour throughout the particular economic process. To say, for example, that IKEA transfers the tasks of assembly and distribution of furniture to consumers is true. But this it is only part of a much larger reconfiguration of the division of labour: the final flat-pack product is an entirely different one to traditional manufactured furniture and predicated on transformation of the work associated with design, tooling, manufacture and so on. Most of these analyses lack a historical dimension in their concentration on the present-day shift , #5G2TQW Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Self-service, co-production, prosumption, etc. #PVEUCS #5G2TQW In the case of recycling and waste disposal, it would, of course, be possible to view consumers as engaging in the co-creation or co-production of feedstock, in either a negative (work shift) or positive (benefiting from municipal heating systems) way. But this interpretation would take us only so far. The residue that ends in landfill and comprises an integral part of consumers' sorting work could hardly be seen in this way and would have to be excluded from the picture. More importantly, the tasks performed by the consumer are defined from the outside by regulation and controlled in a way that affords the consumer not many more degrees of freedom than a worker in shop or factory. To develop a co-creation take on recycling would also require situating the contribution of consumers not simply within a producer/consumer dichotomy, but rather within the particular system of waste management and division of responsibilities between state, private sector, not-for-profit organisations and households. And we are then back to the consumption work framework. ). Brīvbode volunteers, by contrast, do exercise judgment, develop curatorial competencies, set the rules of their own labour, and feel ownership. There’s something of Campbell’s “craft consumer” ( #QHBNB5 Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Self-service, co-production, prosumption, etc. #PVEUCS #QHBNB5 All the ‘co-production’ approaches emphasise the active role of the consumer in the production of goods, value, brands or services. For example, the consumption sociologist Colin Campbell argues for recognition of the ‘craft consumer’ where ‘craft is used to refer to consumption activity in which the “the product” is both “made and designed by the same person” and to which the consumer typically brings skill, knowledge, judgement and passion while being motivated by a desire for self-expression’ (2005: 23). Recent theories of prosumption or co-creation highlight the interactive relation, and feedback loops, between producer and consumer, especially prevalent in new media, such that consumers become co-producers, and the distinction between producer and consumer is blurred. Basing their interpretation largely on the spread of user-generated online content facilitated by Web 2.0, Ritzer (2014) and Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010) go so far as to hail the emergence of ‘prosumer capitalism’, which they see as characterised by distinctive forms of control and exploitation, notably the trend towards unpaid labour, cost-free products and a ‘new abundance’. Zwick et al. (2008) have a quite different take on co-creation as ‘a political form of power aimed at generating particular forms of consumer life at once free and controllable, creative and docile’ (2008: 163) promoted largely by business schools and marketing gurus. Their Foucauldian and neo-Marxist analysis views the discourse of value co-creation as a new way of disciplining consumers, through exploitation of creative and valuable forms of consumer labour. ) in Anna’s developed intuition for bag contents and Rasa’s “filter” ( #737NYX Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / Valuation work without the context of price #L5PE5X #737NYX Curation extends valuation work beyond sorting into knowing and managing people's needs. Rasa describes it as having "a filter". She sometimes holds specific items for specific regular visitors based on accumulated knowledge about their life circumstances: a particular colour of top for a visually impaired visitor, a wedding gift set aside for a regular who recently moved from homelessness into social housing. This is care work and consumption work simultaneously – relational knowledge that cannot be systematised or delegated, and that makes Brīvbode function as something more than a drop-off point. ). Acknowledging this complicates a clean import of W&G – but it’s where the empirical interest lies. The chapter could argue that Brīvbode labour sits between the two camps W&G separate: it has the gendered, invisibilised, infrastructural character of consumption work, and the discretionary, evaluative, identity-forming character of co-creation. That’s not a weakness of the analysis; it’s a feature of non-market reuse sites that deserves naming.

(e) The moral-economy chapter of W&G is your hidden ally. W&G’s Chapter 8 ( #DDQXJ2 Household Recycling and Consumption Work #4LST57 / Moral economy revisited #DDQXJ2 #DDQXJ2 Moral economy revisited ) draws on Polanyi, E.P. Thompson and Sayer’s “lay normativity” to explain how recycling is legitimated collectively. Their state-driven cases largely lean on the Polanyian/Esping-Andersen institutional level. Brīvbode is much more Thompsonian – community customs, traditional rights, moral evaluation from below, without state mandate. If you want one more sentence connecting the chapter back to W&G in the conclusion, this is the natural one: “Where Wheeler and Glucksmann’s recycling cases are legitimated through state institutions and the discourses they propagate, Brīvbode’s consumption work is legitimated through what Thompson would recognise as community moral custom – and what Sayer calls lay normativity – operating without state mandate.”

A concrete suggestion for #HGVGLS Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / Modal labour across socioeconomic modes #A43655 #HGVGLS Wheeler and Glucksmann’s modal dimension attends to how labour is distributed across different socioeconomic arrangements – market and non-market, paid and unpaid, formal and informal. In their original context of waste recycling, household consumption work feeds into municipal waste management system: people prepare, wash, sort and transport materials, performing labour that contributes to a formal insitutional process. and #5ZQLP4 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / Modal labour across socioeconomic modes #A43655 #5ZQLP4 While Brīvbode is indirectly embedded in wider textile collection infrastructure, its operation as an informal volunteer initiative is modally different. The chain of work usually connects one household to another. Objects leaving one home pass through the swaphsop and arrive in someone elses home where a new set of consumption work tasks begin – storing, integrating, eventually deciding what to do when the object might no longer be wanted.

The current modal section is short and a bit understated. You could replace the current two-paragraph flow with something like:

Wheeler and Glucksmann’s modal dimension was developed to track how labour moves between state, market, not-for-profit and household, and how the same task (sorting a yoghurt pot) takes very different shape depending on which actor it has been allocated to. In their cases the analytical interest lies at the boundary: extended producer responsibility in Sweden means producers fund and organise collection, while liberal-marketised England relies on a patchwork of local authorities and private waste contractors, with consumers’ unpaid sorting work calibrated accordingly.

Brīvbode is modally distinctive in a different way. The labour does not shift between modes; an entire chain operates almost wholly inside the volunteer–household–not-for-profit zone, with the market absent and the state present only as background infrastructure (textile collection, the building’s lease). The chain does not link a household to an industrial reprocessor but one household to another, mediated by volunteer curation. Some participants choose this route precisely because it is non-market and non-municipal ( #SP2V6Q Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #FYG32U / Modal labour across socioeconomic modes #A43655 #SP2V6Q Some participants choose Brīvbode precisely because they do not want to perform labour for formal waste management institutions – they prefer the more relational, informal route. This is a modal choice: the same divestment work takes a different socioeconomic form depending on the route chosen, and Brīvbode's modal distinctiveness is part of what recruits and retains its participants. ): the same divestment task can be performed in different modes, and the modal character of Brīvbode is part of what recruits its participants. In this sense, the modal question for an informal swapshop is not how labour is distributed across existing modes but how an alternative mode is constituted and held together by labour that no formal actor demands.

That would tighten the modal section and make the conceptual move – from “shift between modes” to “constitution of a mode” – explicit.