Underperformative economies: Discrimination and gendered ideas of workplace culture in San Francisco’s digital media sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on recent research in feminist and cultural economic geography, as well as queer and affect theory, in this paper I examine the construction of ideas of workplace culture in the context of digital media work in San Francisco. I argue that in this context, workplace culture is produced as an idea that functions to describe certain individuals and behaviors as in or out of alignment with the firm’s established and gendered norms. I frame these observations around a discussion of affect and emotion in the workplace through a critical examination of interviews with workers in this setting. Drawing on Ngai’s framing of confidence as the tone of capitalism, and Berlant’s notion of underperformativity, I emphasize the gendered and affective dimensions of accumulation in the digital media sector, and how ideas of culture are discursively and materially constructed rather than natural or existing prior to their circumstances of production. In a practical sense, reproductions of a culture–economy dualism implicate gendered and other forms of discrimination in the workplace in terms of hiring practices, uneven distributions of (often emotional and unremunerated) work, and how difference in the workplace is valued or undermined.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".