Notes from the Editorial Collective

Abstract

In Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide, the late Diane M. Nelson wrote, "Numbers seem to stand alone, transparently representing the world, but everything depends on the systems of measurement and regimes of logic that make them count " (2015: 221). This issue of Anthropology of Work Review offers a diverse range of original research, commentaries, and reviews about what it means to perform work that "counts" and the systems in place that determine their value and visibility to a wider world. All of our authors grapple in their own ways with the enduring question of value and argue for how particular expressions, aspirations, and politics of value-making inflect working lives everywhere.Dawn Rivers shows us how nonemployer business owners in the United States seek out the autonomy, creativity and control that are more valuable to them than simply growth and accumulation. In her article "'Meat and Three': Business Ownership as an Alternative Form of Work," Rivers begins her inquiry with the timely and timeless question: "What would work look like without employers?" (Rivers, this issue). She focuses on the specific category of the nonemployer business owner, a category defined by the US government and unique American workplace that neither has nor desires employees. In this category of work, the single person operator works with no managers, no bosses, and no employees. Interviewing nonemployer business owners in North Carolina and New York, she argues that the claim of self-identifying as a business owner allows for "alternative forms of work" beyond the precarity and lack of control afforded by waged, salaried, independently contracted, or gig work.Rivers explores what happens when workers' discontents push them to a limit of what they can tolerate. These limits transform what would be formerly considered as employer benefits into forms of autonomy, senses of freedom, and business ownership control that center the "humanness" and identities of those who create their own work environments (Rivers, this issue). She argues that most nonemployer business owners do not start a business simply to run a business but do so to exercise control over the way they work. Her analysis points to the need to examine how the desire for control over one's work translates to both refusal of certain collective conditions and of work obligations and a chosen reimagining or revising of one's relation to the systems that support work, such as health insurance, clients and customers, and client networks.Likewise, Hosna Sheikholeslami is interested in questions of singularity and translation in the unique case of the ketab shenass or "book knower" in Iran's publishing industry, an important figure of value-mediation even when the labor of mediation is publicly invisible. Unlike the category of the nonemployer business in Rivers' essay, which is given a formality by government and labor agencies, the ketab shenass is a discursively and socially created category of expertise and work. It is also a labor category t...