Twenty-first International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

The emergence of COVID-19 has globally transformed the ways in which labor is organized, and child welfare policy work in Chile has been no exception. Nowadays, child welfare policy workers have to juggle between the burnout generated by teleworking; the online interventions in a context of scarce technological resources; and the concern for virtually safeguarding the well-being of children in situations of violence and abuse, tasks that were previously supported by a presential-affective-corporal bond (Rojas, 2018). This paper considers how these professionals have experienced this labor reorganization, and which have been the effects of this in these workers’ subjective construction. We conducted a Digital Ethnography (Pink et al., 2016) with eight workers from different Accredited Collaborating Organizations of the Chilean National Child Service. Through textual-affective analysis (Cromby, 2012) we found that the use of technologies in social intervention has affected workers in different ways. On one hand, because of the difficulty of separating work and private life, these workers feel that their lives have been taken away from them and that they have been consumed by work. This has turned them into non-human robotic bodies (Chen, 2012), extensions of the technologies they work with. On the other hand, certain opportunities have also emerged within COVID-19 crisis. In effect, the use of technologies has allowed workers to know the everyday life of families with whom they work, which was not possible in face-to-face intervention spaces. All this has strengthened their emotional relationship with children and families, making possible online interventions.