The Moral Orders of Matchmaking Work: Digitization of Matrimonial Services and the Future of Work

What is it about?

To contribute to understanding of digitzation of services and the future of work, we undertake a qualitative and ethnographic study the work of matrimonial matchmakers, astrologers and private detectives in this paper. We ask how does technology influence matchmaking work? What does matchmaking produce other than matches?

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Why is it important?

Our findings show that scale offered by matrimonial websites like shaadi.com along with ongoing socio-cultural, moral churn in families and communities means that technology impacts user and non-user matchmakers in three ways. (1) scale creates indeterminancy around choice and clients doubt self-declared information and opt for background checks by private detectives. (2) young people desire autonomy from parents and a chat with someone who understands without judgement. This changes astrologers' role in matchmaking and also enables a new type of matchmaking that offers friendly advice, keeps parents out and helps young people make choices. (3) does this mean that genealogy or maintaining family lineages ceases to matter? No, we find old and new hierarchies involved in finding a tribe. What does free, fee based matchmaking within and across communities produce other than matches? We found how matchmakers also shape boundaries of family, caste, religion, class and gender in different ways depending on their moral positioning. Based on these findings we argue that to assess the impact of technology on work, we must understand the social life of work. This means asking what does work do other than produce economic outputs? What does this mean for the future of work debate? Following the feminist approach of interrogating together the productive and reproductive realms of life, we suggest that labor and capital be domesticated or followed into the families and communities in which they reside. By doing so in the case of matchmaking we showeded how capital is invested in diverse moral projects. Domesticating labor and capital even outside this case may allow us to be open to see how get socio-economic structures get ossified.