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Research studies on academic work and the COVID-19 crisis have clearly shown that the pandemic crisis contributed to exacerbating pre-existing gender gaps. Although the research has been extensive in this regard, it has focused more on the widening of the “motherhood penalty”, while other groups of academics are blurred. Even more underinvestigated and not yet fully explained are the intersections between further axes of diversity, often because the research conducted during the pandemic was based on a small volume of in-depth data. By drawing on interview data from a wider national research project, this article aims to contribute to this debate by adopting an intersectional approach. In investigating daily working life and work–life balance during the pandemic of a highly heterogeneous sample of 127 Italian academics, this article sheds light on how gender combines with other axes of asymmetry, particularly class (precarious versus stable and prestigious career positions) and age (individuals’ life-course stage), to produce specific conditions of interrelated (dis)advantage for some academics. The analysis reveals three household and family life course types that embody the interlocking of gender, class, and age within a specific social location with unequal, and possibly long-term, consequences for the quality of working life, well-being, and careers of academics, living alone or with parents, couples without children or with grown-up children, and couples with young children and other family members in need of care.

IntroductionThe article aims to shed light on the process of shaping the relational space of work in the service triangle through the progressive digitalization of work in retail banking industry. It addresses the following research question: how do technological shifts affect the relationships and interactions (a) between employees and supervisors, and (b) between employees and customers? Through a close examination of the redesign of the interpersonal relationships from the subjective viewpoint of front-line workers across these two levels, the paper contributes to advancing the understanding of the impact of technologies on surveillance practices, work identity and professional ethics in a key working sector with regard to digitalization and changes in professional requirements.MethodsThe question is addressed through a qualitative case study of retail banking in Italy. In the (retail) banking sector, the redesign of the relations between supply and demand for services is more sensitive to the changes afforded by digitalization and learning algorithms. The study was conducted with the involvement of workers and trade unionists, with whom we embarked on a constant work of re-articulation through data collection, analysis, and conceptualization. We collected a multiplicity of data for triangulation: interviews, focus groups, documents, and ethnographic notes.ResultsData analysis shows how work processes and interpersonal relationships start to be redesigned across the two levels. At (a) level, two main aspects are found: the measurement of individual performance within the logic of quantification, which reduces employees to a set of measured dimensions, pushing workers into conditions of stress and competition; new surveillance practices and forms of organizational control enabled by technologies and learning algorithms. At (b) level, from being an expert with specific knowledge in the financial sector the bank employee turns into a kind of seller of any product that the algorithm decides to sell, thus ignoring the value of situated experience held by embedded, embodied social actors. Moreover, algorithms enter jurisdictional spaces traditionally controlled by knowledge workers and produce unknown outcomes concerning to whom to sell which products that cannot be clearly understood by workers.DiscussionTechnology contributes to engendering complex identity constructions to maintain, protect, and revise professional identity.