Outsourced agency? an exploration of the implications of outsourcing everyday life tasks

People navigate a social realm characterized by an abundance of (often constricting) normative ideals about the good life. Living up to these ideals of being the good student, the good employee, the good partner, the good parent - and the list goes on - often cause stress in busy, everyday lives. As a result, a proliferation of options or technologies that allow us to outsource particular basic and fundamental everyday life tasks such as cleaning, grocery shopping, cooking, child sitting etc. have recently been introduced and continue to do so. Outsourcing these tasks allow us to get closer to living up to given ideals in a point in time; short on time but endless on demands. We discuss how outsourcing key everyday life tasks might simultaneously drain everyday life from basic but also necessary and important content. We seek to explore the question; what are the implications of outsourcing basic tasks and does it also entail outsourcing agency? Using a sociocultural theoretical framework, we explore different outsourcing technologies and investigate how they affect everyday life of the people who employ them. We propose the term “outsourced agency” in order to fine-tune understandings of some the intended and unintended effects of such practices. This entails an exploration of implied rationales that afford outsourcing technologies as well as an investigation of the multiple (shadow) effects; in relation to human agency, interpersonal relations and social coherence.