Author: David Knights Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1349192422 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
The papers in this volume examine the conditions and consequences of micro-electronic technology within one or more of various spheres of the labour process.
Author: Kendra Briken Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 113761014X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
With contributions from over 20 leading scholars from across the globe, this new book brings together a number of papers that have been presented at the annual International Labour Process Conference, at which the conference theme 'Working Revolutions: Revolutionising Work' provided the inspiration for many of the chapters included in this volume. Grounded in Labour Process Theory, the text examines how digital technologies impact on work and organisations and provides a rigorous account of the technological, organizational and work related changes in both the new digital industries and in the traditional service and manufacturing sectors. The book covers many of the most significant contemporary issues and subjects in the field, including the representation of women in IT, workplace cyberbulling, virtualisation and the video games industry. This book is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students studying modules related to technology and work, as well as modules in work sociology on sociology degree programmes.
Author: Gavin Mueller Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1786636751 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
In the Nineteenth-century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. The luddites weren't primitive and they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the twenty-first century world. Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labour and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. The task is intimidating, but the seeds of this resistance are already present in the neo-Luddite efforts of hackers, pirates, and dark web users who are challenging surveillance and control, often through older systems of communication technology.
Author: David Knights Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1349204668 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
How are we to make sense of the way work is organised and controlled? To what extent is its design the result of technological demands, the interests of capital or processes of negotiation and struggle? In recent years labour process analysis, revived by Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital , has been most influential in shaping our thinking about this question. With contributions from leading authorities in the field, this book reviews the contribution of the labour process theory to the study of work organisation. Providing a fresh response to criticisms of 'Bravermania' and lost momentum, the volume explores the theoretical foundations of labour process analysis and suggests new directions for its development
Author: James Steinhoff Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030716899 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 259
Book Description
This book argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms. On the basis of this study, Steinhoff develops a Marxist analysis to argue that the popular theory of immaterial labour, which holds that information technologies increase the autonomy of workers from capital, tending towards a post-capitalist economy, does not adequately describe the situation of high-tech digital labour today. In the AI industry, digital labour remains firmly under the control of capital. Steinhoff argues that theories discerning therein an emergent autonomy of labour are in fact witnessing labour’s increasing automation.
Author: Catherine McKercher Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 9780739117811 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
Knowledge Workers in the Information Society addresses the changing nature of work, workers, and their organizations in the media, information, and knowledge industries. These knowledge workers include journalists, broadcasters, librarians, filmmakers and animators, government workers, and employees in the telecommunications and high tech sectors. Technological change has become relentless. Corporate concentration has created new pressures to rationalize work and eliminate stages in the labor process. Globalization and advances in telecommunications have made real the prospect that knowledge work will follow manufacturing labor to parts of the world with low wages, poor working conditions, and little unionization. McKercher and Mosco bring together scholars from numerous disciplines to examine knowledge workers from a genuinely global perspective.
Author: Ursula Huws Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1583674632 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
For every person who reads this text on the printed page, many more will read it on a computer screen or mobile device. It’s a situation that we increasingly take for granted in our digital era, and while it is indicative of the novelty of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is also the key to understanding its driving force: the relentless impulse to commodify our lives in every aspect. Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. Labor in the Global Digital Economy is a forceful critique of our dizzying contemporary moment, one that goes beyond notions of mere connectedness or free-flowing information to illuminate the entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control at the core of capitalism.
Author: Klaus Schwab Publisher: Crown Currency ISBN: 1524758876 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wearable sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manufacturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individuals. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frameworks that advance progress.
Author: Mary L. Gray Publisher: Harper Business ISBN: 1328566242 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
"A startling exposé of the invisible human workforce that powers the web--and how to bring it out of the shadows. Hidden beneath the surface of the internet, a new, stark reality is looming--one that cuts to the very heart of our endless debates about the impact of AI. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri unveil how the services we use from companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast human labor force that is kept deliberately concealed. The people who do 'ghost work' make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech, on-demand piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, transcribing audio, confirming identities, captioning video, and much more. The shameful truth is that no labor laws protect them or even acknowledge their existence. They often earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked in this 'ghost economy,' and that number is growing every day. In this unprecedented investigation, Gray and Suri make the case that robots will never completely eliminate 'ghost work' and the unchecked quest for artificial intelligence could spark catastrophic work conditions if not stopped in its tracks. Ultimately, they show how this essential type of work can create opportunity--rather than misery--for those who do it."--Dust jacket.
Author: Manuel Castells Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing ISBN: 9781845424350 Category : Computer networks Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Manuel Castells has drawn together a group of contributors to explore the patterns and dynamics of the network society in its cultural and institutional diversity.
Author: David Knights
Author: Kendra Briken
Author: Gavin Mueller
Author: David Knights
Author: James Steinhoff
Author: Catherine McKercher
Author: Ursula Huws
Author: Klaus Schwab
Author: Mary L. Gray
Author: Manuel Castells