work and play

Barry Jones' 1999 address on The Information Revolution in Australia: Its Impact On Politics, the Economy & Society and his Sleepers, Wake! Technology & the Future of Work (Melbourne: Oxford Uni Press rev 98) offer local perspectives for considering work, labour and the big end of town in the age of connectivity. On the Front Line: Organization of Work in the Information Economy (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 99) by Stephen Frenkel, Marek Korczynski & May Tam is less upbeat.

The UK Department of Trade & Industry report on Converging Technologies: The Consequences For the New Knowledge-Driven Economy, Amy Sue Bix's Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 00) and Robert Thomas's What Machines Can't Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 94) are other starting points. 

Further to the left is Herbert Schiller's Information & The Crisis Economy (New York: Oxford Uni Press 86) and Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis In America (London: Routledge 96) or Shoshana Zuboff's In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work & Power (New York: Basic Books 88). 

New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Post-Industrial America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 98) by Stephen Herzenberg & Howard Wial highlights the changing nature of the workforce, noting that while there were fewer than 5 thousand computer programmers in the US in 1960, there were over 1.3 million by 98, with managerial and professional jobs increasing from 22% in 1979 to 29% of total employment in 1995.

Nate Bolt contributed a modish essay on The Binary Proletariat to First Monday. Noah Kennedy's The Industrialisation of Intelligence (London: Unwin 89), James Cortada's  Rise of the Knowledge Worker (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann 98), White-Collar Sweatshop (New York: Norton 01) by Jill Fraser and The Electronic Sweatshop (New York: Simon & Schuster 88) by Barbara Garson are arguably better value.

Net Slaves - True Tales of Working the Web by Bill Lessard & Steve Baldwin (New York: McGraw-Hill 00) is breathless - and relentlessly anecdotal - but looks at the systems administrators, technicians and others in the underside of the Information Economy. Andrew Ross's more mordant Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (New York: NY Uni Press 98) features 'Jobs in Cyberspace', a critique that can be read in conjunction with Chris Benner's Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley (Oxford: Blackwell 02). Audrey Collin & Richard Young edited the provocative collection The Future of Career (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 00) exploring occupational training, unemployment, pre-employment training and the nature of work.

There's a pungent critique of the techno-libertarians in Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (New York: PublicAffairs 99) and Langdon Winner's 'Silicon Valley Mystery House' in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City & the End of Public Space (New York: Noonday 92) edited by  Michael Sorkin.

     telework

Teleworking, despite pontification by cybertheorists, has proved to be neither as personally liberating or as attractive to managers as originaly conceived. And it hasn't led to the death of the city, as Joel Kotkin's The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape (New York: Random 00) and Digital Geography: The Remaking of City & Countryside in the New Economy (PDF) demonstrate.

In January 2001 the US Department of Labor released a hefty report on Telework & the New Workplace for the 21st Century, with studies by social scientists, economists and technologists. There's another perspective in The Virtual Workplace (Hershey: Idea 98) edited by Magid Igbaria and Martin Carnoy's Sustaining the New Economy: Work, Family & Community in the Information Age (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 00)

     technologies and tools

The literature on digital technology's transformation of the workplace and work processes is immense. We'll be supplying pointers in coming weeks. 

For collaborative activity there's a useful introduction in Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Dordrecht: Kluwer 99) edited by Susanne Bodker & Kjeld Schmidt, Studies in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Amsterdam: North-Holland 91) by Steven Benford and Computer-Supported Co-Operative Work (Chichester: Wiley 99) edited by Michel Beaudouin-Lafont.

     unions and activism

There's surprisingly little writing about unions and labour activism in the digital environment. 

James Glee's The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism (Boulder: Westview 97) and Michael Perelman's Class Warfare in the Information Age (New York: St Martins 98) are provocative or rather silly studies, depending on your bias. Lorraine Giordano's Beyond Taylorism: Computerization & the New Industrial Relations (New York: St Martins 92) is suggestive. We found Eric Lee's The Labour Movement & the Internet: The New Internationalism, (London: Pluto Press 97) unconvincing

Peter Waterman's paper on Labour@Cyberspace is another academic exercise from Cybersociology magazine. There's a perspective in Jonathan Cohn's TNR article on Amazon.com & the New Economy.

The Reputation Management page in the Marketing guide on this site looks at 'attack' sites and corporate 'sucks' domains.



   next page  (the state)