[ecrea] CFP - ICTs and Work: the United States at the Origin of the Dissemination of Digital Capitalism

Call for Submissions

Interdisciplinary Conference HDEA – TCS

ICTs and Work: the United States at the Origin of the Dissemination of 
Digital Capitalism

Université Paris Sorbonne, 29-30 May 2013

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have revolutionized 
work practices: the acquisition, processing and storage of data thanks 
to hardware, software, and networks have changed the face of work in 
offices and factories. Their impact has been felt beyond the walls of 
traditional companies’ spaces, resulting in the modification of time and 
space constraints at work and in the constant blurring of the frontier 
between private and work life. The impact of ICT is often viewed in 
Manichean terms: some exalt the benefits of new technologies in terms of 
gains in interactivity, autonomy and creativity for employees, including 
atypical employees such as “independent contractors”, while others warn 
against increased stress due to constant demands, real-time control of 
working activities and surveillance of workplace interactions.

While pros and cons of the use of ICT at work are widely debated, there 
is markedly less interrogation of what has made its existence and 
dissemination possible. The global dimension of professional uses of 
ICTs makes them look universal and, so to speak, ahistorical. Yet these 
uses have a precise origin: individuals have elaborated, reoriented, and 
disseminated these new techniques in specific places and at identifiable 
moments. Some of these practices refer directly to US cultural practices 
and ideologies. Moreover, the growing adoption of ICTs goes hand in hand 
with deep changes in labor markets such as flexibility, cost-cutting, 
casualization of work and deregulation, which ICTs have contributed to 
amplify, a phenomenon largely originating in the US. Further, the United 
States has continued to play a major role in the development, the 
dissemination and the control of ICTs, while the extension of the 
mediasphere has been accompanied by a corresponding extension of the 
anglosphere.

It is therefore indispensible to re-territorialize the issue of ICTs. 
What have been, historically, the economic and sociological bases for 
the development and dissemination into the work sphere of those 
technologies, which carry with them the “new spirit of capitalism” 
(Boltanski and Chiappello 1999), or “digital capitalism” (Schiller 
1999), but also that of freeware and digital commons such as Wikipedia. 
How did they interact, in synergy and conflict, with other social facts? 
The globalization of practices also raises the issue of 
interculturality, as various cultures become involved in a process of 
appropriation and modification of the globalized US culture, which ICTs 
have been so influential in diffusing.

We encourage contributions that engage with the role of the United 
States in the development of ICT at work, including:

- Entrepreneurial rhetoric and the deployment of ICTs.
- The relationship between ICTs and neoliberal deregulation and 
delocalization.
- Vectors of dissemination: management manuals, trade shows, public 
policies, media, awareness raising campaigns, seminars, industry rivalry 
(eg. Apple vs. Microsoft), model rivalry (eg. proprietary vs. free 
software).
- Pre-existing modes of flattened and networked organizations and soft 
control in the US (advertising agencies and research projects are an 
example) and their interaction with the development of ICTs-related 
modes of work organization.
- Emergence of new professional types such as the hacker and their set 
of values of expert autonomy, sharing and transparent exchange that 
contradict the values of capitalism but echo US cultural entrepreneurial 
values of self-reliance, DIY and distrust of institutions.
- ICTs and masculine domination: the impact of technical changes on 
gender roles at work.
- The role of consumers: from consumerism to prosumerism.
- The governance of networks (including regulation through legal 
licences) and the US legal tradition.

Please send submissions to (fraysseo /at/ aol.com) and (mathieu.oneil /at/ anu.edu.au) 
and include your name and affiliation.

Abstracts for papers should be 250 words.

Abstract submission date: December 15, 2012.

Applicants will be advised by January 15, 2013.
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