Archive for 2022

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[Commlist] New book: Media and Management

Fri Feb 18 21:08:03 GMT 2022







Cultural studies friends,

New book, Media and Management, collaboratively written by Melissa Gregg <https://www.linkedin.com/in/melgregg/>, Rutvica Andrijasevic <https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/rutvica-andrijasevic>, Julie Chen <https://ischool.utoronto.ca/profile/julie-yujie-chen/> and Marc Steinberg <https://www.concordia.ca/finearts/cinema/faculty.html?fpid=marc-steinberg>.

It’s open access and available now @ https://meson.press/books/media-and-management/ <https://meson.press/books/media-and-management/>

The central insight of this book is that platform capitalism has a hardware history. Against the trend of studying manufacturing and platform labour separately, we explore the concept of ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) to show historical and geographical continuities in labour regimes from hardware to software. In 3 short chapters, we illustrate how Toyota’s production techniques in mid-20th century Japan have been integrated in runaway assembly lines in Central and Eastern Europe, following decades of inter-continental pollination with corporate managerial practices. We show how digital platforms are steeped in the history of automobile and hardware manufacture: “lean” and “agile” workers are not a recent invention.

This book shifts attention from Silicon Valley to Japan, China and Central and Eastern Europe to propose an alternative global geography of media production. Working across disciplines of Media, Culture and Organization Studies allows us to observe the blurred boundaries between factory labour and today’s on-demand online services.

The COVID lockdown affecting so many of us gave rise to the conversations archived in this work. We hope it is a topical teaching resource for many of you, especially as we wrestle with daily evidence of the humanity driving so-called supply chains that deliver our digital everyday.

Endorsements

“This timely collection reminds us how the latest forms of algorithmic management are extensions of the long history of industrialized labor. We can only understand the future of work when we contend with the patterns of the past and how they manifest around the world.”

— Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI

“This remarkable book critically probes hardware manufacturing practices and histories in the Asia Pacific, insisting media theory and management studies recompose in ways attentive to real-time labor regimes and the organizational force of global logistics.”

— Ned Rossiter, Western Sydney University

“This original book links up Toyotism, just-in-time management, and platform capitalism, all in one volume. I especially liked the main geographical foci of the chapters being on non-western countries: Japan, China, and Central and Eastern Europe.”

— Jack Linchuan Qiu, National University of Singapore


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