[Commlist] New book: Media and Management

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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