Technologies of Labour and the Politics of Contradiction

Paško Bilić, Jaka Primorac, Bjarki Valtýsson, Jaka Primorac, Bjarki Valtýsson, Paško Bilić

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319762784
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319762791
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is situated in the nexus between technology, labour and politics. It focuses on contradictions as heuristic devices that uncover struggles, frictions and ambiguities of digitalization in work and labour environments. Topics include contradictions in automation, internet platforms, digital practices, creative industries, communication industries, human interaction, democratic participation and regulation. Three cross-cutting themes can be identified within the diverse chapters represented in the book. First, many authors argue that labour and economic valorisation occur outside of the traditional concept of working space and time. Second, digital technology is not fixed under capital. It is malleable and mouldable. Third, many political tensions are occurring without organized awareness or dissent. The book will, therefore, be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of sociology of work, media studies, cultural studies, gender studies, science and technology studies and Critical Theory as well as to trade-unionists and policy makers.

© The Author(s) 2018

Paško Bilić , Jaka Primorac and Bjarki Valtýsson (eds.)Technologies of Labour and the Politics of ContradictionDynamics of Virtual Workhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76279-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Technology, Labour and Politics in the 21st Century: Old Struggles in New Clothing

Paško Bilić¹ , Jaka Primorac¹ and Bjarki Valtýsson²

(1)

Department for Culture and Communication, Institute for Development and International Relations, Zagreb, Croatia

(2)

Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Paško Bilić (Corresponding author)

Jaka Primorac

Bjarki Valtýsson

End Abstract

The Idea Behind the Book

The idea for this book grew out of the Technologies of Digital Work international training school held at the Inter-University Centre (IUC) in Dubrovnik, Croatia between 3rd and 6th May 2016, supported by the Dynamics of Virtual Work COST IS1202 action. Early career, mid-career, and senior researchers discussed the increasing need among scholars, students, and policy makers to understand how digital technologies affect labour in contemporary societies. Do they bring social, democratic, and economic benefits? Are they inherently designed to bring positive change to society? Do they also enable surveillance? Do they create social inequalities ? From a critical perspective, technologies are perceived as being used to establish control , dominance, value extraction, and perpetuation of the capitalist system through alienated, exploited labour and various capital accumulation strategies. A gender perspective questions how technologies perpetuate patriarchal structures and contribute to digital gender divide while also providing emancipatory possibilities. From a media studies perspective, information and communication technologies enable social and cultural environments that alter communication and information production, distribution, consumption, and use. A science and technology studies (STS) perspective takes that all technologies are produced, used, and interpreted differently, while sometimes also exhibiting characteristics of social agency in various socio-material configurations. Furthermore, digital technologies present a challenge for policy makers since they develop at a faster rate than national, regional, and supranational (e.g., EU) legislative systems. The outlined perspectives share a nuanced and intricate understanding of the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of digital technologies. This edited volume provides a contribution to fragmented literature divided by disciplinary boundaries and professional alignments. The collection of chapters puts different views into a balanced dialogue and offers a fresh perspective for grasping the complexity of the relationship between technology, labour, and politics in the 21st century. The politics of a contradiction perspective brings to our attention how full of frictions, ambiguities, ambivalence, and difficulties implementation and use of digital technologies can be.

The global spread of information and communication technologies sparked many discussions on the ambiguous influence of technology on work and labour processes, capitalism, and modernity more generally. The classical labour process studies argued that production technologies bring new forms of managerial control under a monopoly of capitalism and create de-skilled labour (Braverman 1974) . Digital technologies seem no less ambivalent and are depicted as bringing various forms of distributed capitalism through customisation, crowdsourcing, impacting the development of knowledge work and innovation, and bringing about the rise of creative jobs (Florida 2002). They also contribute to the rise of low-paid jobs, piecemeal work, and crowd-work , thus contributing to new divisions of labour that create further inequalities (Huws 2003; Dyer-Witheford 2015) and reconfiguring worker organisations (Mosco and McKercher 2009). Approaches from the digital labour perspective (e.g., Fuchs 2010; Scholz 2013; Fisher and Fuchs 2015) critically evaluated network effects of online platforms and pointed out that large numbers of users contribute to the economic sustainability of digital services by creating digital value through their online presence, cooperation, and exchange. This book argues that digital technology can be regarded not only as a conduit for monetisation of network effects or as a tool for surveillance and management control of labour processes, but also as a socially assembled and reassembled apparatus for the purpose of ambivalent, ambiguous, and contradictory implementation and use in labour-related activities. Furthermore, the book takes a twofold approach to the concept of materiality. It starts from the acknowledgment of technological materiality evident in the abundance of machines, devices, algorithms , software applications, and social media inhabiting our everyday lives and shaping our labour dynamics. It then explores how the materiality of labour is intertwined with technological materiality. In other words, it questions how labour is embedded in social inequalities and socio-economic processes that produce and re-purpose digital technologies, and how labour is mediated, shaped, co-constructed and influenced by digital technologies. The complex interplay between technology and labour is evidenced in the upsurge of contradictions in many areas. Contradictions are taken as heuristic, epistemological devices that help us understand the frictions between technology and labour. This book maps out some of the existing contradictions and provides a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the wide ranging and continuously evolving relationship between technology, labour, and politics.

To untangle this challenging complexity, we argue that critical perspectives are much needed in contemporary discussions on the relationship between technology and labour together with visions of technology that propose alternatives strongly embedded in democratic processes, transparency, and accountability. It is therefore important to note that diverging visions of technology bring to our attention an underlying politics of contradiction in which the producers and controllers of technology have different interests and intentions when making technologies, compared to the interests of citizens, technology users, and labourers. It is a type of asymmetry and disconnection between long-standing scientific and instrumental rationality and everyday experience (Feenberg 2010) embedded in the socio-historical transformations of modernity. Labour is an integral part of the transformation as technologies need to be produced and put to use in social contexts. The realities of production and use are not always, if ever, in sync. This book looks beyond technological determinism and instead focuses on technology: first as a broader organisational, institutional, cultural, political, and economic context in which technical systems are embedded; and second as a concrete technical system with which humans and society relate. It examines how broader contexts shape digital technologies, work, and labour, and also how digital technics are embedded and how they alter the contexts, organisations, practices, and routines of human work, work-life balance, and labour.

Book Structure

Technologies are developed and deployed as technical tools for collaboration , communication, and information exchange, and are also (mis-)used as tools for control , dominance, and exploitation. These seemingly divergent realities point to the social embeddedness of digital technologies and also to the broader shifts in social sciences and humanities trying to tackle these socio-historical specificities with a mixture of existing and novel concepts and approaches. Unpacking these contradictions has scholarly, educational, and policy value for a critical and informed understanding of the role of digital technologies in society and more specifically in labour processes. Unlike many works in this field which tend to tackle positive or negative issues in their analysis of digital technology, this book takes a novel approach that will lay out and explore the contradictions of digital technologies. This edited volume is divided into four thematic sections where each section deals with manifest contradictions in the tensions between critical and emancipative perspectives. The list of contradictions reflected in the book structure is built solely on the work of the authors of this book. It is in no way all-encompassing, exhaustive, and completed. It does not represent the totality of the relations between technology, labour, and politics, nor does it pretend to do so. Our list is a combination of initial, analytical starting points, explored empirical realities, and professional pursuits of the authors of this book.

Part I titled ‘Contradictions in Automation and Internet Platforms’ deals with contradictions in automated labour, capital accumulation strategies by major Internet companies, and social media monitoring agencies. In particular, it looks at how robotics industries as well as major ICT companies and specialised local companies reorganise labour and create contradictions along new lines of struggle, forms of control , and value generation. The authors of this section suggest that non-routine activities, use-value of labour, and social engagement are relevant elements in digital capitalism . Human existence is pressured within struggles of capital , labour, time , sociality, and design contingencies of digital technologies.

In the opening chapter titled ‘Industry 4.0 : Robotics and Contradictions’ (Chap. 2), Sabine Pfeiffer argued that regardless of current developments in robotics, human labour remains an essential aspect of the production process. Despite the discourse arguing for the replacement of routine tasks with advanced automated systems, Pfeiffer argued that such predictions are inadequate. She used qualitative data to highlight the importance of non-routine activities in highly automated environments. Based on these findings she developed the labour capacity index (LC) and applied it to a dataset of 20,000 German employees. Mechanical and automotive engineering are often regarded as highly automated sectors of the economy. Yet, the empirical data supports the thesis of the existing contradiction between use value and exchange value of human labour. This contradiction cannot be resolved through increasing digitalisation . The distinction between knowledge work as a non-routine activity and production work as a routine activity does not stand up to close scrutiny since it misses the social foundations of labour and treats them as technologically replaceable objects. She concluded succinctly: ‘[d]igital capitalism will not be able to resolve its immanent contradictions by means of bits and bytes, nor delegate its class conflicts to an algorithm .’

In his chapter ‘From Ford ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Technology, Labour and Politics in the 21st Century: Old Struggles in New Clothing
• Part I. Contradictions in Automation and Internet Platforms
• Part II. Contradictions in Digital Practices and Creative Industries
• Part III. Contradictions in Human Interaction and Communication
• Part IV. Contradictions in Democratic Participation and Regulation
• Back Matter