Book•
The New Spirit of Capitalism
01 Jan 2005-
TL;DR: A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.
Abstract: A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the affective ambiguities of what Tiziana Terranova has termed free labor, or the voluntary, unwaged, and exploited activities that generate the digital data, content, and connections central to informational capitalism.
Abstract: In this essay, I introduce the figure of the “neoliberal subject of value” to explore the affective ambiguities of what Tiziana Terranova has termed “free labor,” or the voluntary, unwaged, and exploited activities that generate the digital data, content, and connections central to informational capitalism. If, as Terranova argues, free labor is characterized by exhaustion—due to the lack of means by which this labor can sustain itself—why are millions of people still sustaining a commitment to such pervasive modes of unremunerated work? To formulate an answer to this question, I first turn to the neoliberal theory of human capital, which offers a more fruitful avenue for the analysis of digitally mediated “living labor” than the Autonomist Marxist theory that inspired Terranova’s analysis, by elucidating how a logic based on competition, entrepreneurialism, and speculation has transformed how work is understood and valued. Second, I discuss the central role of commensuration within capitalist value production, arguing that human capital functions as a “commensurating machine” that allows neoliberal governmentality to permeate areas of life previously impervious to market rationality. Third, I show how such practices of market commensuration depend on a range of evaluative devices that create environments of equivalence and hierarchical difference, explicating how these devices have come to play an increasingly important role in contemporary digital culture. I then discuss a case study of Klout, a digital device that commensurates variegated social data into a score that ranks users according to their “influence,” which has become an important, if contentious, measure of human capital in information economies. Finally, I return to the neoliberal subject of value and her affective ambiguities, which index both the aspirations and exhaustion of competitive value-generating sociality.
31 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce the concept of ambiguity work as a specific form of work-life balancing performed when making a livelihood based on leisure interests and a personal lifestyle, and show that horse-farmers perform a delicate and ongoing balancing act between family interests, individual leisure and paid work.
Abstract: This article introduces the concept of ambiguity work as a specific form of work–life balancing performed when making a livelihood based on leisure interests and a personal lifestyle. The study focuses on female self-employed horse-farmers in Sweden involved in service work with and through horses. Through an analysis of narratives and practices of this service work, based on ethnographic interviews and observations, boundary negotiations of various social spheres are discernible: work and life, and the commercial and the personal. The analysis shows that the horse-farmers perform a delicate and ongoing balancing act between family interests, individual leisure and paid work. Drawing on the notion of sociological ambivalence, it is suggested that this balancing act does not strive for demarcations, but rather to stay betwixt and between social spheres. It is argued that lifestyle enterprising is enacted and confirmed through ongoing boundary negotiations, or ambiguity work, that sustain a tension between ...
31 citations
Cites background from "The New Spirit of Capitalism"
...…change in late capitalist societies where the distinction between leisure and work is blurred, and norms and ideals emphasizing creativity, flexibility, individualization, and self-realization in life as well as work are taking shape (Bauman, 2007; Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Giddens, 1991)....
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TL;DR: In the early 1950s, Drucker (1954, p. 1) declared that management would remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western Civilization itself survives.
Abstract: In the 1950s Peter Drucker (1954, p. 1) declared that management would ‘remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western Civilization itself survives’. By the time of his remarks managers had clearly become the ‘new heroes of the economy’ (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005, p. 59; see Wren 1994). However, Drucker’s naturalistic and teleological description ignores the intricate antecedents that created such a natural ordering of managerial authority. It leads us to forget that in most times and places people managed to manage their affairs without management (see Parker 2002). Culturally, this did not mean that people were necessarily more disorganized when compared to modernites but that they used less formal and more phenomenal and socially embedded ways of coordinating their activities. Yet in an organizational sense management did indeed make people more organized since it was actually managerial rhetoric and practices that were partially responsible for defining and delimiting what it meant to be ‘rational’, ‘productive’, ‘efficient’ and, ultimately, ‘modern’. The insertion of management as an integral part of the ordering of human affairs originated in the midto late nineteenth century with the separation of capital ownership from management and a shift from individual to corporate ownership of companies. This shift led to the insertion of a third ‘special form of wage labor’ between workers and owners for whom, as Marx (1996) described them, ‘the work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function’. This third group would be responsible for the daily workings of the company and the maximization of profit for the new shareholder owners. In historical terms the rise of management signaled a broader switch from more federative and communal types of social organizations toward the centralized bureaucratic organizations that came to dominate much of modern life (see Weber 1947; Berle & Means 1991 [1933]; Chandler 1977). This switch eventually created a university trained, professional class of both public and private managers whose job it was to discipline the workforce, hone organizational functioning and continually rationalize output and production. While management as an organizational stratum has been around for some time, managerialism as a particular ‘regime of truth’ (Morley & Rassool 2000, p. 170) is more recent. Managerialism can be seen as a set of ideas and practices that, under the direction of managers, arranges a group’s activities in efficiency-minded ways and a doxa that legitimates the need for this control in all settings. Managerialism is, then, much more than the application of particular managerial practices in organizations. It is, rather, the
31 citations
Cites background from "The New Spirit of Capitalism"
...basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western Civilization itself survives’.1 By the time of his remarks managers had clearly become the ‘new heroes of the economy’ (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005, p. 59; see Wren 1994)....
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: The concept of "disaffected consent" was first proposed at a conference in 2009 as discussed by the authors, which can be defined as "a profound dissatisfaction with both the consequences and the ideological premises of the neoliberal project; it involves a general acquiescence with that project, a degree of deference to its relative legitimacy in the absence of any convincing alternative, and a belief that it cannot be effectively challenged".
Abstract: T his essay constitutes an attempt to develop the concept of ‘disaffected consent’ that I first formulated in reflecting on the complex attitude to neoliberal hegemony which seemed to have typified Western European publics both before and after the 2008 financial crisis (and which I first proposed at a conference in 2009). Broadly speaking, this attitude could be characterised as follows: on the one hand, it involves a profound dissatisfaction with both the consequences and the ideological premises of the neoliberal project; on the other hand, it involves a general acquiescence with that project, a degree of deference to its relative legitimacy in the absence of any convincing alternative, and a belief that it cannot be effectively challenged. The wider context for this Western European phenomenon is a situation in which national electorates have on no occasion offered a convincing mandate to the neoliberal programme.
31 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that even the most seemingly secure sections of the gaming workforce have a tendency to drift toward the economic precarity most acutely felt across below the line workers, and they argue that workers, like game testers, are attracted to below-the-line positions as through-ports to the glamorous core sections of game labor.
Abstract: This article foregrounds the concept of immaterial labor to theorize the tension between the precarity of below the line workers and the glamor of above the line workers in the video game industry. I argue that even the most seemingly secure sections of the gaming workforce have a tendency to drift toward the economic precarity most acutely felt across below the line workers. In other words, we, as researchers, may need to question the presumed hard break between the above and below the line work experiences of employees in the game industry in light of the increase in processes of deskilling, outsourcing, and financialization. Moreover, I assert that workers, like game testers, are attracted to below the line positions as through-ports to the glamorous core sections of game labor: design, art, and programming. As such, they are interpellated to the ideology of creativity and practices of hope labor. The theoretical insights developed in the article draw on 2.5-year ethnographic work in a medium-sized gam...
31 citations
References
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TL;DR: In this paper, a translation of the poem "The Pleasures of Philosophy" is presented, with a discussion of concrete rules and abstract machines in the context of art and philosophy.
Abstract: Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements Author's Note 1. Introduction: Rhizome 2. 1914: One or Several Wolves? 3. 10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?) 4. November 20th, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics 5. 587BC-AD70: On Several Regimes of Signs 6. November 28th, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs? 7. Year Zero: Faciality 8. 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?" 9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity 10. 1730: Becoming Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming Imperceptible... 11. 1837: Of the Refrain 12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine 13. 7000BC: Apparatus of Capture 14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated 15. Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index
14,735 citations
5,247 citations
Posted Content•
01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray as discussed by the authors, and a good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan's economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker's Rule.
Abstract: The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.
3,447 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1967
TL;DR: The Society of the Spectacle as mentioned in this paper is one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s, and it has been widely used in the literature since.
Abstract: For the first time, Guy Debord's pivotal work Society of the Spectacle appears in a definitive and authoritative English translation. Originally published in France in 1967, Society of the Spectacle offered a set of radically new propositions about the nature of contemporary capitalism and modern culture. At the same time it was one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s. Today, Debord's work continues to be in the forefront of debates about the fate of consumer society and the operation of modern social power. In a sweeping revision of Marxist categories, the notion of the spectacle takes the problem of the commodity from the sphere of economics to a point at which the commodity as an image dominates not only economic exchange but the primary communicative and symbolic activity of all modern societies.Guy Debord was one of the most important participants in the activities associated with the Situationist International in the 1960s. Also an artist and filmmaker, he is the author of Memoires and Commentaires sur la societe du spectacle. A Swerve Edition, distributed for Zone Books.
3,391 citations
Book•
01 Mar 1987
TL;DR: Relevance Lost as mentioned in this paper is an overview of the evolution of management accounting in American business, from textile mills in the 1880s and the giant railroad, steel, and retail corporations, to today's environment of global competition and computer-automated manufacturers.
Abstract: "Relevance Lost" is an overview of the evolution of management accounting in American business, from textile mills in the 1880s and the giant railroad, steel, and retail corporations, to today's environment of global competition and computer-automated manufacturers. The book shows that modern corporations must work toward designing new management accounting systems that will assist managers more fully in their long-term planning. It is the winner of the American Accounting Association's Deloitte Haskins & Sells/Wildman Award Medal. It is also available in paperback: ISBN 0875842542.
3,308 citations