Happy people sell

Woodcock, Jamie. 2015. A Worker’s Inquiry in a UK Call Centre : the Labour Process, Management, and Resistance. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

The Call Centre, s01 e01 still. Source : youtube

Summary

Claim: Worker and manager are opposed. Workers' are seen as ability to resist is confronted by the idea of "the victory of management" (4). A key theme developed in the thesis: refusal of work (4).

Aim: to uncover the extent and form of resistance by call centre workers (8).

Supports/opposes who: Marx, Johnston-Forest Tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie (Catroiadis, Lefort) and International Socialists in Britain. Operaismo. Burawoy's (1979) sociological extended case method. Taylor and Bain's (1999:109) research on call centre work. Mulholland (2004).

Questions (17):

• How is the labour process organised in a call centre?
• What are the emotional and affective components of the labour process?
• What is the class composition of workers in call centres?
• What techniques of supervision and control do management use?
• What is the role of technology in the call centre?
  Is there resistance in the workplace?
• What are the possibilities for organisation?

Method: Theory: analysis of the development and organisation of call centres. Empirical: a detailed ethnographic account. Case study: Trade Union Cover, a private company that sells insurance to trade union members. Sociological methods of discussions, working in a call centre (following the example of Burawoy), and collectively writing up the experience over a period of three years. 10 call centres were involved.

Why important: contributes to an understanding of the labour process, management techniques, and the possibilities for resistance in a call centre.

Chapter breakdown:

1. Introduction
2. Literature review
3. Methodology
4. Ethnographic: call centre workplace
5. Ethnographic: management
6. Worker resistance
7. Challenges for organising: contemporary trade unionism in the UK

Relevance to my research: deals with concepts I use in my analysis.

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Why call centers? These are selected because they lay on the intersection of two areas of project's interests: on the one hand, they are non-unionised, on the other, they present an example of a post-industrial service economy.

Naysayer from my side: However, what I find find lacks here is the evidence that this example can stand to represent all of contemporary work landscape. To me, the problem with post-industrial model is precisely being heterogenous - a variety of different occupations do not use the same traits. A call center in this context can be argued an example of how in some cases industrial, eg factory ways of labour still exist after the information society paradigm shift. This is why the traditional worker's inquiry methods work when applied to this model. In other types of work, such as software engineering, high levels of competence of workers is combined with distributed character of workforce and blurred distinction between the worker and the manager. Here, it would be problematic to talk about worker/manager opposition and worker organisation based on location.

Studies focused on the workplace: Huw Beynon's (1973)
Working for Ford, Anna Pollert's (1981) Girls, Wives, and Factory Lives, Ruth Cavendish's (1982) Women on the Line, and a number of studies by Michael Burawoy (1979) starting with Manufacturing Consent. Woodcock notes that a new research is needed, since there were number of important changes since these studies were undertaken (9). More recent studies, specifically on the call centres include Houlihan (2002), Taylor and Bain (2003), and Kolinko (2002).

Further notes on methodology:

Analysis of how historically, workers’ inquiry was broken from in search of new organisational forms. Three examples: US, France, and Italy (Operaismo). Applying Burawoy's framework to come up with propositions for such organisational forms in the contemporary context. Woodcock mentions (and adapts) the method described in Marx Capital's chapter 10 for ethnographic research (Harvey, 2010:141).

He notes one-sidedness of Capital in that "the subject of Capital, as the name perhaps implies, is capital – rather than workers' (49), which makes it problematic to take Capital as inspiration for workers' inquiry.

Operaismo is described as a doctrine that, contrary to Capital, places the worker in the centre of attention. Its method was rooted in empirical "investigation into the subjectivity of the workers at the [Olivetti and FIAT] factories" (60). Relationship between sociology and Marxism seen as fragile, due to Marx's suspicion of certain forms of sociology, and sociology's suspicion of politics, such as political conception of the working class.

Directions for future research. The failure to negotiate unionisation in the empirical study contributes to the debate on new trade union models. The method could be used in other studies that engage with workplaces involing precarious contracts with low pay and poor conditions.

Bibliography:

Harvey, D., A Companion to Marx’s Capital. London: Verso, 2010.

Marx, K., 1880. “A Workers’ Inquiry.” New International, 1938, 4 (12): 379–81.

Human motor in Marx

Rabinbach, Anson. The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor. First edition. Forms of Living. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

Etienne-Jules Marey chronophotograph. Source: graphicine.com

Overview

Claim: there is an eclipse of hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.

Who deals with: European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. Marx’s productivism, Taylorism, Communism, the Nazi Beauty of Labor program, and the discourses of the digital workplace in the later 20thC.

Method: Analysis of labour. Establishes the idea of human motor as a figure of 19thC transcendental materialism. Then uses this definition in the context of dualism of human and machine to cut across history, identify the notion's decline in 20thC and analyse why it happened (the answer is it because of digital technology). Rabinbach's historical analysis is based on division of history into three parts (mimetic, transcendental, and digital). Chapters are mapped to this three stages.

Why important: for historians. General public, because more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.

Relevance to my research: important because also analyses differences between industrial and digital labour.

- - - -

Notes:

Explains categorisation into three historical stages:

1. Mimetic (18thC) - aims at imitating the nature.

2. Transcendental (19-20thC) the body as productive in the sense that it is capable of converting energy into work. Energy is a transcendental principle, that is, equally omnipresent in nature and society.

3. Digital (from 20thC onwards). Driven by the ideas that (1) the primacy of bodily functions was now replaced by the manipulation of signs (Walter Benjamin) and (2) that any mathematical operation can be reproduced mechnanically (Alan Turing) (ix).

Étienne- Jules Marey. Cat drop. Source: ucla.edu

Human motor in Marx

Claim: Marx saw labour as a '“metabolic exchange” between history and nature" (7)

Who deals with: discoveries of William Thomson and Helmholtz around steam engines (7). Thermodynamics theory of William Robert Grove (8). Clausius’s second law of thermodynamics (10). Ukrainian physician and socialist Sergei Podolinsky (11). The “Pope” of German socialism, Karl Kautsky (12).

Method: Looks at Marxism from the standpoint of physics, particlarly first and seconds laws of thermodynamics.

Why important: one reason why socialism is a utopia is because it ignores the 2nd law of thermodynamics, thus denying the environmental impact (“heat death of the universe” hypothesis)(10).

Relevance to my research: to compare application of Marxian analysis in Rabinbach with other digital labour theorists. He also points out the shift in Marx's thinking from more anthropological to economic analysis.

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Notes:

Marx considered his discovery of labour-power as one of his most important achievements (7). In his productvist shift, as observed by Rabinbach, Marx redefines the concrete and abstract labour as conversion of labour versus its generation (Moishe Postone) (8, 177). Once discovered, labour-power became quantifiable, which foregrounded emancipation from productive labour for the sake of even greater productivity over Marx's earlier claim of emancipation through labour (8). In Capital, Marx stresses the substance of exchange is nothing more but labour power, now understood as a commodity (Marx, Capital, 1:179).

In its most general sense, productivism is a belief that all growth is good (opposed by the belief of the finite planet and those who argue that it's up to the worker to put values on their free time). Rabinbach defines it as "primacy and ultimate interchangeability of productive activity of the body, technology, or nature" (vii). Getting back to Marx, he observes in this context that Marxian analysis is built on seeing labour as expenditure of human labour power (8).

Rabinbach argues that Marx and Engels failed to fully adopt the theory of "heat death" in their labour theory of value, and thus delineated their thinking from productivism (11).

Digital labour and the theory of value

Fuchs, Christian. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

Austin Distel, Unsplash

PART I Theoretical Foundations of Studying Digital Labour

Claim: An understanding of key concepts of Marx' theory of value is essential for analysis of digital labour.

Who deals with: Karl Marx

Method: narrative. Breaks down Marx’s labour theory of value into key points: (2.2) labour and work; (2.3) use-value, value,exchange-value, money, price, value and price of labour-power, surplus value.

Why important: to Marxists researchers, as a background for his theory, which is the most thorough analysis that is available (25)

Relevance to my research: lays ground to understanding Fuch's theory of digital labour

Notes:

Introduction. Starts with Aristotle's definitions of poíesis (the creation of works from nature) and praxis (self-determined action) (24). This is seen as key to Marxia definitions. Looks at how later thinkers responded to this duality in definitions: Paulus, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Locke, Adam Smith, Hegel.

Marx breaks down economy into production, distribution and consumption. Humans are seen as having doing work, which is a conscious productive activity, aimed at producing means of subsistence. Their need is described as "production of material life itself" (Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1845/1846. The German ideology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.) Subjectivity in Marx is the world of work that surrounds the commodity, which is seen as objective. Labour creates use-value.

Marx sees labour as natural condition of human existence. There is an implied "interchange between man and nature", which I would question i two ways: (1) man and nature dualism needs to be further nivetigated; (2) argue the evidence for the interchange - capitalism uses extractive logic, which does not presuppose to give anythinig to nature in return of resources.

Fuchs uses the following distinction between work and labour drawn by Marx in Capital: "Labour which creates use-values and is qualitatively determined is called ‘work’ as opposed to ‘labour’; labour which creates value and is only measured quantitatively is called ‘labour’, as opposed to ‘work" (27 quoting Marx, 1867c: 138). In other words, in labour humans do not own means and results of production, and it is necessary alienated. Work is a process where humans make use of technology to transform nature and society and satisfy human needs. Freedom begins where labour ends.

Labour creates "objective form", the product from the material by the activity that uses the instruments (technology). Labour is seen bby Marx as something that consumes materials and instruments, and thus is also a process of consumption.

Hegelian dialectical concept of subject-object relation prescribes the subject as a "posited unseparatedness of moments in their distinction" and objects are external undetermined totality, and the idea is a subject-object relation, or a process. (28). Marx supports these views and extends them into the realm of economy.

Use-value in Marx is a piece of natural material adapted to human needs through changing its form. Labour is objectified (congealed) in product - and this is true also in the phenomena of internet as the sum of efforts of many people. Latter can also be defined as objectification, - and even the deliverables in agile terminology are called artifacts. In other words, software development is usually seen as material production, despite the fact that it doesn't result in physical objects.

What I find inconsistent with application of Marxian logic to digital labour is that the product is theorised by Marx as something that "was intended from the outset" (29). According to my argument, in software development the product is not, and cannot be, something that is intended from the outset. Is it true that we need to have a vision in order to start working on software product, but the work on software does not have an end, meaning, by extension, that no result could be imagined from the outset.

The "productive forces" is a system consisting of humans and their tools.

To Marx, capital and labour stand in opposition: "real not-capital is labour” (Marx, Karl. 857/1858b. Grundrisse. London: Penguin: 274). He introduces the idea that in capitalism the worker works one part of the day for her subsistence, and the other part of the day for the capitalist - effectively meaning that outside of capitalism workers would only perform the labour necessary for their subsistence, and wouldn't have to work in the other part of day.

Alienation to Marx comes in four aspects: (1) alienation from the product; (2) alienation from the labour process in the form of forced labour (ibid.,
74), (3) alienation from himself/herself and (4) from other humans and society (Marx, 1844: 74). This earlier categorisation of alienations focuses more on humans than later one theorised in Grundrisse. Out of the manifold alienations, exploitation of labour emerges, in the moment when the worker labours for free (surplus value) and capitalist turns the free results of labour to monetary profit (33). Exploitation occurs in the context of class relations. The latter are seen as something that evolves from relation to production, and is the source of "antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production" (35). Dead labour is the labour objectified into capital (as Marx sees it, labour as space) and it dominates living labour (labour as time) (Marx, 1861–1863)

Fuchs notes that there are two layers in Capital due to the fact that Marx wrote critique of capitalism and economic theory in the same book. Marx thus has two sets of categories both constituents of capitalism. There are essential and historic categories (36):

What it means that one set are milestones for developing his critique, and the other are economic categories.

Abstract labour here is human power in abstract, the one that can be use in economic analysis. Speaking of abstractions, Marx identifies four kinds: (1) from physical properties; (2) from single products (in favor of quantities); (3) from simple labour activites to more complex tasks; (4) from labour conditions

Marx theorises three types of labour in relation to production: productive (for capital), unproductive(for the worker) and reproductive (to regenerate from work experience). Wage labour is productive, the one that creates surplus value. For Marx, wage labour is the area of interest - in the moment of exchange of use value to money this labour confronts capital. Negri goes as far as to claim that for Marx there is no other labour, but wage labour, but extends this by rejecting the difference between labour and work, seeing both as necessarily alienated. Work is something to be abolished. Fuchs, however, argues that non-wage work is also accounted for, in the notion of collective worker, the sum of labour efforts that labour power spends not only to produce, but to reproduce (37, quoting Marx, Capital Vol.1, 1867: 274).

Communism for Marx is "a society without labour because alienation ceases to exist" (38). He predicts further focus in society on science and knowledge work that would reduce the necessary labour time and free uptime for personal development. The classes would then cease to exist, because labour relations are not going to be based on onwership of means of production, but on disposable time - in this context, the idea of general labour emerges.

Marx’s Labour Theory of Value

Fuchs' discusses Marx' theory of value in conversation with today's German debate around it, in which value is seen as the notion that appears only in relation with money, in the moment of exchange.

In his value form analysis, Marx comes from Hegelian notion of attraction and repulsion. To Hegel, Ones confront one another, but are still exists in the certain relationship which he argues could be the relation of attraction as well as repulsion.(43) similarly, Marx claims that commodities repulse each other individually, but are generalized in production as abstract labour and in exchange by money. Here I must add from my side, expanding Hegelian principle to subjects of labour, which are mutually attracted via abstraction of their labour despite their repulsion - for example, in entrepreneur mindset.

Capital's volume 1 chapter 1 uses the dialectical method of argumentation of theory of value: first it talks about the commodity (objective view) then the labour (subjective view), and then the exchange, where subjects exchange the labour objectified in commodities. Abstract human labour is here summed up by Fuchs as the substance of value. While use-value is shaped by the time required to produce a commodity, its value (a second type of value in Marx) is determined socially - via the amount of social labour that goes into it. Marx theorises socially necessary labour as the amount of labour required to produce a commodity generalized over the entire economy. Magnitude of value is the amount of socially necessary labour that goes into commodity. Marxian law of value is connected to productivity: the higher the productivity, the less time is needed to produce an item, the lower its value.

Looking at value from the perspective of class, Marx observes that proletariat sees the use-value of the commodities, to consume them. Capitalists see the exchange-value, e.g. apprehend value quantitatively. However, while being "absolutely poor", labourer also uses quantitative nature of commodities when she sells her time in exchange for renumeration. Capitalist, at the same time, needs use-value (of labour as commodity) in order to produce (Cleaver, 2000: 99 and Marx, 1857/1858b: 295).

A part of the horse market in Lorenzkirch, Zeithain, Saxony, Germany. View from the church steeple in Lorenzkirch to the horse market, to the river Elbe and to the town Strehla. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Exchange-value

This is defined by Marx as “the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearance, of value” (Marx, 1867c: 128). Fuchs supports Marx's idea that objectivity of abstract human labour in commodity is a social (and societal) matter. This is because commodities produced in a society and production process is a social process. Due to the exchange, and the two sides of Marxian theorisation (essential and economic), commodities have concrete and abstract sides, use-values and exchange-values, and value has objective and social form. This dialectical unity of commodities is called the measure (50). In other words, Marxian theory (which it extends from Hegel's quality>quantity>qualitative quantity) accounts for three kinds of value: use-value>value>exchange value.

Price

To Marx, “price is the money-name of the labour objectifi ed in a commodity” (Marx 1867c:195–196). Money is the medium of circulation, but also the mediator of class relation. The latter is evident, for example, in the way that capitalist aims to lower the wages and increase the retail price, while the worker struggles or higher wages and can go on strike. Value and price do not necessarily coincide. Price can be driven down by such factors, as for example, market competition, however Fuchs aligns with the idea that generally price and value and not entirely independent and are in any case linked to amounts of social labour that goes into them.

In his two examples, Fuchs shows how prices depend on politics of class struggle. In the first example, fascist enslavement of workers, computers are produced for 100 and sold for 400 eur, through the low wages paid to the workers. The second example shows that when the legislation is changed to pay a minimum wage of 200 eur, the capitalist increases the price of computers to 700 eur, thus achieving the same profit.

Bidet (2007) points out two mediations, market and organisation, as the two key forces that coordinate capitalism on the social scale. Exchange-value is different for the worker and for the capitalist. For the worker, the money is both the income and the instrument of resistance to capital. For the capitalist, on the other hand, it is a cost which threatens surplus value (55). In his example of trade unions, Fuchs show that trade unions's efforts are directed at not letting the price of labour fall below its value (56).

Value of labour-power is here determined by the labour-time necessary to produce the commodity. Services such as schoolwork and housework, as the unpaid labour, contribute to the increase of surplus value (55). In this context, Mario Tronti introduces the term "social factory" (1962). This addresses the social nature of labour, and defines the new way of labour becoming implicated in society through the development of technical means, in the way that the whole society becomes a collective production, in other words, a factory.

Surplus value

To Marx, this kind of value equals surplus labour, the "increment or excess over the original value" (Marx 1867c: 293, 251). "The theory of surplus value is in consequence immediately the theory of exploitation” (Negri 1991, 74) and, one can add, the theory of class and as a consequence the political demand for a classless society". (55) This phenomena of capital being able to acquire unpaid surplus labour (to Marx, a permanent theft) is why the capital is able to self-valorise.

Conclusion.

Chapter 1 of Fuchs' Digital Labour and Karl Marx gives an overview of Marx's labour theory of value. It starts from establishing the differences in Marx's theorisation of work vs labour by pointing out their subjective and objective qualities and the use-value that is produced in labour. It then proceeds to explain alienation leading to exploitation as the key to self-valorisation of capital. Labour appropriated by capital becomes dead labour, and capital is presented as a vampire that requires constant inflow for living labour. Then the two-sided character of Marxian terminology is descried, which on one side operates in "essential categories", eg work, use-value and concrete labour, and historic (economic) categories, such as labour, exchange-value and abstract labour. The moment of exchange is theorised as the point at which the categories swtch from essential to economic. The antagonism between labour and capital is grounded in wages and the surplus value created by unpaid surplus labour, and is thus a class relation. Use and exchange values of commodities are mediated through money and price, which reveals their dialectical unity. The nature of labour, meaning, concerete labour, is social. Through the improvement of technology the relations of production become closely interlinked with other societal relation thus converting a society into a project - a social factory. In the next chapter Fuchs look at the application of theory of value in the context of digital labour from the perspective of media and communication studies.

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Bibliography

Bidet, Jacques. 2007. A reconstruction project of the Marxian theory: From Exploring Marx’s Capital
(1985) to Altermarxisme (2007), via Théorie Générale (1999) and Explication et reconstruction
du Capital (2004). http://jacques.bidet.pagesperso-orange.fr/londongla.htm.

Cleaver, Harry. 2000. Reading Capital politically. Leeds: Anti/Theses

Marx, Karl. Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, 13–168. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

Marx, Karl. 1857/1858b. Grundrisse. London: Penguin

Marx, Karl. 1861–1863. Economic manuscripts of 1861–1863. http://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1861/economic/index.htm.)

Marx, Karl. 1867c. Capital, Volume 1. London: Penguin

Negri, Antonio. 1991. Marx beyond Marx. London: Pluto.

Tronti, Mario. 1962. Arbeiter und Kapital, Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik.

Software vs human work rituals

Kenneth S. Rubin - Essential Scrum. A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process (2012, Addison-Wesley Professional)..

Image: sagarsoft.com

0. Introduction

Claim: Scrum can be a way of making software engineering work more proficient.

Who deals with: rejects traditional, plan-driven, predictive development (waterfall style) approaches and Gannt charts, acknowledges that kanban framework is useful in contexts where scrum is not applicable.

Method: Narrative. Breaks Scrum framework into constituent parts: concepts (sprints, requirements and user stories, backlog, estimation and velocity, tehnical debt) and roles (product owner, scrum master, dev team, managers). Then gives introduction to agile principles and zooms in to planning and sprinting to discuss in more detail.

Why important: Rubin defines three key reasons: (1) deals well with situations where there's more unknown than known; (2) avoids big up-front architecture design; (3) teams are cross-functional.

Relevance to my research: describes the software engineering approach to work, which my research also deals with; explains how software rituals are applied in human behaviour.

Naysayer: scrum is not ideal for all situations; it's not good for chaotic contexts and in interrupt-driven workflow (eg, support tickets).

Image: Rubin, 2012: 7

Technical debt

Avoiding long-term, low-certainty guessing

Example technical debt economic analysis

•Each month of development costs $100K.

•We cannot reasonably meet the target delivery date (at ten months) with all of the requested, must-have features.

•Dropping features is just not an option.

Post-launch development process: Scenario 1

•Team finishes up all the lag in the reasonable amount of time (before next update/release due)

•At point B, the total amount of work gets back to being equal to ongoing work

Post-launch development process: Scenario 2

Team makes sure the debt is not growing and covers the most critical issues, sealing the debt that cannot be addressed

At point B, the total amount of work equals ongoing work plus any servicing of debt that was left behind unaddressed

Post-launch development process: Scenario 3

Team discovers that technical debt is in fact growing quicker than can be addressed without further budgeting considerations

The total amount of work grows, adding up the ongoing work, servicing of debt and addressing the debt.

At point B maintenance costs exceed total cost of building entirely new website from scratch, making keeping of the old one questionable

Notes:

Found chapters on technical debt, sprints and product backlog quite informative. chapter 16 to 18 contain information which mostly reiterates previous claims and adds a bit more in terms of large-scale planning. The section about sprinting contains mainly stuff mentioned before.

Sprinting:

- come to sprint planning with already groomed backlog (336)
- formulate sprint goal
- break backlog items into smaller tasks (344)

Difference between sprint review and retrospective: review is for the work done in the sprint (with stakeholders). Retrospective is to analyse the working methods (for Scrum team).

Retrospective questions (377):

- What worked well this sprint that we want to continue doing?
- What didn’t work well this sprint that we should stop doing?
- What should we start doing or improve?

Tools for retrospective:

- Timeline with emotional seismograph to analyse team feelings about the sprint
- Things to keep doing/things to stop doing/things to try board

Marxist analysis today

Fuchs, Christian. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

0. Introduction

Claim: The task of this book is to better understand labour and value generation in the context of digital media.

Who deals with: Karx Marx, Dallas Smythe. Supports Dyer-Witheford and Trevor Scholtz.

Method: Grounded in the works of Karl Marx. Introduces a matrix of two sets of ideas: (1) Labour-Power and the Objects, Tools and Products of Labour and (2) role in the International Division of Digital Labour. Applies it to case studies (Foxconn, mineral extraction, call centres, labour on social media, indian software industry). The aim is to create a set of categories, or more a lexicon of key ideas (listed below).

Why important: Nine reasons for which Marxist analysis fits the best in today's situation are occupying a whole section in Introduction. The reasons are: economic crisis, neoliberalism and precarisation of work, new social movements, financialisation of economy, global wars, revolutions and rebellions, globalisation, mediatisation, precarious work in academia.

Relevance to my research: In order to introduce the debate on digital labour (a candidate to develop a debate with?). Find out what his ideas are on the differences between industrial and software engineering. And the role of abstraction he sees in software.

Dallas Walker Smythe was a political activist and researcher who contributed to a political economy of communications. He believed that research should be used to develop knowledge that could be applied to policies in support of public interest and the disenfranchised in the face of private capital.Wikipedia

Notes:

The task is rather to introduce a multifaceted conceptual digital labour theory toolbox with following categories: absolute and relative surplus-value production, commodity fetishism, formal and real subsumption, housewifization, labour aristocracy, modes of production, play labour, productive forces, prosumers commodifi cation, slavery, the new imperialism, primitive accumulation, etc. (8)

Prejudices against Marx (Eagleton, Terry. 2011. Why Marx was right. London: Yale University Press.) - addressed directly to Eagleton's text, where the reasons for rejection of those prejudices are described. Fuchs supports Eagleton's claims and adds a few of his own in a media and communiations dimension, which he calls "a Marxist theiry of communication" (16).

Technical vs political

Cowen, Deborah. “The Deadly Life of Logistics,” University of Minnesota Press, 2014

Marcin Jozwiak, Unsplash

Claims: Logistics is an industry that is politically charged while presents itself as neutral. It is a valid part of production. It brings new kinds of crises, new paradigms of security, new uses of law, new logics of killing, and a new map of the world.

Who deals with: a view of consumer who does not see any logistics in their day-to-day life; "supply chain security" movement. Philosopher Michel Foucault, anthropologist Mark Duffield, cultural theorist Raymond Williams.

Method: A critique of a view of logistics as political neutral phenomenon, placing geography in the center of analysis. This is done via mixing sociological approach to the entanglement of military and economic force and Foucauldian genealogic approach to the shifting contours of power (Society Must Be Defended).

Why important: contributes to political sociology, anthropology and behavioural science in analysing connections between geography, logistics and forms of knowledge.

Relevance to my research: developing a spatial approach to thinking (online pages as different geographic locations); argument for political life of forms of knowledge that present themselves as purely technical is instrumental to developing my critique of ideology.

Aim: to sketch an emerging network of power and violence, shoing that seemingly banal and technocratic management of the movement of stuff through space has become a driving force of war and trade.

Limitations: geography of the book is limited for the reason that comprehensiveness is not necessary when studying distributed phenomena (17, quoting Kelty, 2008:20).

Chapter breakdown:

1. History and context (debates in the fields of systems analysis, business, and physical distribution management).
2. Political ground: supply chain security. Next three chapters break this down further:
3. Labour: managing the bodies and movements
   of productive labor.
4. Piracy.
5. Urban revolution. Emergence of "logistics city”. a mix of miiltayr base and corporate export processing zone.
6. Conclusion: alternative futures.

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Notes:

Transportation as an element of production rather than merely a service that follows production (2)

Analysis is performed along the following axes:

• militarization of the economy and the privatization of warfare;
• political life of forms of knowledge that present themselves as purely technical;
• Logistics as contemporary imperialism (8). "Present" as time of "logistics space", where violence is based on legal, conceptual and geographical shifts between the civilian and the military.
• queer reading of logistics (looking at it from the point of view of other). (5)

Maps: are not territories but nevertheless crucially important in the production of space (Lefebvre 1991, The Production of Space).

Change and continuity in the cultural industries (D. Hesmondhalgh)

David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural  Industries, Introduction, Research Gate, 2012.

Claim: the cultural industries have undergone
remarkable transformation since the early 1980s.

Who deals with: Opposes a view that information technologies have altered the fundamental underlying dynamics of cultural production and consumption.

Method: Uses this opposition to discover "patterns of change and continuity in the cultural industries"(3).

Why important: for general public: because they influence our understanding and knowledge of the world (5)

for cultural theorists: good at management of creativity and knowledge; and economic, social and cultural change they bring.

Relevance to my research: Useful to look at what is "industry" for my research around "industrial engineering". Also cultural industries, as something that influences our understanding of the word, are directly linked to ideology, as a totality of society's ideas.

Which industries looks at: broadcasting, film, music, publishing, video games, advertising, web design.

- - - -

Notes:

9 arguments (changes in cultural industry) (3):

• Economic value. Cultural industry companies can no longer be seen as secondary to the ‘real’ economy
• Ownership. Large companies in the sector operate across a number of different cultural industries. They are also connected, due to having similar nature.
• Scale. There are much more medium and small companies and relationships between them and large companies are complex.
• Impact of digitalisation. Easier access to content.
• Impact of digitalisation(2). Cultural production easier than previously transcends national borders; US influence is becoming less prominent.
• Reach. There is greater emphasis on audience research, marketing and addressing ‘niche’ audiences.
• Government policy and regulation. Local urban and social policy changes to proritize cultural activities as means regenrating economies and gaining competitive advantage.
• Growing expenses on advertising.
• Advertising (2). Advertising penetrates areas previously protected from it.

Naysayers: (1) of course there are not only changes, but continuities too (2) describes opinion that internet has triumphed and TV, music and publishing are dying. Users are new creators (denies this by the facts that tell us that those industries are doing as well as previously; but the logic flawed since we cannot uderstand whether we are talking about present or (near) future).

Motivation for his research: Hesmondhalgh refers, firstly, to his experience of growing up as an Irish person in an English town, where he right from his teens learned that the cultural industries had a role in maintaining power relations and distorting people’s understanding of them. Secondly, he is also a fan of popular culture.

Situated knowledge: the world as the trickster

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

0. Introduction.

Claim: Situated knowledge for Haraway is embodied feminist objectivity, which means "a view from somewhere" (590). It is the knowledge that opposes transcendence and splitting of subject and object. (583) There is no way to be in all, or wholly in any, positions structured by race, class and gender. This means that knowledge, instead of going towards universality, needs to strive to become partial (while nevertheless rigorous). However, that does not mean rejection of Science all together - that would mean to lose rigorousness in favor of total relativism.

Method: The truth claims (of science) can be deconstructed by showing historical specificity and so contestability (578). A usable doctrine of objectivity can be devised by comparing radical constructivism (successor science project) with feminist critical empiricism (postmodernist accounts of difference). (580)

Her usual analytical tool is a table of the common themes in scientific/ideological discourses. She puts them side by side to visualize how within each theme the opposing elements structure each other dialectically. However, she also points out that the table view implies that the terms are mutually exclusive or simply alternative (588, 599). She explains the terms rather as nodes in the network of meanings.

STS critique of objectivity. Haraway aligns with Social constructionists in her claim? Equals science to rhetoric. Ideological doctrine of scientific method and all the philosophical verbiage about epistemology, she claims, were cooked up to distract our attention from getting to know the world effectively by practicing the sciences.

Feminist critique of objectivity: Marxism polluted at the source because its theory is structured around the domination of nature in self-construction of man and inability to acknowledge the things women did outside of wage labour (eg ignoring social reproduction). Haraway finds it helpful though because of its provides the tools for nuanced theories of mediation and critiquing hegemony without disempowering positivisms and relativisms.

She points out though that object relations theory in psychoanalysis has given feminism in the US much more than Marx or Althusser (578).

Objectivity in postmodernism, she notes, cannot be about unproblematic objects, but about specific prosthesis and partial translations. It is about crafting a comparative knowledge (597).

Feminist empiricism - Haraway is critical of that too, since to her it is quite positivist and also insists on legitimate meanings of objectivity.

She sees a problem is to balance the account of radical historical contingency of all knowledge claims and knowing subjects with a faithful account of a 'real' world.

We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life (580).

Science to Haraway is a discourse contained in English language and is reductionist in the same way as money is reductionist in capitalism: "What money does in the exchange orders of capitalism, reductionism does in the powerful mental orders of global sciences" (580) - hence the call for "successor science projects" (quoting Sandra Harding, 1987).

World Championship Coyote Calling Contest

1. Vision

Method: "Parallel dissections". In order to crack open mystified units like science or woman, Haraway finds the common ideological aspects of discourse on science and gender.

Vision is crucial for Haraway here because it is a point of convergence of various aspects such as the gaze and point of view. It is about the power to see (587). The gaze is approached critically as something that constructs the idea of male and white.

Haraway talks about irresponsibility of vision, irresponsible meaning unable to be called into account. The way I see it, this argues scientific view which 'irresponsible' because it always seeks suppot from other claims, and thus is not accountable on it own. Point of view goes back to the voice of the subaltern and the discussion of the ways in which such voices are preferred because they are allow for denial and interpretive core of all knowledge. (584) However, Haraway also warns that the 'capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths' (583) also should not be romanticised and needs to be subjected to critical reexamination, decoding and deconstruction.

Haraway opposes relativism equally to totalisation, deeming them both as 'myths in rhetorics surrounding science' (584). She argues that these two positions do not stand in opposition to one another, as it is usually assumed. To her the alternative lies a responsible kind of partial view, something that she defines as "passionate detachment" (587) - this means detachment from dominant axes of knowledge.

Vision is entangled with moral, technological and political discourses. Who gets to see, who gets blinded and who gets multiple points of view? (587)

The notion of location embedded in the definition of "situ"-ated knowledge is gaining a new traction in the context of my project which sees software as the site of ideological production. "Location is about vulnerability" Haraway suggests (590). It resists the politics of closure and finality. The only way to find objectivity, to her is to be somewhere in particular - a view of objectivity as positioned rationality.

Coyote Tucson, Arizona Sonoran Desert

2. Apparatus of bodily production

Claim: there is an ambiguity when referring to "science" because the field is highly heterogenous. Haraway admits that she reduced the whole of this broad field, generally defining it as an institutionalized knowledge production with high stakes in ideological struggles. Haraway's resolution to such ambiguity is that throughout all sciences, no matter how varied, there is a pattern that refers to how faithful the account of object of knowledge is to "real world" - i.e., objectivity (591)

Meanwhile, feminists shy away from doctrines of scientific objectivity (on the basis of the "object" of knowledge being passive), a tendency deplored by Haraway. This, she says, damages the critique because only leads to two understandings such knowledge: either (1) as a reduction of the view of the world to an instrument for destructive capitalist projects, or (2) as masks for certain hegemonic interests.

In her example of sex vs gender, Haraway points out that there needs to be a "productive tension" between the authoritarian biological account of sex and gender as socially positioned difference. To strip gender of any biological category would be to lose too much. Not only would it give up the analytic power of particular Western tradition, but would also assume the body as blank page for social inscriptions. Similar damage from tension happens in other natural sciences. (591) As she mentions earlier in the essay, science is needed precisely because it has always been utopian and visionary (585).

Here Haraway takes time to discuss the position of capitalist colonialism in greater detail: "White Capitalist Patriarchy", a.k.a humanists, need a representation of the world as an object, and nature as raw resource for culture.

She opposes this view by the vision of a world as an actor and agent - something she calls situated knowledge (592). As she explains, the world becomes an agent when it is explicitly shown that politics and ethics provide the grounds for objectivity across all of science, both natural and sociological included (593).

What does Haraway propose instead? (1) view of the world as active subject implies that science will be tricked, yet seemingly no example for such "trickstery" is proposed. (2) "activation" of previously passive objects of knowledge (Haraway's own method used in Primate Visions, 1989). By interpreting the sociological construction of the notion of gender via primatology, the binary distinctions get "permanently problematized" (594). Body is no longer the resource, but an agent. What is important to Haraway here is that such activated image (of the female in this case) creates a situated conversation at every level of its articulation. In other words, embodied feminist objectivity.

Haraway adopts the notion of apparatus from literary theory and applies it to critical scientific discourse. Katie King's (1987) "apparatus of literary production" is a methodological framework she develops to analyse women and writing technologies (595). It is a matrix of art, business and technology from which "literature" is born. Haraway adopts this framework to the analyse production of bodies and other objects in scientific knowledge projects.

She presents bodies as "material-semiotic actors", which, similarly to poems being sites of literary production, are sites of bodily production. In poems, language is an actor intependent of intentions and authors, bodies are too the objects of knowledge all of and in themselves.

This allows her to argue that objects are boundary projects, with boundaries seen as shifting, not entirely reliable parameters. The bodies, to Haraway, emerge at the intersection of biological research and writing, medical and other business practices, and technology, as the visualisation she looks earlier in this essay.

Subjects of digital labour: towards the roadmap (2)

Abstract

The problem with today’s critical discourse around the future of work lies in the assumption that methods used by worker’s right movements are readily available for use in digital labour. In the same way as we have argued for the workers’ rights in industrial production and service industries, the assumption tells us, we can now adopt the same methods to software engineering and other new types of labour that involve provision of digital services produced and delivered over the internet. Indeed, this is quite obvious that exploitation of workers online is no less and is often higher than in offline and colocated labour. Numerous efforts are made to adopt traditional methods of collective bargaining and self-organisation to digital labour without any further interrogation. Yet any attempt of unionisation are largely met with worker’s scepticism. Struggles to bring down exploitation by arguing full time employment and benefits are met as attempts to undermine the freedom of lifestyle choices. Platform coops remain the esoteric endeavour of the few, not supported by the majority of global remote workforce. Why such efforts are short lived or fail at the very outset? Traditional worker inquiry has no tools to provide the answer. 

My research addresses this gap by claiming that the difference between seemingly similar spheres of industrial and software engineering is much larger than meets the eye, and indeed so vast that new analytical methods need to be devised in order to access digital labour in full detail. What makes the two so different? Firstly, industrial production is using the economic model which makes profit from making identical copies of same products. In software engineering, products are not goods, but processes in the perpetual state of becoming, not only constantly updated, but usually customised for each customer. Secondly, industrial production is dependent on extraction of fossil fuels, while software production uses extraction of time in order to make teams more effective and deliver value early. Lastly, the key players, the manager and the worker, come in completely different forms and have different relationships. In the industrial model, the worker is a distinct individual that is connected to performing a certain service in a certain location often together  with other workers, and manager’s role is focused on administration. In digital labour where the product is both the software and the user experience, the product is largely created not by the worker but by the algorithm, individuals performing the work may not be in touch. The engineer in this context becomes a mixed figure combining the features of administrator with those of the worker. 

Having determined the key role software plays in remote digital labour, the research aims at developing a mode of ideological critique of such software, as the way to theorise the subjects of digital labour as something fluid and constantly changing depending on the work and the rituals used to perform it. Why such study is important? As mentioned previously, such theoretical tool is required to delineate software production from production of physical commodities and will thus position me and other researchers in the field better to understand what kind of possible futures for this labour can be imagined. On the other hand, my research contributes to the broader discourse around the future of work as a whole, which is a theme that is extensively debated in academic circles as well as by wider audience. 

Marvin Meyer, Unsplash

Methodology

In order to observe the changes involved in the paradigm shift from industrial to computational logic of labour, and to construct the proposed ideological critique, I compare the two spheres using the matrix with four categories - entrepreneur ideology, corporate cultures, topology and abstraction. The figure of the subject that emerges through this matrix is applied in the project to software engineering but is potentially applicable across the broad range of other services delivered online. In contrast to sociological methods used in today’s study of platform labour by Oxford Internet Institute and other research organisations in the field of society and internet, my aim is to develop a distinctly critical mode of inquiry that would look at the ideological implications in the sphere densely involved with software. In order to do this, I have to combine methods from three disciplines. Feminist critique of work and constructionist critique of science (Haraway, Beniger) allow to analyse the scientific basis of industrial production model. Topological view helps to draw the parallel of space in physical industry vis a vis virtual space of software, as well as for its argument for political life of forms of knowledge that present themselves a purely technical (Neilson, Cowen). Theorisation of abstraction (Kittler, Gehl) in combination with Simondon’s notion of individuation are required for analysing the notion of the subject with regards to human-computer interaction (HCI). Beside these three methodological sets, traditional worker’s inquiry along with its theorisation of the working class and the meaning of alienation of workers in remote vs colocated employment is re-assessed in light of the radical shift in digital labour discussed above.

This project's key innovation does not lie in its approach to subjects themselves, the models of labour it analyses or the application of comparative analysis, but rather in the argument of the previously ignored differences between the two types labour, which would potentially help us gain a better position for analysing them. 

Chapter overview.

Five theoretical chapters that look at the key themes. Each chapter is broken down in three sections, (1) industrial (colocated) engineering, (2) software (remote) practices and (3) comparing the relationship of key trends in each to the subjects of labour.

Corporate cultures. Comparison of waterfall vs agile workflows. Celebration of teamwork in scrum methodology and traditional work philosophies in history and today (Ford, Taylor, Toyota Way, Amazon). Ways of overlapping of agile into other practices.

Entrepreneur ideology. Broader discussion of ideology and its implication in industrial labour and software (work as ideology vs software as ideology).

Topology.  Comparison of logistics (spatial relation of production) vs software topology (how space is being translated in software). Also similarities here - London tube map vs Google Maps as abstraction of space in and out of software.

Abstraction. Discussion of abstractions in maths, computer science, in Marxian critique. Real abstraction vs interface as abstraction in software.

Subjects. Comparing the figures of industrial worker, software engineers and technical individual. Can we argue that in both spheres technological individual is a broader notion of a worker, which is always already more than human/technological? Working class vs digital working class.

Towards the ideological critique of digital labour. Summary of outcomes and proposition for the new way of analysing digital labour through its subjects.

Empirical study

Ideas to come after the initial engagement with the companies. Still like the idea of having a long-term relationships with individuals over the time of my PhD, but not all of them would be workers (Bryan Stutzman, Workplaceless). Alternatively to the more general internet and society think tanks, it would be more interesting to look at the more hands-on practices connected to software engineering and remote work in general: Workplaceless, Laboratoria - a feminist coding bootcamp based in Latin America. Maybe worth getting in touch with Atlassian, the company that produces the mainstream project management software that is my primary target of critique. Is it worth locating partners among the industrial engineering sector, and which could that be? Eg some kind of robotics used for manufacturing, etc.

Shortlisted institutions in the sphere of more general research in the area: The Centre for Internet & Society in Bangalore, India; Digital Asia Hub in Hong Kong; Sarai, Delhi, India.

The Economic Power of Public Opinion & the Public Power of Economic Opinion

Andreas Siekmann - more illustration inspiration at onlineopen

An attempt for a road map

eg, which sources could be helpful in the following intersections of theories and praxis

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“Entrepreneurial ideology“ vs “company cultures”

How does “entrepreneurial ideology“ differ from “company cultures”? Seemingly, the latter presupposes that there is a certain adherence of the worker to a bigger whole, while the former aims to separate workers into standalone disempowered individuals. At the same time, both result in the same view of the workflows, where the all the initiative, including the ones of freedom, flexibility, ergonomics and ultimately, rights, come top down from the manager. This means that while there is a view of a choice, in fact we are looking at an antagonistic relation between the individualised entrepreneur, who disregards exploitation for the benefit of not being attached to any particular company, and remote employee, who are ripped off by any administrative decision by way of company culture that tells them what their relationship with labour should be.

Images courtesy: Instagram

Gas chromatographic recording (chemical mesaging) in insects. Thomas S. Baker, Learning the Language of Insects - and How to Talk Back

Konrad Lorenz: Animals do not have a language in the true sense of the word. In the higher vertebrates, as also in insects, particularly in the socially living species of both great groups, every individual has a certain number of innate movements and sounds for expressing feelings. It also has innate ways of reacting to those signals…
King Solomon’s Ring, The Language of Animals

Saturn close

Frederick Farrar, a friend of Sebald, has killed himself unintentionally with a cigarette lighter that he carried in his pocket - he was found an hour later covered with severe burns head to foot and died the same day.

God's own junkyard, Walthamstow