scholarly journals Digital Workers of the World Unite! A Framework for Critically Theorising and Analysing Digital Labour

Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs ◽  
Marisol Sandoval

The overall task of this paper is to elaborate a typology of the forms of labour that are needed for the production, circulation and use of digital media. First, we introduce a cultural-materialist perspective on theorising digital labour. Second, we discuss the relevance of Marx’s concept of the mode of production for the analysis of digital labour. Third, we introduce a typology of the dimensions of working conditions. Fourth, based on the preceding sections we present a digital labour analysis toolbox. Finally, we draw some conclusions. We engage with the question what labour is, how it differs from work, which basic dimensions it has and how these dimensions can be used for defining digital labour. We introduce the theoretical notion of the mode of production as analytical tool for conceptualizing digital labour. Modes of production are dialectical units of relations of production and productive forces. Relations of production are the basic social relations that shape the economy. Productive forces are a combination of labour power, objects and instruments of work in a work process, in which new products are created. We have a deeper look at dimensions of the work process and the conditions under which it takes place. We present a typology that identifies dimensions of working conditions. It is a general typology that can be used for the analysis of any production process.

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angely Dias da Cunha ◽  
Bernadete de Lourdes Figueiredo de Almeida ◽  
Elizangela Paulino S. Buriti

Resumo: Esse artigo de cunho qualitativo, de caráter exploratório e descritivo que se alicerça em uma revisão bibliográfica tem o objetivo de analisar o modo de produção capitalista, como acontece o processo de acumulação e reprodução e as inflexões para o papel do estado e da política social, a ênfase é nos períodos marcado por crises que provocam transformações societárias que impactam o mundo do trabalho e das relações sociais. O método crítico-dialético utilizado nessa pesquisa se debruça sobre as categorias mediação, historicidade e dialética com o propósito de desvendar a realidade para além da aparência e aprofundar as análises sobre o capitalismo. Como resultados apontamos que as crises capitalistas provocadas por suas próprias contradições o tem dimensionado o trato teórico-metodológico da política social. Capitalist accumulation, State and workforce reproduction: the theoretical and methodological treatment of the social policy Abstract: This qualitative nature of an article, exploratory and descriptive character which is based on a literature review aims to analyze the capitalist mode of production, as the process of accumulation and reproduction and inflections to the role of the state and social policy, the emphasis is in periods marked by crises that cause societal changes that impact the world of work and social relations. The critical-dialectical method used in this research focuses on the categories mediation, historicity and dialectics in order to unravel the reality beyond appearance and deepen the analysis of capitalism. The results point out that the capitalist crisis caused by its own contradictions has scaled the theoretical-methodological treatment of social policy.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Falkenberg

Mobile assistance systems are associated with promises of relief and greater independence at work. At the same time, they are suspected of conducting seamless surveillance of employees. Using the example of order picking, the qualitative case studies in this book show that the aforementioned systems contribute to the intensification and standardisation of work, but are hardly used to monitor workers. The reasons for this are manifold and lie in regulated working conditions and co-determination, work process requirements, technical limitations, alternative control practices or the maintenance of social relations. The findings of this book show that one-sided forecasts fall short of assessing the true impact of mobile assistance systems.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (187) ◽  
pp. 249-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Barthel ◽  
Jan Rottenbach

The article presents the results of ongoing co-research at the fulfilment centre of Amazon in Leipzig. It demonstrates exemplarily that despotic forms of labour are a central feature also of digital capitalism. Amazon is implementing various strategies of real subsumption to get the workers functioning as a senso-motoric part of the digital machinery in order to exploit their labour power. It is monopolizing the knowledge about the production process, setting up the FC as a panoptic factory and producing an internal public. This however encounters moments of insubordination resulting in daily micro-conflicts over working conditions and capitalist commands. Workers try to withdraw themselves from the despotism of the factory, use primitive forms of sabotage and develop a counter-public.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 1313-1316
Author(s):  
Venelin Terziev ◽  
Redon Koleci

The successful management of costs in the development of new products in small and medium-sized enterprises in the Western Balkans is being developed in agriculture. Effective cost management in the development of new products in small and medium-sized enterprises has serious and direct implications for the efficiency of the enterprises themselves. The appeal for the production of vegetables arises from the need to analyze the management of costs as one of the basic conditions for increasing the efficiency of business entities, with particular emphasis on small and medium-sized enterprises as a major driver of economic activity and economic development. Specifically, the purpose of the vegetable industry is to define and analyze the correlation between the successful management of costs in developing new products and the efficiency of small and medium-sized enterprises in the Western Balkans. Modern working conditions, characterized by dynamic structural changes, continuous growth and development of modern technology, internationalization and globalization of markets, increasing the global competitiveness of companies, fragmentation of the market and increased insecurity developing a dynamic and relatable sector as small and medium sized as possible. The idea that big companies tend to grow into big systems that are followed by technological development, why they have high efficiency and productivity and a great deal of leverage on the world markets, has prevailed. Namely, you have been a challenge to globalized economies and at the same time a possibility for economic development and prosperity, but with the changes in working conditions and the deepening of the crisis of big companies in the world, since the end of the 1980s, the economic policies of the last century started to take a serious interest in small business development, industrial competitiveness, restructuring and privatization. In the 1980s, turbulent changes occurred in the functioning of the economic systems of individual national economies to dismantle socialist systems and lay the foundations for a stable democratic society (capitalism). The crisis affecting the financial markets, followed by the high interest rates on the ears, has increased the imminence of the emergence of small and medium-sized enterprises and the level of importance for the internal economy, according to the level of financial structure. During this period, the first in the SAD was a shaky liberal and institutional environment that slowly reflected on the expansion of these entities, and such conditions underwent expansion in other lands as well, when ownership of the activity began. Because of this, the vegetable period will be remembered because of the strong effect of entrepreneurial reconstruction, and the economic science further points to the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises, as carriers of restructuring of economic systems, as well as their own generative capacity, new recruits and mobilizers of all factors of production. Undoubtedly, one of the main characteristics of modern market savings is that small and medium-sized companies represent a club factor for level of functionality and efficiency. In this sense, they represent the true engines of economic development, because, therefore, in the vegetable industry, special attention is paid to the development of this dust, and the consciousness’s and conclusions that are expected to have a meaningful implication are the implications.


2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvie Contrepois ◽  
Steve Jefferys

Trade unionism in western Europe is facing the growing challenge of the relocation of work to other parts of the world. This article focuses on the major banking trade unions in France and the UK. It discusses the unions' responses to globalisation in a sector where information technology has exposed firms to intense competitive pressures and has encouraged not just relocation but also business mergers and concentration combined with widespread outsourcing. The authors find that there is often a tension between the day-to-day defence of the workers and broader trade union aspirations to develop alternatives to the arbitrariness of an economic system where labour power is reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold. The article concludes that the dual purposes of union activity, the defence and improvement of workers' immediate working conditions, and the projection of alternative people-friendly forms of social and economic organisation, are being made more difficult by globalisation.


Author(s):  
Andrey Atanov

The article considers the conceptual constructions of K. Marx brought in accordance with the conceptual system of G. Hegel. The author stresses that such concepts such as value, commodity, wealth, etc. are understood quite differently in Russia and Western Europe. Therefore, the semantic mismatch between these concepts in the context of civilizational approach expressed in the system of logical analysis occurs. As a result, the description of the traditional for Russia structures of economy, social relations, and historical development began to distort. This description is based on the methodology of Marx, bringing the real structures in accordance with his theory, but further the author states that the concepts of Marx are general, but not universal (at the outside, they are based on the theme of community - but the basis of community is a different system of values). In the course of the study, it was found that there is no object of Marxist methodology in Russian capitalism, as well as in history and social relations, since there were no equivalent to Marxism structures in the world of the real things of Russia. This kind of structures belongs to the capitalist mode of production in Western Europe. In Russia, they were placed in the structure of ideology, replacing the real object with the imaginary one. Thus, in this case, there is the category of formation, but it only generates an effect - existential and ontological foundations exist as real and true in a completely different social system.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leszek Koczanowicz

The Dialogical concept of consciousness in L.S. Vygotsky and G.H. Mead and its relevance for contemporary discussions on consciousness In my paper I show the relevance of cultural-activity theory for solving the puzzles of the concept of consciousness which encounter contemporary philosophy. I reconstruct the main categories of cultural-activity theory as developed by M.M. Bakhtin, L.S. Vygotsky, G.H. Mead, and J. Dewey. For the concept of consciousness the most important thing is that the phenomenon of human consciousness is consider to be an effect of intersection of language, social relations, and activity. Therefore consciousness cannot be reduced to merely sensual experience but it has to be treated as a complex process in which experience is converted into language expressions which in turn are used for establishing interpersonal relationships. Consciousness thus can be accounted for by its reference to objectivity of social relationships rather than to the world of physical or biological phenomena.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (SPL1) ◽  
pp. 796-806
Author(s):  
Sana M Kamal ◽  
Ali Al-Samydai ◽  
Rudaina Othman Yousif ◽  
Talal Aburjai

COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the world, which considered a relative of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), with possibility of transmission from animals to human and effect each of health and economic. Several preventative strategies and non-pharmaceutical interventions have been used to slow down the spread of COVID-19. The questionnaire contained 36 questions regarding the impact of COVID-19 quarantine on children`s behaviors and language have been distributed online (Google form). Data collected after asking parents about their children behavior during quarantine, among the survey completers (n=469), 42.3% were female children, and 57.7 were male children. Results showed that quarantine has an impact on children`s behaviors and language, where stress and isolationism has a higher effect, while social relations had no impact. The majority of the respondents (75.0%) had confidence that community pharmacies can play an important role in helping families in protection their children`s behaviors and language as they made the highest contact with pharmacists during quarantine. One of the main recommendations that could be applied to help parents protection and improvement their children`s behaviors and language in quarantine condition base on simple random sample opinion is increasing the role of community pharmacies inpatient counseling and especially towards children after giving courses to pharmacists in child psychology and behavior. This could be helpful to family to protect their children, from any changing in them behaviors and language in such conditions in the future if the world reface such the same problem.


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