Individualisation of Labour and the Networked World

What about the workers?

What about the workers?

 

How do  we  take advantage of  it if we ourselves don’t know what’s coming  next?  

In the modern ‘networked’ world of work, the ‘individualisation of labour’ is a relatively recent development.

Rather than working in a regular, 9 to 5, social way along with an office or factory full of people doing much the same task, people are expected to be able to operate as self sufficient individuals, solving their own problems, managing themselves effectively, able to take responsibility and be accountable.

It is a result of a number of factors - fast developing new technologies which, among other things, bring staff ‘efficiencies

Decentralised management practices, leading to more reliance on more autonomous staff; and fragmenting markets, requiring individual agility and decision making. (Deuze: p86) Media as an agent of change

This sort of world comes as no surprise to media workers Media work has always been relatively individualistic. It is a creative industry, where successful professionals are particularly recognisable for their creative efficacy

What we have heard from scholars such as Castells and Deuze is that it is also no coincidence that the world of media gave us a foretaste of working practices that would later become common throughout modern ‘post-industrial’ societies. Because media work always relies on the tools of communication, it was well placed to embrace and exploit for itself the opportunity of networked working afforded by revolutionary digital technologies The network economy But media and its technologies did more than that.

It showed itself as an inspirational example of a flexible, agile way of working which makes use of knowledge and information in modern, innovative ways to cross boundaries, collaborate, form networks, create markets, add value. Something to copy?

Because it could, the new media opened up social and economic spaces for anyone using the new technologies to ‘plug in’ to this newly available idea of networks, and to try out this new way of working This leads to the network economy, a network that relies on ...media and its technologies!

A ‘new kind of economic organisation that on the one hand relies on the new media and technologies, and on the other it imposes their logic on all areas of production and consumption’ (Siapera: p41) Caution typical management!

In the beginning (ie the mid to late 90s) there was a hiccup, the new technologies were eagerly grasped by a business community presuming that they could simply bolt them on to old business models and win.

But the lesson they learned was that old models such as ‘if you build it, they will come’ did not apply in the new network economy This failure led to the dot.com crash: the fall of most digital start- ups by year 2000

It showed that not every e-business idea was going to be successful simply because it was ‘e’-business

It can be argued that the above examples of convergence could still fit comfortably in the old political economy model ascribed to industrial capitalism

But theorists such as Castells and Deuze note that other, newer and important meanings of convergence are emerging including cultural and social convergence  and that they are emerging in great part due to the rise of new media Castells explains that new media has a particular and important meaning in society. It is quite different from being just another service or product He argues that new media and its communicative technologies are central to a reorganisation of modern life. They have allowed (and taught) society to operate as a network, in the way that networks are structures comprised of different, but interconnected points. This new social formation is the network society