Media and Management
Rutvica Andrijasevic (University of Bristol)
(In Person at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute, 1 Cathedral Square, Room G.02)
Join us for a book launch! Jointly organised with the Perspectives on Work and Global Political Economy Faculty Research Groups, the event provides the opportunity to discuss the book with Rutvica and hear reflections from colleagues. Pizza and refreshments will be provided.
The book is co-authored with Melissa Gregg, Julia Chen, and Marc Steinberg, and is open access and available now at: https://meson.press/books/media-and-management/
Abstract
The central insight of the book is that platform capitalism has a hardware history. Against the trend of studying manufacturing and platform labour separately, the book explores the concept of ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) to show historical and geographical continuities in labour regimes from hardware to software. By working across disciplines of Media, Culture and Organization Studies, the book identifies the blurred boundaries between factory labour and today’s on-demand online services. In 3 short chapters, the book illustrates how Toyota’s production techniques in mid-20th century Japan have been integrated in runaway assembly lines in Central and Eastern Europe, following decades of inter-continental pollination with corporate managerial practices. Digital platforms are steeped in the history of automobile and hardware manufacture: “lean” and “agile” workers are not a recent invention.
Endorsements
“This timely collection reminds us how the latest forms of algorithmic management are extensions of the long history of industrialized labor. We can only understand the future of work when we contend with the patterns of the past and how they manifest around the world.”
— Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI
“This remarkable book critically probes hardware manufacturing practices and histories in the Asia Pacific, insisting media theory and management studies recompose in ways attentive to real-time labor regimes and the organizational force of global logistics.”
— Ned Rossiter, Western Sydney University
“This original book links up Toyotism, just-in-time management, and platform capitalism, all in one volume. I especially liked the main geographical foci of the chapters being on non-western countries: Japan, China, and Central and Eastern Europe.”
— Jack Linchuan Qiu, National University of Singapore