ABSTRACT

Labor resides at the center of all media and communication production, from the workers who create the information technologies that form the dynamic core of the global capitalist system and the designers who create media content to the salvage workers who dismantle the industry’s high-tech trash. The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media is the first book to bring together representative research from the diverse body of scholarly work surrounding this often fragmentary field, and seeks to provide a comprehensive resource for the study and teaching of media and labor. Essays examine work on the mostly unglamorous side of media and cultural production, technology manufacture, and every occupation in between.

Specifically, this book features:

-wide-ranging international case studies spanning the major global hubs of media labor;

-interdisciplinary approaches for thinking about and analyzing class and labor in information communication technology (ICT), consumer electronics (CE), and media/cultural production;

-an overview of global political economic conditions affecting media workers;

-reports on chemical environments and their effect on the health of media workers and consumers;

-activist scholarship on media and labor, and inspiring stories of resistance and solidarity.

section I|62 pages

The Changing Face of Media Labor: Networks, Clouds, and Digitalized Work

chapter 1|15 pages

Labor and Digital Capitalism

chapter 2|12 pages

Working (or Not) in the Cloud

Chains of Accumulation and Chains of Resistance

chapter 3|10 pages

Exploitation and Media Labor

chapter 4|11 pages

Mediations of Labor

Algorithmic Architectures, Logistical Media, and the Rise of Black Box Politics

chapter 5|12 pages

Dallas Smythe and Digital Labor

section II|28 pages

Materials and Chemical Impact on Workers and Consumers

chapter 6|13 pages

The Body Burden

Toxics, Stresses, and Biophysical Health

section III|174 pages

Media Labor Around the World

chapter 9|12 pages

Embracing Communication

China’s Post-2008 Economic Restructuring and Labor

chapter 10|11 pages

“Free Birds”

The New Precariat in India’s Mobile Phone Manufacturing

chapter 11|13 pages

Behind the Line

Information Privatization and the Reification of Work in the Call Center of a Brazilian State-Owned Telecommunications Company

chapter 12|11 pages

The Creative in the Middle

Knowledge Workers in a Medium-Sized Company in Spain

chapter 13|16 pages

The Exceptional Intermittents du Spectacle

Hyperflexibility as the Avant-Garde of Labor Security in France

chapter 16|12 pages

The Straw That Broke the Tiger’s Back?

Skilled Labor, Social Networks, and Protest in the Digital Workshops of the World

chapter 17|15 pages

Crisis or Innovation?

The Norwegian Journalist Between Market and Ideals in the Multimedia Era

chapter 18|13 pages

History of the International Movement of Journalists

Shifting Drives of Profession, Labor, and Politics

chapter 20|10 pages

Student Media Labor in the Digital Age

MediaNOLA in the Classroom and the University

chapter 21|13 pages

The Work of Wearing Cameras

Body-Worn Devices and Police Media Labor

section IV|78 pages

Activism, Organization, Worker Resistance, and Media Labor’s Future

chapter 22|13 pages

The GoodElectronics Network

Making IT Fair?

chapter 23|10 pages

Centro de Reflexión y Acción Laboral

Defending Electronics Workers in Mexico

chapter 26|12 pages

Labor Messaging

Practices of Autonomous Communication