The Laboring of Communication

The Laboring of Communication PDF Author: Vincent Mosco
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739129961
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The Laboring of Communication examines the transformation of work and of worker organizations in today's Information Society. The book focuses on how traditional trade unions and new worker associations growing out of social movements are coming together to address the crisis of organized labor. It concentrates on the creative responses of the technical and cultural workers in the mass media, telecommunications, and information technology industries. Concentrating on political economy, labor process, and feminist theory, it proceeds to offer several ways of thinking about communication workers and the nature of the society in which they work. Drawing on interviews and the documentary record, the book offers case studies of successful and unsuccessful efforts among both traditional and alternative worker organizations in the United States and Canada. It concludes by addressing the thorny issue of outsourcing, describing how global labor federations and nascent worker organizations in the developing world are coming together to develop creative solutions.

The Laboring of Communication

The Laboring of Communication PDF Author: Vincent Mosco
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739129961
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Laboring of Communication examines the transformation of work and of worker organizations in today's Information Society. The book focuses on how traditional trade unions and new worker associations growing out of social movements are coming together to address the crisis of organized labor. It concentrates on the creative responses of the technical and cultural workers in the mass media, telecommunications, and information technology industries. Concentrating on political economy, labor process, and feminist theory, it proceeds to offer several ways of thinking about communication workers and the nature of the society in which they work. Drawing on interviews and the documentary record, the book offers case studies of successful and unsuccessful efforts among both traditional and alternative worker organizations in the United States and Canada. It concludes by addressing the thorny issue of outsourcing, describing how global labor federations and nascent worker organizations in the developing world are coming together to develop creative solutions.

Everyday Dirty Work

Everyday Dirty Work PDF Author: WILFREDO. ALVAREZ
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814214671
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Centers Latin American immigrant janitors' lived experiences to analyze their workplace communication in the face of linguistic, cultural, and perceptual barriers.

Framed!

Framed! PDF Author: Christopher R. Martin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728547
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Christopher R. Martin argues that the mainstream news media (and the large corporations behind them) put the labor movement in a bad light even while avoiding the appearance of bias. Martin has found that the news media construct "common ground" narratives between labor and management positions by reporting on labor relations from a consumer perspective. Martin identifies five central storytelling frames using this consumer orientation that repeatedly emerged in the news media coverage of major labor stories in the 1990s: the 1991–94 shutdown of the General Motors Willow Run Assembly Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan; the 1993 American Airlines flight attendant strike; the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike, the 1997 United Parcel Service strike, and the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization's conference in Seattle. In Martin's view, the news media's consumer "take" on the labor movement has the effect of submerging issues of citizenship, political activity, and class relations, and elevating issues of consumption and the myth of a class-free America. Instead of facilitating a public sphere, the democratic ideal in which the public can engage in discovery and rational-critical debate, Martin says, news organizations have fostered a consumer sphere, in which public discourse and action is defined in terms of consumer interests—the impact of strikes, lock-outs, shut-downs, and protests on the general consumer economy and the price, quality, and availability of things such as automobiles, airline flights, and baseball tickets.

WCFL, Chicago's Voice of Labor, 1926-78

WCFL, Chicago's Voice of Labor, 1926-78 PDF Author: Nathan Godfried
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252065927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Chicago radio station WCFL was the first and longest surviving labor radio station in the nation, beginning in 1926 as a listener-supported station owned and operated by the Chicago Federation of Labor and lasting more than fifty years.

The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media

The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media PDF Author: Richard Maxwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135042497
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
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.

Venture Labor

Venture Labor PDF Author: Gina Neff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300524
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Why employees of pioneering Internet companies chose to invest their time, energy, hopes, and human capital in start-up ventures. In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks—left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (that shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule. In Venture Labor, Gina Neff investigates choices like these made by high-tech workers in New York City's “Silicon Alley” in the 1990s. Why did these workers exhibit entrepreneurial behavior in their jobs—investing time, energy, and other personal resources that Neff terms “venture labor”—when they themselves were employees and not entrepreneurs? Neff argues that this behavior was part of a broader shift in society in which economic risk shifted away from collective responsibility toward individual responsibility. In the new economy, risk and reward took the place of job loyalty, and the dot-com boom helped glorify risks. Company flexibility was gained at the expense of employee security. Through extensive interviews, Neff finds not the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit but a mixture of motivations and strategies, informed variously by bravado, naïveté, and cold calculation. She connects these individual choices with larger social and economic structures, making it clear that understanding venture labor is of paramount importance for encouraging innovation and, even more important, for creating sustainable work environments that support workers.

Telegraph Messenger Boys

Telegraph Messenger Boys PDF Author: Gregory J. Downey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113531568X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In Telegraph Messenger Boys Gregory J. Downey provides an entirely new perspective on the telegraph system: a communications network that revolutionized human perceptions of time and space. The book goes beyond the advent of the telegraphy and tells a broader story of human interaction with technology and the social and cultural changes it brought about.

Organize Or Die

Organize Or Die PDF Author: Mark Breslin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780974166230
Category : Labor unions
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
"This book proposes an innovative labor-management approach for union leaders, agents and organizers utilizing cooperation and mutual interest. With frank and compelling style, it emphasizes using top-down organizing, marketing and business development strategies up to, and including, closing the sale on non-union employers to re-energize organizing efforts. In today's market where harsh economic and political realities are determined by price, performance and results, this nontraditional book challenges organized labor to recapture lost market share and bring meaningful percentages back to the unionized sector."

Technologies of Consumer Labor

Technologies of Consumer Labor PDF Author: Michael Palm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317287193
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book documents and examines the history of technology used by consumers to serve oneself. The telephone’s development as a self-service technology functions as the narrative spine, beginning with the advent of rotary dialing eliminating most operator services and transforming every local connection into an instance of self-service. Today, nearly a century later, consumers manipulate 0-9 keypads on a plethora of digital machines. Throughout the book Palm employs a combination of historical, political-economic and cultural analysis to describe how the telephone keypad was absorbed into business models across media, retail and financial industries, as the interface on everyday machines including the ATM, cell phone and debit card reader. He argues that the naturalization of self-service telephony shaped consumers’ attitudes and expectations about digital technology.

Selling Free Enterprise

Selling Free Enterprise PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252064395
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The post-World War II years in the United States were marked by the business community's efforts to discredit New Deal liberalism and undermine the power and legitimacy of organized labor. In Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes how conservative business leaders strove to reorient workers away from their loyalties to organized labor and government, teaching that prosperity could be achieved through reliance on individual initiative, increased productivity, and the protection of personal liberty. Based on research in a wide variety of business and labor sources, this detailed account shows how business permeated every aspect of American life, including factories, schools, churches, and community institutions.