Humans and Machines at Work: Monitoring, Surveillance and Automation in Contemporary Capitalism (Dynamics of Virtual Work) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3319582313 ISBN 13: 9783319582313

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Synopsis

This edited collection provides a series of accounts of workers’ local experiences that reflect the ubiquity of work’s digitalisation. Precarious gig economy workers ride bikes and drive taxis in China and Britain; call centre workers in India experience invasive tracking; warehouse workers discover that hidden data has been used for layoffs; and academic researchers see their labour obscured by a ‘data foam’ that does not benefit them. These cases are couched in 

historical

accounts of identity and selfhood experiments seen in the Hawthorne experiments and the lineage of automation. This book will appeal to scholars in the Sociology of Work and Digital Labour Studies and anyone interested in learning about monitoring and surveillance, automation, the gig economy and the quantified self in the workplace.

About this title

About the Author

Phoebe V. Moore works at Middlesex University London. She is an internationally known researcher and lecturer who writes about labour, technology and global governance. 

Martin Upchurch is Professor of International Employment Relations at Middlesex University London. He has published more than 40 articles in the field of labour studies and industrial relations.

Xanthe Whittaker is a post-graduate student in the School of Management at the University of Leicester. Her doctoral research is an ethnographic study of digital journalism in the UK and her research interests include the digitalisation of work, atypical work, and labour process analysis.

From the Back Cover

In the era of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, we increasingly work with machines in both cognitive and manual workplaces. This collection provides a series of accounts of workers’ local experiences that reflect the ubiquity of work’s digitalisation. Precarious gig economy workers ride bikes and drive taxis in China and Britain; domestic workers’ timekeeping and movements are documented; call centre workers in India experience invasive tracking but creative forms of worker subversion are evident; warehouse workers discover that hidden data has been used for layoffs; academic researchers see their labour obscured by a ‘data foam’ that does not benefit them; and journalists suffer the algorithmic curse. These cases are couched in historical accounts of identity and selfhood experiments seen in the Hawthorne experiments and the lineage of automation.

This collection will appeal to scholars in the Sociology of Work and Digital Labour Studies and anyone interested in lea

rning about monitoring and surveillance, automation, the gig economy and the quantified self in the workplace.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3319582313
• ISBN 13: 9783319582313
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276
• Editor: Moore Phoebe V., Upchurch Martin, Whittaker Xanthe