Free Labour, Social Media, Management: Challenging Marxist Organization Studies

Armin Beverungen,Chris Land,Steffen Böhm

doi:10.1177/0170840614561568

Armin Beverungen, Chris Land + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840614561568

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Abstract

In this paper we explore how so-called ‘social media’ such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on ‘work’, understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of ‘free labour’, which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the ‘audience commodity’ provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, which is central to Marx’s labour theory of value. The Marxist literature on ‘the becoming rent of profit’ allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of ‘free labour’ as unpaid. It overstates, however, the ‘uncontrolled’ side of free labour, and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism.

Highlights

By nearly any measure, Facebook is an impressive phenomenon
Facebook users produce content by updating their status, uploading photos, liking, commenting, messaging, and playing on-line games through the platform. This activity has traditionally not been understood as labour, yet Facebook’s business model relies heavily on what we argue should be understood as the ‘free labour’ (Terranova, 2004) of users
Whilst appreciating the basic point that the ‘labour’ of users is central to the production of value in digital capitalism, we suggest that this approach does not fully explain how such free labour is captured and rendered productive in digital media

Summary

Introduction

Facebook is an impressive phenomenon. Founded in 2004, by September 2012 it recorded over one billion monthly active users, and more than half a billion daily active users (Facebook, 2013). These conceptions of the socialization of labour and the social factory point beyond the labour process as mediated by the wage relation towards a new ‘hidden abode’ of production, where work occupies an expanded terrain of social activity; where management moves further away from direct control of work to more complex practices of governance (Arvidsson, 2005); and where collaboration in production is increasingly the responsibility of the workers (Böhm and Land, 2012) This is not to say that distinctions between productive and unproductive labour, or Marxist value theory in toto, is obsolete (Henninger, 2007). In reviewing these debates we follow Harvie (2005) in focussing on capital’s attempts to capture free labour and to make it productive, and on how this labour is disguised as non-work ‘often by refusing to remunerate it’ (Henninger, 2007, p. 174)

Producing the audience commodity

Capturing free labour by digital means

Managing and controlling labour by code and protocol

Conclusions