WORK AND THE CITY IN THE e-SOCIETY A critical investigation of the sociospatially situated character of economic production in the digital content industries in the UK

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to ground debates about the ‘new economy’ or ‘e-society’ in the practice of individuals and companies producing ‘new media’. The uncontroversial starting point is to question the generalization in much theorizing, and the tendency to technological reductive accounts of social and economic change. The focus here is to point to the intellectual sources of much policy in this field. The authors present case study material of three very specific parts of the new media/digital content industries (film special effects, computer games and web design). The paper concludes that both technological reductive and agentic accounts have underplayed the continuing importance of the social and economic embeddedness of production, and of the situated co-constitution of technologies, people and places. The differences between industries associated with labour processes, labour markets, users and markets for goods are highlighted. These particularities begin to offer more robust accounts of location and organization.