Concept Of Immaterial Labor Research Articles

Selling youth sport: the production and promotion of immaterial values in commercialised child and youth sport

ABSTRACT The contexts in which young people participate in sport are diverse. In Scandinavia, as in many other countries, child and youth sport is mainly organised in non-profit, membership-based and voluntary driven sports clubs. In Sweden, this model is now challenged by commercial businesses providing child and youth sport services. The overall aim of this article is to provide empirically based knowledge about these ongoing and largely unexplored commercialisation processes. The focus of the article is to illuminate how commercial businesses produce immaterial values through the promotion of sport services. In this article, we have explored the cultural and social values produced and promoted by commercial businesses in youth sport. Drawing on the website communications of eight commercial businesses from four different commercial strands, we use the concept of immaterial labour to consider the values produced when child and youth sport is turned into a desirable product on the market. The values generated from the texts on the selected websites are the immaterial values of (i) competence, (ii) individually adjusted training and, (iii) happiness. These values are enunciated differently by the businesses in the different strands. We situate the findings in relation to western social and cultural values and discuss the potential consequences of these value productions for contemporary ideas about youth sport and the way it should be organised.

Editors' Introduction: Materializing Immaterial Labor in Cultural Studies

This introduction frames the six original articles in this issue and the forum on "Corona A(e)ffects: Radical Affectivities of Dissent and Hope" around the concept of immaterial labor. Two full years into a pandemic that has uprooted place-based work for many, and forced even more indoors, away from public spaces, and onto screens, we reflect on the very material effects of present-day immaterial and emotional labor.

Sean Sayers' Concept of Immaterial Labor and the Information Economy

Sean Sayers' Concept of Immaterial Labor and the Information EconomyKaan KangalKaan KangalCenter for Studies of Marxist Social Theory, Nanjing University, Xianlin Campus, Qixia District, 38, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210046, People's Republic of China. [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:December 2016https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2017.81.1.124PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 81Issue 1Jan 2017 Information© 2017 by S & S Quarterly, Inc.PDF download

Immaterial labour, public librarians, and third-generation public libraries

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to draw attention to one specific upper-level government policy document in which a discourse of perpetual innovation and customer service is promoted, and the kinds of questions such discursive interventions raise for the future of work in public libraries; and second, to demonstrate the explanatory potential of the concept of immaterial labour for questions relating to emerging labour processes in libraries. The concepts of “prosumer” and Web 2.0 are included as discursive resources of relevance to any discussion of immaterial labour.Design/methodology/approach– This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of a public policy visioning document for public libraries in Ontario, Canada, with reflections on related literatures.Findings– The concept of immaterial labour provides an additional analytic tool suitable for questions of relevance to public librarians and library scholars. Within the government text under review which deals specifically with the future of the public library to 2020, the identity of the public librarian is alarmingly absent. Conversely, the library patron as a producer and consumer is privileged.Research limitations/implications– Failure to attend to the broader policy arena within which the public library resides creates dangerous blind spots for public library professionals, educators and researchers.Practical implications– This paper demonstrates the value of a discourse analysis for uncovering the ideological dimensions of policy documents, while simultaneously modelling the method using the kind of policy text commonly produced in governments around the world.Social implications– This paper shows how failure to attend to the broader policy arena within which the public library resides creates dangerous blind spots for the public library community.Originality/value– This paper contextualizes the immaterial and volunteer labour of the public library user as producer/consumer in the context of the future of the frontline professional and waged librarian.

Glamor Above, Precarity Below: Immaterial Labor in the Video Game Industry

This article foregrounds the concept of immaterial labor to theorize the tension between the precarity of below the line workers and the glamor of above the line workers in the video game industry. I argue that even the most seemingly secure sections of the gaming workforce have a tendency to drift toward the economic precarity most acutely felt across below the line workers. In other words, we, as researchers, may need to question the presumed hard break between the above and below the line work experiences of employees in the game industry in light of the increase in processes of deskilling, outsourcing, and financialization. Moreover, I assert that workers, like game testers, are attracted to below the line positions as through-ports to the glamorous core sections of game labor: design, art, and programming. As such, they are interpellated to the ideology of creativity and practices of hope labor. The theoretical insights developed in the article draw on 2.5-year ethnographic work in a medium-sized game studio in the US, during which above and below the line digital laborers, and their spouses, were interviewed alongside participatory observation.

Against Autonomy: Capitalism Beyond Quantification in the Autonomist Reading of Marx

Against Autonomy: Capitalism Beyond Quantification in the Autonomist Reading of Marx Duy Lap Nguyen (bio) This essay outlines a critique of the autonomist theory of post-Fordism as a stage of capitalism defined by immaterial forms of production that purportedly constitute “value beyond quantification,” which is to say, value exceeding the measure of spatialized time. The essay argues that this concept of immaterial labor – proposed as a corrective to Marx’s “quantitative theory of value” – elides the crucial distinction in Marx’s analysis between two entirely different kinds of spatialized time: the time required for the production of material goods and the time that determines their (exchange) value. This elision, the essay argues, results in a fundamental mischaracterization of contemporary capitalism. Spatialized Time and the “Quantitative Theory of Value” in Capital For past thirty years, the theory of post-Fordist production developed in the works of Autonomist Marxists (including Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Franco Berardi) has provided one of the most widely employed critical frameworks for understanding the increasing significance of culture, affect, information, and digital labor in the contemporary global economy. This theory emerged, in part, out of a phenomenological critique of the spatialized concept of time (as the measure of value) employed in Marx’s analyses of capitalism. For the Autonomists, this spatialized time – inherited from the Western metaphysical tradition – is no longer sufficient as a measure of value, given the prevalence within contemporary capitalism of immaterial (and immeasurable) forms of production. As I show in this essay, this account of post-Fordist production is based upon a fundamental misreading of Marx. The critique of the Autonomist reading of Marx outlined below draws extensively on the reinterpretation of Marx’s mature critical theory developed by thinkers – including Norbert Trenkle, Robert Kurz, Jean-Marie Vincent, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Moishe Postone – associated with the Marxian school of critical theory known as Wertkritik, or value critique. In particular, my analysis attempts to build upon the critique of Autonomist Marxism elaborated by Robert Kurz and Anselm Jappe in Les Habits neufs de l’Empire, as well as upon the critique of the Autonomist notion of bio-political production outlined in the work of Tiqqun. These texts extend Marx’s critique of the commodity form to an analysis of important secular trends within the contemporary global economy, including the decline of stable rates of exchange, the rise of financial derivatives, the prevalence of precarious labor, and the increasingly predominant role of information in the global economy. These developments, which have been the focus of Autonomist Marxist analyses of post-Fordist production, have been largely ignored in earlier works associated with Wertkritik, limiting the latter’s potential as critique. In proposing a critical reading of Autonomist theories of post-Fordist production, based on the work of the Wertkritik school and on related interpretations of Marx, this essay addresses this important limitation. In Empire, Hardt and Negri situate Marx’s theory of value within the “great Western metaphysical tradition:” From “Aristotle’s theory of virtue as a measure to Hegel’s theory of measure as the key to the passage from existence to essence,” this tradition is one that “has always abhorred the immeasurable.” “Marx’s theory of value pays its dues to this metaphysical tradition: his theory of value is always been a theory of the measure of value” (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 355).1 This account of Marx’s theory of value appears to rely upon Heidegger’s critique of the “vulgar conception of time” in the history of Western metaphysical thought. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that, in both Aristotle and Hegel, the passage of time is understood as a succession of homogeneous “now-points” that is conceived on the model of the movements of physical objects in space (see Derrida 34–35). For Heidegger, it is this conversion of time into space that allows the former to serve as a measure of movement:1 time becomes subject to quantification through its reduction to spatialized units. In Marx’s theory of value, this vulgar conception of spatialized time is applied to an analysis of the exploitation of labor in capitalism.2 As Melinda Cooper describes in her reading...

Immaterial Labor and the Determination of Social Class

In this article the concept of immaterial labor is dialectically related to the cycle of material labor in the production and reproduction of capital and bourgeois society. The article reflects on how this affects the dynamics of social classes and their struggles in contemporary capitalist society. Immaterial labor, like its manual counterpart, is also subject to capitalism’s essential contradictions as well as its processes and tendencies. Various authors, including Latin American Marxists, are drawn upon to explore further this historical process.

El trabajo inmaterial en el ciclo material del capital y la determinación de las clases sociales en el capitalismo contemporáneo

En el presente artículo, buscamos relacionar dialécticamente el concepto de trabajo inmaterial con el ciclo del trabajo material en la producción y reproducción del capital y de la sociedad burguesa. Asimismo, nos interesa reflexionar sobre algunas hipótesis en relación con la manera como lo anterior incide en la conformación de las clases sociales - y en sus luchas - en la sociedad capitalista contemporánea.

Permanent Performance

The concept of immaterial labour, as it was introduced and developed by, among others, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, how stimulating its discursive production may have been in many respects, almost automatically leads to a debate on the supposed difference between two types of labour, material and immaterial labour, as well as to the self-deconstructive clause that, in fact, it is quite difficult to distinguish between these two types. If, however, the crucial insight from this debate is that all labour tends to become performative, then it makes sense for theory not to focus any longer on the articulation of the difference between material and immaterial labour, to give up the struggle with the bad binaries of a hopeless ontological discussion, and to begin to imagine the consequences of the general tendency of the becoming performative of labour. Sven Lütticken's concept of general performance allows to operate a strategic shift in the twenty something year old discourse on immaterial labour. Not only has performance become general, but even more so, performance has become permanent. Labour today is characterised by a regime of 'permanent performance'. However, the basic discursive operation implied by the introduction of the concept of permanent performance, as different from Lütticken's concept of general performance, is that it re-inscribes a notion of (measurable) working time into the debate on contemporary labour. This notion had been evacuated from the debate by the debate's initiators, as a consequence of the idea that post-Fordist productivity can no longer be measured. Thus, time as a system of measurement par excellence became a non-issue, whereas in the ordinary lives of the multitude, it is in fact a very important issue.

The Management of Circulations: Biopolitical Variations after Foucault

This paper provides a review of the reception of Foucault's later work on biopolitics within management and organization studies and contrasts this with the reception of these ideas in sister fields of research in the social sciences. In his later work, Foucault developed original conceptions of power, including ‘biopolitics’, ‘the apparatus of security’ and ‘neo‐liberal governmentality’, which marked a departure from his conception of disciplinary power. This paper explores these concepts and elaborates the implications of these ideas for management studies. The structure of this argument is divided as follows. The first section outlines Foucault's concept of biopolitics and neo‐liberal governmentality, distinguishing these systems of control clearly from the concept of disciplinary power. The second section then undertakes a synthesis and evaluation of the extent to which these ideas have been developed within the field of management and organization studies. The final section provides a discussion of how these concepts have been used within other social sciences, distinguishing between three key approaches to their development in terms of: (a) the concept of governmentality; (b) the concept of immaterial labour; and (c) the concept of biocapital. Based on this analysis, a framework is developed which can serve as a basis for future research into the significance of these new biopolitical systems of control for management studies.

The Subjective Architects

The rapid rise of the tween, an influential market-constructed demographic of youth between the ages of 8 and 13, raises several questions. How and why did the tween emerge? How do we account for this downward trend in marketing and the corporate targeting of younger and younger children? And most importantly, for the purposes of my argument, what role has immaterial labor played in demarcating this new category of youth? Initially, Hardt and Negri theorized the shift of production outside the factory walls; this diffused, expanded and intensified production now accounts for new modes of sociality and hence modalities of subjectivization required for capital’s reproduction. As such, the concept of immaterial labor, beginning with Maurizio Lazzarato and extended by Hardt and Negri, is paramount for accounting for new subjective formations such as the tween. This paper illustrates the intensification of immaterial labor by examining how the tween has already “learned to immaterial labor 2.0”. By so doing, it examines the synergy that flows out of the ease in which this demographic moves between the virtual and the material and the marketing practices used to engage and capitalize on their mediated cultural practices.

The Cool Brand, Affective Activism and Japanese Youth

Japanese youth goods have become globally popular over the past 15 years. Referred to as `cool', their contribution to the national economy has been much hyped under the catchword Japan's `GNC' (gross national cool). While this new national brand is indebted to youth — youth are the intended consumers for such products and sometimes the creators — young Japanese today are also chastised for not working hard, failing at school and work, and being insufficiently productive or reproductive. Using the concept of immaterial labor, the article argues that such `J-cool' products as Pokémon are both based on, and generative of, a type of socio-power also seen in the very behaviors of youth — flexible sociality, instantaneous communication, information juggling — that are so roundly condemned in public discourse. The article examines the contradictions between these two different ways of assessing and calibrating the value of youth today. It also looks at the emergence of youth activism around the very precariousness, for them, of socio-economic conditions of flexibility.

The Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics

Marx conceives of labor as form-giving activity. This is criticized for presupposing a productivist model of labor which regards work that creates a material product — craft or in- dustrial work — as the paradigm for all work (Habermas, Benton, Arendt). Many traditional kinds of work do not seem to fit this picture, and new immaterial forms of labor (computer work, service work, etc.) have developed in postindustrial society which, it is argued, necessitate a fundamental revision of Marx's ap- proach (Hardt and Negri). Marx's theory, however, must be understood in the context of Hegel's philosophy. In that light, the view that Marx has a productivist model of labor is mistaken. The concept of immaterial labor is unsound, and Marx's ideas continue to provide an illuminating framework for understand- ing work in modern society. In the labour-process . . . man's activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, effects an alteration, designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon. The process disappears in the product, the latter is a use-value, Nature's material adapted by a change of form to the wants of man. Labour has incorporated itself with its subject: the former is materialized, the latter transformed. — Marx, 1961, 180

The Multitude and the Kangaroo: A Critique of Hardt and Negri's Theory of Immaterial Labour

AbstractHardt and Negri's theory of immaterial labour provides a socio-economic foundation in the contemporary world for the philosophical and political elements of their thought. Although there has been considerable engagement with Hardt and Negri's work, the socio-economic dimension of their thought has received little sustained attention. This is certainly true of their theory of immaterial labour. This article aims to remedy this oversight. It presents and scrutinises Hardt and Negri's concept of immaterial labour and its putative hegemony. It then examines the depiction of the world of paid work in advanced capitalist societies with which the theory is associated and looks at three alleged consequences of the rise of immaterial labour. It concludes that this dimension of Hardt and Negri's thought is profoundly flawed, that immaterial labour cannot play the role they wish to assign it in their theory, and that this failure suggests the importance of a different method of developing theory from that employed by Hardt and Negri, along with so many other contemporary writers.

Intensidade e imaterialidade do trabalho e saúde

A relação entre condições de trabalho e saúde constitui o objeto deste artigo. O crescente grau de intensidade imposto ao trabalho contemporâneo provoca sérios danos à saúde dos trabalhadores. O artigo acresce ao estudo a ótica da imaterialidade, que fornece base para a hipótese de que a transição para atividades imateriais intensificadas está criando um perfil próprio de problemas de saúde para os trabalhadores. A análise empírica é realizada com o auxílio de dados provenientes de levantamento efetuado junto a 825 trabalhadores assalariados do Distrito Federal, Brasil. A análise das informações conduz à conclusão de que existem dois perfis diferenciados de problemas de saúde: o primeiro exemplificado pelas respostas dos trabalhadores da construção civil, protótipo do trabalho material; o segundo pelas respostas dos trabalhadores de telefonia, um ramo de atividades imateriais recentemente privatizado no Brasil e submetido ao rigor da competição internacional. Se a intensificação do trabalho material atinge primordialmente o físico do trabalhador, como nos casos dos inúmeros acidentes de trabalho, a intensificação nas atividades imateriais também conduz a problemas de saúde, mas com um perfil diferenciado, centrado mais em aspectos cognitivos, emotivos, relacionais e sociais da pessoa do trabalhador e do grupo a que pertence.