Abstract
This chapter discusses how the proposed notion of ‘digital work’ can interpret the way knowledge workers today seem to put aside the unresolved tensions between precariousness, insecurity and the instability of work, to pursue an ideological approach to entrepreneurialism, professionalism and independence as ‘the new way of working’. This narrative, is argued, has surged as hegemonic in the form of a powerful rhetoric of ‘new professionalism’ that conceives knowledge work as a form of venture labour, and envisages freelance knowledge workers as ‘digital professionals’. This is discussed in a broader critical perspective that looks at conceptions of value in various contexts, and especially those more contaminated by collaborative logics of work.
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Notes
- 1.
Arne Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s–2000s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011).
- 2.
Gina Neff, Venture Labor (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012).
- 3.
Tammy Johns and Lynda Gratton, “The third wave of virtual work,” Harvard Business Review 91.1 (2013): 66–73.
- 4.
On the supposed ‘third industrial revolution’, see Chris Anderson, Makers. The New Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Books, 2013). For a critical reflection on ‘changemakers’ see Carolina Bandinelli and Adam Arvidsson, “Brand yourself a changemaker!,” Journal of Macromarketing 28.4 (2013): 326–338.
- 5.
For a definition of ‘bourgeois bohemians’, see David Brooks, Bobos in paradise: The new upper class and how they got there (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
- 6.
Alessandro Gandini, “Assessing the job quality of ‘digital professions’: a case of extreme work,” Studi di Sociologia 3 (2015).
- 7.
Gina Neff, Venture Labor (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012).
- 8.
Harry Braverman, Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century (New York: New York University Press, 1974).
- 9.
On the notion of ‘community of practice’, see Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Etienne Wenger, “Communities of practice and social learning systems,” Organization 7.2 (2000): 225–246.
- 10.
On networks of practice and contracting, see Steven R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, “Bringing work back in,” Organization Science 12.1 (2001): 76–95; Steven R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, “Contracting: A new form of professional practice,” The Academy of Management Perspectives 20.1 (2006): 45–66.
- 11.
Vincent Mosco and Catherine McKercher, The Laboring of Communication: will knowledge workers of the world unite? (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
- 12.
On the notion of digital labour, see Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33–58; Trebor Scholz (eds.), Digital Labor. The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York and London: Routledge, 2013).
- 13.
Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni, “Value in informational capitalism and on the Internet,” The Information Society 28.3 (2012): 135–150.
- 14.
Marx, Karl. Capital: a critique of political economy. Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Review, 1976).
- 15.
Alessandro Gandini, “Online Social Influence and the Evaluation of Creative Practice: A Critique of Klout,” in Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts, ed. Cecilia H. Suhr (New York: Routledge, 2014), 150–168.
- 16.
Michel Bauwens, “The Political Economy of Peer Production,” Post-autistic Economics Review, 37.28 (2006): 33–44; Yochlai Benkler, The wealth of networks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
- 17.
Research for this section was partially financed by the project P2Pvalue, funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7): grant agreement no. 610961. For information on the P2Pvalue project, see http://www.p2pvalue.eu/.
- 18.
Adam Arvidsson, Alessandro Caliandro, Alessandro Gandini, “First Report Task 1.3 Digital Ethnography of 10 Cases of CBPP,” P2Pvalue, Deliverable D1.2, accessed October 29, 2015, http://www.p2pvalue.eu/sites/default/files/u28/D12_31July_TheoreticalFindingsA%20%281%29.pdf.
Reference
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A critique of political economy. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Review.
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Gandini, A. (2016). Understanding Digital Work as Venture Labour. In: The Reputation Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56107-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56107-7_6
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