Knowledge Workers of the World! Unite?

Abstract

Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions and Information Technology and the World of Work both demonstrate the value of paying serious attention to the labouring of communication and information technology. There remain many questions to address, including defining knowledge labour and the nature of the society in which it is becoming ever more important. Is knowledge labour best limited to the so-called creative workers who produce content? Does it extend to the distributional work of the call centre employee working from a tech support script? Should it encompass the entire chain of production that would include, as Pellow and Park suggest, the immigrant women in the US and the developing world who produce high tech components in an unsafe environment? And what name should replace [Daniel Bell]'s concept of "post-industrial"? Is this plain old capitalism with a new set of technologies? A revised capitalism, perhaps preceded by the adjective "informational" or "digital?" Or has capitalism itself become so transformed that the name must be replaced with another-the information society? the network society? There is a great deal of research to be done. One way to start, as these books imply, is by replacing the very popular question: "What will be the next new thing?" with one that bears weightier significance and not a little historical resonance: "Will knowledge workers of the world unite?" These articles are enormously suggestive of the research that needs to be done to uncover the creation of a working class of informational workers in the industrial era. They are closely connected to two subsequent articles on the making of computer workers in the early years ofthat industry and to two papers on the role of informational labour in the transformation of the industries that ship material goods. These are particularly valuable in documenting how managerial control and the self-organization of information workers are inextricably linked in the building and rebuilding of entire industries. Finally, the book takes us into the present era where the lines are blurring on what constitutes labour, documented in a study of America Online's "volunteers" who helped build a major and profitable computer network outside the wage labour system. The AOL case provided one of the first major examples of how value production on the net continues to be hidden, a situation that has exploded in Web 2.0 with Goggle's purchase of YouTube, viral marketing's use of social networking sites, and the growth of wikis and blogs. A similar blurring is taking place in the organizations that represent workers. Benner documents this in an overview of unions and worker associations that have taken root in the hostile environment within the high tech industry. The book concludes with a very perceptive analysis of its contents in the context of a map of the literature that demonstrates the importance of writing a labour history of communication and information technology by making workers the units of analysis and using that history "as a lever for wider societal changes" (p. 261). Modestly, [Greg Downey] acknowledges that the book is just a starting point in a long-neglected field, and it is encouraging to turn to Information Technology and the World of Work, which deepens and extends some of the central issues raised in the Blok and Downey volume.