>Another way to look at the phenomenon may be that geeky labor of
>"knowledge workers," being labor-intensive, has helped to restore
>profitability (see Edward N. Wolff's "What's Behind the Recent Rise in
>Profitability?" at <http://www.levy.org/docs/wrkpap/papers/297.html>)
>directly & indirectly. Just as the expansion of service industries in
>general -- in which women are heavily concentrated on the low-wage end -- did.
yes, we had a very brief discussion of this not too long ago when i fwded something abt technology and rising productivity levels.
>As for open source, it helps businesses in several ways:
>
>1. to counteract the tendency toward inefficiency in product development
>entailed by excessively stringent enforcement of intellectual property rights;
>
>2. to help transform the industry from the shrink-packed product model to
>the customer service model (fight the rising organic composition of capital!);
>
>3. to enlist customers into product development (no-wage labor!);
>
>4. to induce future workers to train themselves on their own time & at
>their own expense, not on company time & at company expense (it's a hobby!).
>
>Yoshie
god! why is this so obvious to me? and you? and maybe kendall. there have been a few folks working on this, referring to the entire process as "rationalization" or "mcdonaldization: -- drawing on Weber's claims about rationalization but ditching the transhistoric "cultural inevitability" thesis.
good god. read eric raymond's ode to linux. users. why are users (consumers) Good Thangs? why hell because we can get them to participate in the production process.
i'm sorry, but this is the New Managerial Ethos. This is Tom Peters for Hackers. This is Golden Circles. (or maybe better called golden showers. or how about circle jerks? apologies to the kinky out there! don't mean to oppress you! heh) This is the expropriation of what was once called "shop floor" knowledge.
This is the revolutionary New Managerial Ethos that meant that when I took my Mitsubishi in to get serviced, I got a "please comment" card on my passenger seat and two andes mints! yeah, mitsubishi loves it customers.
and kills them too doncha know!
jeesus christ.
our dept once had a sec'y, whom i shall call Dawn. Dawn was...oh my...one of those secretaries that could make your life miserable in her resistance to her superordinates (in this case fac and grad students and even undergrads). e.g., when you needed copies and the copy machine was out of ink, you'd better be on dawn's good side or else you might not get any ink from the locked cabinet for a long time. but more than that, Dawn used to talk a lot abt how she was not gonna do any more work than she had to. she had her job and that was it and screw anyone else. she had a job description damn it.
well, then the uni started the SU IQ program --quality circles, internal and external customers an' all that jazz--following the Peters et all new managerial gospel.
for three days dawn went to rah rah siss boom bah cheerleading session replete with cloth napkins at lunch and rilly rilly great food and lotsa lotsa Neat Things. like bosses *really* listening to you. and lots of space for the exempt employees to bitch about their bosses, the non-exempt employees. yadda yadda.
dawn came back and you would not believe the change. all of a sudden dawn was going beyond her job description. all of a sudden, dawn, who once saw students looking for a sig to get into a booked class as the enemy, now saw students as "customers" and she needed to serve them. and she was part of the team and her knowledge was valuable and taken seriously.
man, it was nice to get my copies made on time, but it was a damn shame to see the spark of at least SOME worker resistance fizzle out all for some melon wrapped in prosciutto and silver thin lemon slices in your iced water.!
i won't even tell you abt how a typewriter factory warped it all into a Go for the Gold campaign replete with neato kewlo styrofoam coffee cups and fur coats and bbq grills for the employee ideas that were of the greatest profit to the firm. gad. what people gave up for a washing machine in that little warped contest in which power relations on the shop floor changed not one wit.
heh. amusing myself again. while i have you by the lapels, some of this reminded me of a thesis regarding women and tehcnology. i'll try to sum it up, but i may have it wrong. it was something about the technological deskilling of male dominated occupations nearly always meant that those occ. became thought of as women's jobs and, as such, they were accorded less prestige/status and income. can you recall who authored that thesis?
kelley