Media and Management

Description

An essential account of how the media devices we use today inherit the management practices governing factory labor This book argues that management is enabled by media forms, just as media gives life to management. Media technologies central to management have included the stopwatch, the punch card, the calculator, and the camera, while management theories are taught in printed and virtual textbooks and online through TED talks. In each stage of the evolving relationship between workers and employers, management innovations are learned through media, with media formats producing fresh opportunities for management. Drawing on rich historical and ethnographic case studies, this book approaches key instances of the industrial and service economy-the legacy of Toyotism in today's software industry, labor mediators in electronics manufacturing in Central and Eastern Europe, and app-based food-delivery platforms in China-to push media and management studies in new directions. Media and Management offers a provocative insight on the future of labor and media that inevitably cross geographical boundaries.

Rutvica Andrijasevic, based at the University of Bristol, is an activist scholar with research interests in international labor migration and business. Julie Yujie Chen is assistant professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Melissa Gregg leads user experience and sustainability in the Client Computing Group at Intel. Marc Steinberg is associate professor of film studies at Concordia University.

"This timely collection reminds us how the latest forms of algorithmic management are extensions of the long history of industrialized labor. We can only understand the future of work when we contend with the patterns of the past, and how they manifest around the world."-Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI "This remarkable book critically probes hardware manufacturing practices and histories in the Asia Pacific, insisting media theory and management studies recompose in ways attentive to real-time labor regimes and the organizational force of global logistics."-Ned Rossiter, Western Sydney University "This original book links up Toyotism, just-in-time management, and platform capitalism, all in one volume. I especially liked the main geographical foci of the chapters being on non-western countries: Japan, China, and Central and Eastern Europe."-Jack Linchuan Qiu, National University of Singapore