Commentary

J. Jill employee via Life Magazine

I’ve started to notice more “help wanted” signs in retail stores. Does this mean that the economy is recovering? People may be shopping more, and stores may be hiring more. But retail jobs will never improve this economy unless retail jobs are improved.

In this industry, full-time schedules are rare—most people are hired on a temporary and part-time basis—and pay is slightly more than minimum wage. These jobs offer neither benefits nor opportunities for advancement. Although many stores advertise “flexible” schedules, hours are worked only “as needed,” with schedules and hours shifting from one week to the next with little advance warning. Workers cannot support themselves on the wages from these jobs.

Panel on “The Help”

By Chris Prener

March 19, 2012

Commentary, Panel - The Help

Who are the Real “Help”? Reflections on “The Help”, Race, and Domestic Work, Past and Present

By Rachael Gorab

March 19, 2012

Commentary, Panel - The Help

5 Comments

Few pastimes are perhaps more uniquely American than going to the movies. Though movie prices continue to increase from their already elevated prices, feature films are fairly accessible for most Americans; they reach a diverse and widespread audience, whether viewed in the theater, at home, or, in today’s technology-driven, ask-and-you-shall-receive society, through instant online streaming via iTunes or Netflix.

Inarguably, blockbuster films often serve as powerful theatric representations of both contemporary and historical social problems and injustices. Through fictional yet theatrical and artistically visual means, popular films have captured the imaginations of millions of Americans, establishing a platform upon which conversations about political and social issues—both in the media and amongst citizens—can and have taken root. Don Cheadle’s 2004 performance in Hotel Rwanda, Sean Penn’s portrayal of gay rights activist Harvey Milk in 2008’s Milk, and 1994’s Philadelphia, which tells the story of Andrew Beckett (played by Tom Hanks), an HIV-positive attorney who is fired on the basis of his medical condition, are all movies that have sparked politically charged conversations about race, sexuality, inequality, and civil rights in the United States.

“The Help” Does Not Help

By Adia Harvey Wingfield

March 19, 2012

Commentary, Panel - The Help

5 Comments

Rachael’s post insightfully delves into the ways that The Help has served to motivate domestic workers to organize and push for better treatment, as well as the ways that the film reinforces racialized narratives and stereotypes. While the film and book are fictional stories based on historical material, sociological research on race, gender, and work provide more nuanced, accurate portrayals of the challenges, issues, and obstacles domestic workers encounter.

In a 2003 article published in the Annual Review of Sociology, sociologists Irene Browne and Joya Misra consider whether the literature on work and occupations provides support for the arguments made by intersectionality theorists. Specifically, inasmuch as an intersectional approach contends that issues of race, gender, class, and other categories are overlapping rather than singular and mutually exclusive, Browne and Misra examine whether key areas studied by researchers in the sociology of work show evidence of this overlap. As part of their analysis, Browne and Misra look at the literature on domestic workers to consider whether this indicates interactions of race, gender, and class. These authors note that the overwhelming preponderance of women of color–particularly immigrant women of color–in this profession signifies employers’ preference for certain workers to do this type of labor. Additionally, the low pay afforded to most domestic workers further signifies the ways that race, gender, class—and in this case, nationality—are intertwined.

Will Capitalism Survive “Value Abundance”?

By michelbauwens

March 16, 2012

Commentary, Panel - Facebook

1 Comment

Editor’s Note: The article below is a reaction to the previous article by Christopher Land and Steffen Böhm, which first appeared on OOWBlog as part of our panel on Facebook. This follow-up to Chris and Steffen’s piece, by Michel Bauwens, first appeared on Al Jazeera’s website under the title The $100bn Facebook Question: Will Capitalism Survive “Value Abundance? He has also published a second follow-up on Al Jazeera titled ‘Occupy’ as a business model: The emerging open-source civilization. Bauwens, whose full bio can be found here, is an active blogger for the Peer 2 Peer Foundation.

Does Facebook exploit its users, and where is the $100 billion in estimated value coming from?

This is not a new debate, and it resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and academic circles evern since Tiziana Terranova coined the term “Free Labor”¹ to indicate a new form of capitalist exploitation of unpaid labor, first of the viewers of classic broadcast media, and now of the new generation of social media participants like Facebook. The argument can be summarized very succinctly by the catch phrase, “if it’s free, then you are the product being sold”.

It was recently relaunched by an often retweeted article by University of Essex academics Christopher Land and Steffen Böehm in their piece: “They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free.²” In this mini-essay, they make the very strong claim that “we can certainly position the users of Facebook as laborers. If labor is understood as ‘value producing activity’, then updating your status, liking a website, or ‘friending’ someone, creates Facebook’s basic commodity.”

Internet Privacy and the Workplace

By Chris Prener

March 14, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

1 Comment

We’ve been posting quite a bit on Facebook here in recent weeks, and I wanted to pass on a pair of new stories that have recently been posted on MSNBC’s website. Each are quite troubling and deserve our attention as digital citizens and as sociologists.The first article, which was published last week, describes how employers (including a police department) and colleges have been demanding “behind the scenes” access to Facebook accounts as part of their “background” checks of employees and/or students. The second article, published just yesterday, describes how a middle school student was forced, with police in the room, to turn over her Facebook password to her school principal. What is most troubling is that this is done, in all cases, to gain access to “private” messages that are not publicly available to viewers of an individual’s page on Facebook.

Each of these stories represent our society’s struggle over how to cope with the brave new world of social media. Facebook has become just the latest venue to criticize the boss or principal (though nothing beats a resignation letter posted on the New York Times’ opinion page). Unlike the water cooler or the local coffee shop, however, the digital footprints left behind on Facebook provide physical evidence of an employee’s displeasure. We lack a cohesive set of legal protections in the United States from this sort of behavior by management (be it the boss or the principal), though such intrusions do violate Facebook’s terms of service.

Until such protections are enacted, some are advising their students and colleagues to take their more sensitive discussions underground. We should all consider strongly the ramifications of our tweets, Facebook status updates, and blog posts for that job down the road or the one we’ve got. This much perhaps goes without saying. Yet we also need to consider as a society how to protect this speech and ensure that speech that occurs out of the public eye using social media can stay that way.

From Whom Does Facebook Extract Exchange Value?

By jakobrigi

March 3, 2012

Commentary, Panel - Facebook, Uncategorized

Where’s the Boss? Lunching with Spouse, Doing Pilates, Getting a Haircut and, of course, at a Meeting

By Julie Kmec

March 2, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

1 Comment

Last week the WSJ printed an article describing how CEOs around the world spend their time. The article drew on data from a larger study, the Executive Time Use Project , and relied on reports of time use by CEO’s personal assistants. The article indicates that assistants only tracked activities that lasted over 10 minutes in a single week selected by researchers. That assistants, rather than the CEOs themselves, were keeping track of time use leads me to believe the reports are relatively accurate. After all, the assistant probably does most of the scheduling of a CEOs day and CEOs are likely too busy to track data time or to agree to record their time use.

Markets, monopolies and innovation

By matt vidal

February 28, 2012

Commentary

4 Comments

I recently wrote a blog post on The Mythology of Steve Jobs, in which I noted what I take to be a fairly standard understanding among sociologists: that technical innovation is generally the outcome of collective labor and that major innovations are generally produced by well-funded teams of researchers working in places protected from market forces.

The upshot is exactly the opposite of the standard story on innovation we get from mainstream economics. According to the latter, innovations are the result of individual entrepreneurs and are best fostered by intense market competition. But this simply does not fit the history of major innovations. This is shown very clearly in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine by Jon Gertner on the history of Bell Labs.

The article is a bit long, but very insightful and well worth a read. Let me just note a few highlights. Gertner explains that the researchers at Bell Labs were given “years to pursue what they felt was essential. One might see this as impossible in today’s faster, more competitive world.”

Facebook, Labor, and the Possible Perils of Social Media

By Chris Prener

February 22, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

4 Comments

UPDATED 2/23/12 @ 2:30pm EST – Additional Follow-up Post @ Cyberology Published

We’ve all seen the potential for social media platforms to take part in some of the most important social movements of the last year. From Twitter’s use in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries to the widespread use of social media during the worldwide Occupy protests, we’ve seen how social media can bring us together and bring down governments. More recently in Syria, we’ve seen how YouTube can emerge as the sole source of information on the ground in areas where the world’s traditional media may be unable to reach.

Last week, in the wake of Facebook’s decision to “go public”, I wrote a post about Facebook and the potential for the exploitation of its members. After some discussion among the editorial team, we decided to reach out to some of our colleagues for whom social media is a true intellectual passion. We’ve been able to put together a small panel on Facebook and the possibility for labor exploitation that seeks to address the ways in which all members of Facebook help to contribute to Facebook’s monetary value.

While we’re not “anti” Facebook – indeed, we at OOWBlog have our own Facebook page – we think the decision to “go public” by Facebook provides an ideal moment to reflect on the changing nature of business, labor, and leisure in the 21st century.

To that end, please check out my lead post as well as a response by the University of Maryland’s PJ Rey and two scholars are the University of Essex, Christopher Land and Steffen Böehm. We hope you enjoy them!

Update – 2/23/12 @ 2:30pm EST – PJ has also posted a great follow-up piece over at Cyberology where he blogs regularly. He makes some great points and I urge you all to check it out.