Book Review: Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America

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

March 2, 2012

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.

Is Facebook “Using” Its Members?

By Chris Prener

February 22, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

9 Comments

Facebook’s decision to file for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) with the Securities and Exchange Commission has made headlines and will likely be the most notable tech IPO since Google went public in 2004. Not everyone is rushing to “like” Facebook’s decision to make an IPO, however. The New York Times published an op-ed entitled “Facebook is Using You”, which criticized Facebook’s business plan and argued that the implications of an individual’s online activity extend far beyond the potential for embarrassing photos to surface. In sociological terms, there seems to be an argument surfacing that Facebook is exploiting the labor power of its users. If this is indeed so, Facebook may represent a new frontier for work and labor where even leisure activity can be exploited for the generation of profit.

ZD Net’s Emril Protalinski, who blogs about Facebook for the twenty year old tech site, responded to the Time’s piece and decried the position that Facebook somehow owed its users. Protalinski’s argument rests on the idea that becoming a Facebook member is a voluntary act. Users who enter into this relationship with Facebook receive a service that is free because Facebook can cover its operating costs through advertising revenue.

Facebook is Not a Factory (But Still Exploits its Users)

By PJ Patella-Rey

February 22, 2012

Commentary, Panel - Facebook

12 Comments

This piece is posted in cooperation with the Cyborgology Blog.

Facebook’s IPO announcement has stirred much debate over the question of whether Facebook is exploiting/using/taking advantage of its users. The main problem with the recent discussion of this subject is that no one really seems to have taken the time to actually define what exploitation is. Let me start by reviewing this concept before proceeding to examine its relevance to Facebook.

They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free

By Chris Land

February 22, 2012

Commentary, Panel - Facebook

21 Comments

The stockmarket floatation of Facebook brings together a range of issues in how we understand work and the creation of economic value but we should be careful not to overstate the novelty and conflate the newness of the media with the basic economic logic at work here. As Chris Prener suggests in his post, ‘Facebook may represent a new frontier for work and labor where even leisure activity can be exploited for the generation of profit’, but is this really so new?

In their now classic study of traditional media, Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky explain the basic business model of newspapers as being the production of an audience for advertising. Their analysis suggests the counter-intuitive notion that publishers’ main product is not the newspaper, which they sell to their readers, but the production of an audience of readers, which they sell to advertisers. In short, the readership is their product. This explains why newspapers will often offer a significant discount for students, as this enables them to catch future affluent consumers early on as they establish their media consumption habits. In its more extreme variants, this can lead to the thesis that even watching television can be understood as a form of labor, as by watching TV you produce the audience, which is the broadcaster’s main product – an idea that was neatly captured in an Adbusters’ video a few years ago.

Rich Reporting and Thin Analysis in Adam Davidson’s Pop Economics

By matt vidal

February 20, 2012

Commentary

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Adam Davidson is a co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money, a team of economics reporters that produces podcasts and segments for various NPR shows and the extraordinary weekly public radio show, This American Life. Davidson and his Planet Money team have produced some of the most penetrating and informative reporting on contemporary finance. Indeed, their reporting on finance is unrivalled, serving to demystify the murky world of derivatives, mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps and the like for a broad public audience – in the process playing a critical role for democratic debate.

And Davidson can really tell a good story. So good that he has recently been given a new platform for a news analysis, his It’s the Economy column for The New York Times Magazine. Unfortunately, since Davidson has turned from reporting on finance to news analysis focusing on the wider economy, he has increasingly traded the rich journalism that made his name – carefully and clearly explaining the esoteric workings of the financial world through first-rate investigative reporting – for commentaries on the broader economy that present embarrassingly thin analyses based on the oversimplified fantasy world of textbook economics and recycled tropes of American exceptionalism.

Davidson’s fascination with mainstream Economics got the better of him again in last weekend’s Magazine column, in which he praises the entrepreneurial efficiency of an alleged craft revival. Based on a couple of interviews with “successful entrepreneurs” making hand-crafted beef jerky or precision manufactured components, Davidson argues that a new breed is following “what seems like an ancient business model: making things by hand,” rejecting “the high-volume, low-margin commodity business.”

But, we learn, “the craft approach is actually something new — a happy refinement of the excesses of our industrial era plus a return to the vision laid out by capitalism’s godfather, Adam Smith.” The craft revival is a further realization of the Smithean division of labor, a new round of efficiency improvements based on “hyperspecialization.” Indeed, so efficient is the American economy that “the average American leads a shockingly good life by any historical or international standard” and “Huge numbers of middle-class people are now able to make a living specializing in something they enjoy, including creating niche products for other middle-class people who have enough money to indulge in buying things like high-end beef jerky.”

Follow-up to Jobs Post

By Chris Prener

February 12, 2012

News Analysis

1 Comment

A few days ago, I wrote about the ways in which the unemployment rate ‘hides’ the reality of unemployment. Yesterday, the Associated Press put out a story about long term unemployment that captures some of the daily struggles of several individuals who have been without work for some time. It was picked up by quite a few major newspapers, including the Washington Post. If you have not already seen the article, I highly encourage you to check it out.