Maxwell - The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media

Labor resides at the center of all media and communication production, from the workers who create the information technologies that form the dynamic core of the global capitalist system and the designers who create media content, to the salvage workers who dismantle the industrys high-tech trash. The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media is the first book to bring together representative research from the diverse body of scholarly work surrounding this often fragmentary field and it seeks to provide a comprehensive resource for the study and teaching of media and labor. Essays examine work on the mostly unglamorous side of media and cultural production, technology manufacture, and every occupation in between.

Specifically, this book features:

• wide-ranging international case studies spanning the major global hubs of media labor;
• interdisciplinary approaches for thinking about and analyzing class and labor in information communication technology (ICT), consumer electronics (CE), and media/cultural production;
• an overview of global political-economic conditions affecting media workers;
• reports on chemical environments and their effect on the health of media workers and consumers;
• activist scholarship on media and labor, and inspiring stories of resistance and solidarity.

Richard Maxwell is Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. His research has focused on international communication and media, political economy and media, surveillance and data protection, and the environmental impact of media. His recent publications include Media and the Ecological Crisis and Greening the Media.

Edited by Richard Maxwell

First published in paperback 2017
First published 2016

by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Routledge companion to labor and media / edited by Richard Maxwell.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Mass mediaEconomic aspects.2.Mass mediaEmployees.I.Maxwell, Richard, 1957
P96.E25R68 2015
331.7'6130223dc23
2015002563

ISBN: 978-0-415-83744-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-73177-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-40411-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Goudy

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Janet Wasko

Richard Maxwell

Section I
The Changing Face of Media Labor: Networks, Clouds, and Digitalized Work

Dan Schiller

Vincent Mosco

David Hesmondhalgh

Soenke Zehle and Ned Rossiter

Christian Fuchs

Section II
Materials and Chemical Impact on Workers and Consumers

Elizabeth Grossman

Ted Smith and Chad Raphael

Section III
Media Labor Around the World

Toby Miller

Yu Hong and Wei Wang

Anibel Ferus-Comelo

Simone Wolff

Luis Reygadas

Jonathan Buchsbaum

Mark Banks and Kate Oakley

John A. Lent

Leon Gurevitch

Rune Ottosen

Frank Beyersdorf and Kaarle Nordenstreng

Gerald Sussman and Carey L. Higgins-Dobney

Vicki Mayer and Jocelyn Horner

Kelly Gates

Section IV
Activism, Organization, Worker Resistance, and Media Labors Future

Pauline Overeem, GoodElectronics Network Coordinator with Vicky Anning

Pedro Antonio Reyes Linares for Cereal (Centro de Reflexin y Accin Laboral en Guadalajara)

Jenny Chan, Ngai Pun, and Mark Selden

Jack Linchuan Qiu

Enda Brophy, Nicole S. Cohen, and Greig de Peuter

Chad Raphael and Ted Smith

Mark Banks is Professor of Culture and Communication in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. Recent publications include the report Working Lives in Black British Jazz (with Jason Toynbee and Jill Ebrey) and the edited collection Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity and Change in the Cultural and Creative Industries (with Ros Gill and Stephanie Taylor).

Frank Beyersdorf teaches European and German history at Free University and Humboldt University of Berlin. His current research analyzes attempts of international media actors to create global information orders between 1919 and the early 1950s. He has published on the League of Nations, international telecommunication policy, the Cold War, and internet governance.

Enda Brophy is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. He is completing a manuscript on labor resistance in global call centers (tentatively titled Language Put to Work: Labour and Communicative Capitalism), and is collaborating with Greig de Peuter and Nicole Cohen on Cultural Workers Organize, a research project into collective responses to precarity by workers in the creative industries.

Jonathan Buchsbaum is Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. He is the author of Cinema Engag: Film in the Popular Front, Cinema and the Sandinistas: Filmmaking in Revolutionary Nicaragua, 19791990, and the forthcoming Exception Taken: How France Has Defied Hollywoods New World Order.

Jenny Chan is Lecturer in Contemporary China Studies, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford. Educated at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (BSSc in Sociology) and the University of Hong Kong (MPhil in Sociology), she was a Reid Research Scholar while pursuing her PhD at the University of London. In 20132014, she received the prestigious Great Britain-China Educational Award. Currently, she serves as Board Member of the International Sociological Associations Research Committee on Labor Movements (20142018). Her recent articles have appeared in Current Sociology, Modern China, Human Relations, Critical Asian Studies, Global Labor Journal, The Asia-Pacific Journal, The South Atlantic Quarterly, New Labor Forum, and New Technology, Work and Employment.

Nicole S. Cohen is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga (cross-appointed to the Faculty of Information). She researches freelance journalism and collective organizing and, with Greig de Peuter and Enda Brophy, cultural workers collective responses to precarity (culturalworkersorganize.org). Her work has been published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Democratic Communiqu, The Canadian Journal of Communication