Free Labour, Social Media, Management: Challenging Marxist Organization Studies

Abstract

In this paper we explore how so-called 'social media' such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on 'work', understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of 'free labour', which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the 'audience commodity' provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour which is central to Marx's labour theory of value. The Marxist literature on 'the becoming rent of profit' allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of 'free labour' as unpaid. It overstates, however, the 'uncontrolled' side of 'free labour', and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism.

Patient Portal Advertisements: A Discourse Analysis

“…On the surface, the business of healthcare discourse seems even less explicit in the advertisements that are directed at patients, but such images as those in Figures 4 and 5, of a doctor ghosting out of a digital device, accompanied by written suggestions that patients can manage more of their healthcare for themselves, are subtle examples of this discourse in practice. Much has been written elsewhere of the colonisation of private life by the service of capital (Beverungen, Böhm, and Land 2015;Lazzarato 1996), and the same principle is in operation here: this time, patients are given or pay for the privilege of 'managing' their own health.…”

An assemblage of avatars: Digital organization as affective intensification in the GamerGate controversy

“…Whether conceptualized as prosumption (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010), produsage (Bruns, 2008), cocreative labour (Banks and Deuze, 2009), playbour (Beverungen et al, 2015) or some variation thereof, what is at stake here is the breakdown of traditional categories of production and consumption as well as work and leisure. Here, economic value can be produced by all participants and extracted from all forms of participation (Fuchs and Fischer, 2015).…”

“…Beginning from these observations, I will argue that developments such as those unfolding in the GamerGate controversy signal a broader shift in digital organizing: From relying on the free labour of participants (Beverungen et al, 2015) to being driven by processes of affective intensification.…”

Culture, technology, and process in ‘media theories’: Toward a shift in the understanding of media in organizational research

“…Media create an ontological realm that fundamentally changes organizational realities. As traditional boundaries between organizational media and popular or social media disappear (Beverungen et al, 2015), a perspective on organizational media is needed that takes into account 'external' aspects of organizational media. Earlier ICT, such as mainframe systems, were closely attached to organizations and often only used within an organizational context.…”