Edited by Ursula Huws, Professor of Labour and Globalization at the University of Hertfordshire, UK and Rosalind Gill, Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis at City University, London, UK, this series includes the following titles, with more planned for the future:

Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism, O’Neil, M. (Ed), Frayssé, O. (Ed) (2015)
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Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age, Fuchs, C. (Ed), Fisher, E. (Ed) (2015)
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Space, Place and Global Digital Work, Flecker, J. (Ed) (2016)

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COMING SHORTLY

Virtual Workers and the Global Labour Market, Webster, J. (Ed), Randle, K. (Ed) (2016)

Aesthetic Labour, Elias, A. S. (Ed), Gill, R. (Ed), Scharff, C. (Ed) (2016)

Reinventing Work in Europe, Méda, D., Vendramin, P. (2017)

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This short document was prepared in collaboration between Ursula Huws, the Action Chair and the leader of Working Group 4, Pamela Meil, Director of International Studies at the Institute for Social Science Research (ISF), Munich, supported by Vassil Kirov, Associate Professor, Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria, with inputs from a wide range of policy stakeholders, who met in Brussels on June 9th to discuss a future policy agenda on virtual work.

The meeting took place at Avenue de Cortenbergh 30, 1040 Brussels from 10.30 to 17.00.

Over the past three and a half years, the Dynamics of Virtual Work COST Action has brought together leading scholars from a wide range of different academic disciplines in 31 European countries, plus several non-European ones, to map the state of the art on the impacts of digitisation on labour.

Working Group 4 of the Action has focussed on the policy impacts of these changes, interacting with a wide range of stakeholders from the European Commission, European Parliament, ILO, OECD, international trade union confederations, social partners, NGOs and other organisations. In particular, it has organised events and panel discussions on:

• The explosive growth of ‘crowdsourcing’
• The impact of user-generated content on creative work
• The rights of digital worker in online environments
• The measurement of digital work
• New forms of organisation and representation of digital workers
• Health, safety and wellbeing in digital work.

This event is designed to highlight the key findings, share them with a broader policy audience, and identify issues requiring further research and/or policy initiatives in the future.

some pictures from the event pictures from RMIT Barcelona workshop

The event will be held at the RMIT Europe Centre in Barcelona, Minerva 2 08006 Barcelona, Spain.

The aim of the symposium is to address the new types of labour emerging around mobile media and gaming areas. Phenomena such as Let’s Play (shared videos of people playing games) and mobile lifestyle apps (as part of the quantified self) represent new forms of play and labour within everyday life. This symposium will draw from experts around digital methods and theories to outline some new ways for understanding these phenomenona.

Some of the questions that will be addressed include:

• What are some of the socio-cultural and creative ways mobile phone users are shaping apps through existing work and leisure practices?
• How are mobile media apps like mindfulness quantifying a user’s life? And how can users resist these forms of normalisations?
• How are emergent game player industries like Let’s Play (shared videos of playing) shaping relationships and representations of play, labour and playbour? How does this reshape conceptualisations between players and spectatorship?

Some pictures from the event:  Pictures from the Dynamics of Virtual Work Summer

This COST Training School also constituted the 5th Marie Jahoda Summer School of Sociology to be held at the University of Vienna.The event was therefore a close co-operation between the University and the COST Action.

Two interrelated processes have transformed work and labour on a global scale: The wider reach of multinational corporations and global value chains and the digitisation of information and the advances of telecommunications and the Internet. They have contributed to new dynamics of job relocation and shifting international divisions of labour, new forms of cooperation over distance and new opportunities to integrate geographically distributed work processes. These changes have also brought forth entirely new types of ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’ labour, both paid and unpaid. The summer school will explore recent developments of digital work and labour within corporations, along global value chains and over the Internet. It will devote special attention to the ways in which people experience new forms of work and labour and to their individual and collective reactions.

Focusing on the global digital workplace, the Marie Jahoda Summer School of Sociology will provide an academic frame for a deeper and interdisciplinary approach to these complex processes. An understanding will be developed of how changes in work take place as new forms of virtual labour emerge and what their implications are for work organization, workers identities and workers’ agency. Account will be taken of the ways in which work and labour are being transformed in the context of global economic and technical dynamics and in relation to their local embeddedness. This may include the shifting boundaries between paid and unpaid work and between ‘work’ and ‘play’.

During the Summer-School the participants have to present a research paper (about 20 pages) and subsequently have the chance to discuss it with the audience. Each day of the summer school is devoted to a core topic and is led by an experienced and distinguished scientist. Additionally, two keynote speeches by renowned researchers and social events in the historic city of Vienna are planned.

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Photo courtesy of the University of Vienna.

Pictures  Presentations  Programme  Accommodation  Location  Local transport in Peniche  Venue  Setting

Sponsored by APDSI, the Portuguese Association for promoting the Information Society, APSIOT, the Portuguese Association of Sociology of Industry, Organisations and Work and APS, the Portuguese Association of Sociology.

                

User-generated content – impacts on work and labour: Policy implications for EU stakeholders

hosted by iMinds-SMIT (Studies Media Information Telecommunications), Vrije Universiteit Brussel.This event brought academic researchers together with a wide range of policy stakeholders.

The opening session of the event, on February 24th, took place in the COST offices

The remaining sessions, on February 25th was held at iMinds-SMIT

http://dynamicsofvirtualwork.com/brussels-workshop-presentations

Sponsored by COST (European Co-operation in Science and Technology), Work Organisation Labour and Globalisation, Competition and Change , Triple C and the Journal of Institutional Economics

Globalisation and technological change have transformed where people work, when and how. Digitisation of information has altered labour processes out of all recognition whilst telecommunications have enabled jobs to be relocated globally. But ICTs have also enabled the creation of entirely new types of ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’ labour, both paid and unpaid, shifting the borderline between ‘play’ and ‘work’ and creating new types of unpaid labour connected with the consumption and co-creation of goods and services. The implications of this are far-reaching, both for policy and for scholarship. The dynamics of these changes cannot be captured adequately within the framework of any single academic discipline. On the contrary, they can only be understood in the light of a combination of insights from fields including political economy, the sociology of work, organisational theory, economic geography, development studies, industrial relations, comparative social policy, communications studies, technology policy and gender studies

COST Action IS1202 brings together an international network of leading experts from 31 European Countries with researchers from other parts of the world to develop a multi-faceted approach to understanding these phenomena. This international conference will open up an interactive dialogue between scholars both inside and outside the network.

Contents

Pictures Presentations

The aims of the workshop are to:

• highlight the value of a gender perspective in the analysis of the development and implications of virtual work, and to support the use of this perspective among members of the Action;
• review theoretical developments in gender and their application to virtual work; and
• contribute to the positioning of the Action’s analyses within current international thinking on gender and virtual work.

One of the core aims of this COST Action is to bring together the research perspectives and problematics of different disciplinary approaches to developments in virtual work, in order to create an intellectual dialogue to advance our understanding of these developments.  Although virtual workers have two sexes, so that gender is at the core of every aspect of virtual work, notably absent from many accounts of both workplace and technological developments has been a recognition of their gender dimensions.  Drawing on the expertise of leading researchers and writers on the gender relations of virtual work, this workshop will focus explicitly on the contribution of a gender perspective to an understanding of the development and implications of virtual work.

This workshop gathered scholars interested in how Marx’s labour theory of value applies to value creation in digital environments, and how transformations in production and labour shed new light on this theory.

View presentations from the event here

The Israeli location provided an opportunity to explore some issues pertinent to digital technology in the local context, including a lecture on the Palestinian Internet, and a tour exploring techniques of separation and control along the separation wall in Jerusalem.

Accommodation