On 21st-22nd March all four Working Groups met in a combination of parallel and plenary sessions. The plenary sessions focused on the sharing economy, followed by a workshop.

Topic: Sharing Economy

There were two sessions on the sharing economy.

The first focused on the extent of the sharing economy, its regulation and the question: ‘Sharing economy: towards shared rules?’

The second addressed the question: ‘How can alternative production and welfare be autonomously financed? and explored alternative finance models.

The Workshop, which was jointly organised by Working Groups 2 and 3, was held on 22nd-23rd March.

Topic: The passions of capitalism: Subjectivity in production and the production of subjectivity in contemporary capitalism 

The last few decades have seen an unprecedented mobilisation of life itself into the accumulation process. Identity, subjectivity, self, emotions, personality, passion, sexuality, the life-world, and the body have all become forces of production for capitalism. This trend has been facilitated very prominently by digital technology. Through various practices, technologies and organisational innovations – from surveillance to interactivity, from mobile devices to location-based applications, and from crowdfunding and peer-production – digital technologies have allowed forces of production located mostly outside of the traditional spaces of production, and entailing the very soul and body of individuals – such as interpersonal communication – to be mobilised and subsumed by capitalism.

These developments have repercussions, both for our analysis of contemporary capitalism and in particular the progressive monetisation and commodification of all aspects of personal life, and for our analysis of virtual workers. They also raise questions of how collective identities and social relations (in work – trade unions and workers’ organisations; outside paid employment – families, households, social groups, civic life) may be reshaped and re-enacted if individualised employment and social relations become increasingly dominant.  Lastly, they also raise the question of spaces where alternative subjectivities may emerge.

In this workshop, we will discuss these developments, and in particular the intersection of production and reproduction, capitalism and subjectivity, skills and passions, work-tasks and persona.  The workshop will be focussed on the following questions:

• How is life mobilised?
• How are passionate subjects formed?
• How, if it all, does this mark a departure from previous modes of labour commodification and exploitation?
• How are class, gender, ethnic, and other subjectivities mobilised in particular empirical settings?
• How are collective and social identities affected?  What does this imply for labour organisation, trade unionism and capital-labour relations?

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
 

The Management Committee of the COST Action met from 10.00 to 16.00 on March 26th.

The Working Group Programme opened with a plenary session at 17.00 on October 26th, with a keynote speech from be Gina Neff, author of Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries, (Co-Winner, 2013 American Sociological Association Section on Communication and Information Technologies (CITASA) Book Award).
This was followed by a buffet reception.
Conference Venue and how to get there
Programme
Getting around in Bucharest
Accommodation
The programme included plenary sessions, with a particular focus on virtual work in creative and IT industries.
Some highlights
Tatiana Mazali spoke on ‘Digital creativity and new professions biographies in action to overcome the crisis’
Irene Mandl presented the latest results from the Eurofound Project on ‘New forms of Employment’
James Stewart presented his recent research on Online Work Exchanges.
Karin Hippler from Elance (a leading Online Work Exchange) spoke about the online work revolution while Mike Holderness from the European Federation of Journalists (representing creative and content-producing virtual workers) explored what this means for creative and workers. Vasile Baltac from the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (representing IT professionals) gave an overview of the changing landscape of eskills.
There was also be an interactive question-and-answer session for Early Stage Researchers and PhD students on ‘Getting published’.
Working Groups met in parallel to present their ongoing work and develop future plans.