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.

The Meeting began at midday on September 14th and finished at midday on September 16th.

Over the past four years, this COST Action has organised a wide range of networking activities, including:

• Seven international conferences
• Three policy workshops
• Four PhD Training Schools
• Four expert workshops

It has also published a number of articles, working papers and special journal issues as well as launching a major book series, published by Palgrave Macmillan, with four titles already published and another dozen in the pipeline.

In the course of all these activities we have engaged with a large number of academic and policy stakeholders.

This was the final opportunity for members of the COST Action to meet together to make plans for future publications, networking events and joint research projects, and for those outside the Action to learn the results of its intensive four-year programme and discover the new research agendas that have been developed as a result.

The event took place at the offices of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) at 40 Rue Montoyer, Brussels. It was hosted by FEPS.

Designed to bring together key experts from statistics-producing and statistics-using bodies, the workshop focused on how to capture information in the official statistics on:

• new forms of work and employment enabled by digitisation
• employers’ use of digital labour including ‘crowdsourcing’
• online platforms that manage and co-ordinate work in the ‘sharing economy’

• Pamela Meil (ISF, Germany) presented the work of Working Group 4 of the COST Action.
• Elva Bova (FEPS) presented the work of the FEPS/UNI-Europa Digital Footprint Project being carried out in association with the University of Hertfordshire.

Formal presentations of relevant surveys and statistics were then made by:

• Greet Vermeylen (Eurofound)
• Janine Berg (ILO)
• Simon Joyce (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
• Peter Nielsen (Statistics Denmark)
• David Gierten (OECD)
• Steven Dhondt (TNO, Netherlands)
• Ilaria Masselli (Centre for European Policy Studies)

The meeting was chaired by Ursula Huws (University of Hertfordshire, UK).

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?

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More about the book series

To purchase books – special half price offer

Copies of the titles in the series will be available for sale at the event at a specially discounted rate – 50% of the cover price. However for technical reasons, credit card sales cannot be processed and all purchases must be made in cash.

The book series
Technological change has transformed where people work, when, how and with whom. Digitisation of information has altered labour processes out of all recognition whilst telecommunications have enabled jobs to be relocated globally. 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.

Aspects of these changes have been studied separately by many different academic experts however up till now a cohesive overarching analytical framework has been lacking. Drawing on a major, high-profile COST Action Dynamics of Virtual Work, this series will bring together leading international experts from a wide range of disciplines including political economy, labour sociology, economic geography, communications studies, technology, gender studies, social psychology, organisation studies, industrial relations and development studies to explore the transformation of work and labour in the Internet Age. The series will allow researchers to speak across disciplinary boundaries, national borders, theoretical and political vocabularies, and different languages to understand and make sense of contemporary transformations in work and social life more broadly.

The first two volumes in the series are already published, with more in the pipeline.

Already Published

Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism – edited by Olivier Frayssé and Mathieu O’Neil

Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age – edited by Eran Fisher and Christian Fuchs

Coming Soon

Virtual Workers and the Global Labour Market – edited by Juliet Webster and Keith Randle

Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism – edited by Ana-Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff

Space, Place and Global Digital Work – edited by Jörg Flecker

The Policy Implications of Virtual Work – edited by Pamela Meil and Vassil Kirov

The Reinvention of Work – by Dominique Méda and Patricia Vendramin

Language Put to Work – by Enda Brophy

Dr Tarek Virani and Professor Rosalind Gill are putting together a book proposal for an edited volume about ‘creative hubs’, developing out of  our research as part of AHRC’s Creativeworks London http://www.creativeworkslondon.org.uk/research/place-work-knowledge/

The term ‘hub’ seems to be everywhere.  Starting in and around 2003, the growth and proliferation of these types of  largely urban industrial agglomeration has been exponential. From San Francisco to London to Moscow to Durban to Hanoi to Shanghai, creative hubs are on the increase. But the academic work on creative hubs is surprisingly scarce. Although the term is currently in wide use in policy circles its actual meaning is not always clear. The term has no commonly accepted definition and has been criticised for lacking clarity as well as being ‘all encompassing’. Hubs have been understood as co-working spaces, studios, incubators, accelerators, districts, quarters, zones and/or a mix of all of the above.  The lack of clarity – let alone consensus – is  especially troubling given that policymakers, research councils, consultants, and governments have been so quick to promote and endorse the effectiveness of creative hubs in catalysing growth and innovation in local creative economies, as well as producing urban regeneration.

We are looking for expressions of interest and abstracts for a book that will look critically at the idea of ‘creative hubs’ from interdisciplinary perspectives including Sociology, Geography, Media and Communications, Culture and Creative Industries,  Critical Policy studies, Gender studies, Race and Ethnicity, and Urban Studies.  Contributions may be empirical studies of actual hubs, or may be theoretical reflections on the concept of creative hubs. We are interested in what ‘creative hubs’ as a notion does performatively/ideologically in particular (global/local) policy contexts; we are interested in where ‘hubs’ are situated in relation to existing ideas such as ‘clusters’ or ‘co-working spaces’; we are interested in critically examining how hubs may intervene in geographies of inequality, austerity and injustice; we are interested to explore how the concept of creative hubs travels and materialises in different contexts, and in exploring how ‘creative hubs’ may relate to ‘knowledge hubs’ or ‘innovation spaces’ – either as an idea or in concrete locations. Above all we hope the volume will start a critical conversation that interrogates the taken-for-grantedness of ‘creative hubs’.

We have approached Palgrave who have expressed interest in considering such a volume.  If you are interested in contributing, please send an abstract to Rosalind.Gill.2@city.ac.uk  by November 13^th 2015.  If accepted, final drafts of chapters will be needed by November 2016.

Rosalind Gill
Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis

Room D610
School of Arts and Social Sciences

City University London

Northampton Square

London EC1V 0HB

rosalind.gill.2@city.ac.uk

Group photo
Report
Programme

The event was organised by the Institute for Development and International Relations (IRMO), based in Zagreb, Croatia.

Course description

Historically, public excitement about new technologies goes through a repetitive cycle. Innovation requires substantial financial support in the form of government and/or venture capital investments. Breakthroughs require large numbers of users and consumers which only a handful of companies manage to obtain. Ideas about novelty and social impact abound in this stage. Once established, companies secure large financial returns and start closing-down innovation in order to establish control and dominance. At that point, national and transnational policy objectives change in order to curtail monopolistic tendencies. The cycle starts over again. The global Internet is in a similar cycle at this point in time. As excitement about the Web 2.0 dwindled down, issues such as privacy, surveillance and commercialisation of online data have emerged to the surface. What was once considered a technological breakthrough, now reveals company policies of cost-reduction by creating globally distributed networks of low-paid and unpaid digital work.

Aim

The aim of this international, multi-disciplinary training school/course for PhD students and early-career researchers ws to bring together perspectives from critical theory, media studies, science and technology studies (STS), design studies, gender studies, as well as policy analysis in order to discuss how digital technologies relate to work, work-life balance and how societies change accordingly. From a critical perspective technologies are used to establish dominance, value extraction, control and perpetuation of the capitalist system through alienated work and shifting of the work-life balance. From a media studies perspective communication technologies enable social and cultural environments that alter media content production, distribution and consumption patterns. STS perspective takes that all technologies are used and interpreted differently, while sometimes also exhibiting characteristics of social agency in various socio-material configurations. From a design perspective it is a challenge to create technologies that will meet and satisfy the constantly changing needs and desires of users. Gender perspective questions how technologies can perpetuate patriarchal structures and contribute to gender digital divide, while also offering emancipatory possibilities. Furthermore, digital technologies present a challenge for policy makers since they develop at a faster rate than national, regional, and supranational (e.g. EU) legislative systems.

This training school/course looked beyond technological, and other, determinisms and instead focuses on technology, first, as a broader organizational, institutional, cultural, political and economic context in which technical systems are embedded; and second, as a concrete socio-technical system with which humans relate. We aim to examine how these contexts shape digital technologies and work, and also how digital technologies are embedded and how they alter the contexts, practices and routines of human work and work-life balance. We are interested in digital technologies and infrastructures, innovation and value creation, peer production, crowdsourcing, creative industries and different methods of studying and regulating these phenomena.

Training school/course directors

• Paško Bilić, Institute for Development and International Relations, Croatia
• Jaka Primorac, Institute for Development and International Relations, Croatia
• Eran Fisher, Open University, Israel
• Pamela Meil, ISF, Munich, Germany
• Bjarki Valtysson, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Juliet Webster, Open University of Catalonia, Spain

Format

The training school/course is organised as a combination of lectures, students’ presentations and discussions. Students will be asked to submit their papers (approx. 15 pages) beforehand and present them during the course in order to receive extensive feedback from the course faculty and other participants.

The language of instruction is English.

Applicants

This training school/course is intended for PhD students and early stage researchers (up to 8 years from finishing their PhD) who will present (parts) of their PhD or other research projects. Contributions can be either theoretical or empirical.

Applicants should have a background in social sciences and humanities or technical sciences with interest in social phenomena. The course is open to approx. 20 international trainees.

Applicants are asked to submit their CV (max. 2 pages), an abstract of their PhD project (max. 2 pages) and the filled-in application form to costis1202@herts.ac.uk
The deadline for applications is 15 January, 2016

Students from COST member countries have the possibility to receive a flat rate grant.

Local organiser

Institute for Development and International Relations

Paško Bilić and Jaka Primorac

Lj. F. Vukotinovića 2/II

1000 Zagreb, Croatia

• a public seminar in Athens on December 3rd, 2015
• a launch of our book series in London on January 21st. 2016
• a meeting of all four working groups and a workshop in Milan on March, 2016
• a training school for PhD students in Dubrovnik in May, 2016
• a workshop for policy makers in Brussels in June, 2016
• a final conference in Lithuania in September, 2016

Watch this space for more details.