I'm impressed by Kihun and Nate's remarks. No specific response to them as yet.
From Slaton on the "Anxious Engineer":
The administrator quote about needing to fail large numbers of students in an open admissions environment shows the orientation of administrators to measurable results that can be presented to higher-ups, trustees, and accreditation agencies. If Deans are managers, then they themselves are being managed and held accountable. Pretty tough on those who are caught below them in the hierarchy.
The poor reception of affirmative action among professionals is parallel to their attitude toward unions. I had an engineering professor who counted as a liberal activist in local politics tell me that he could not belong to the Faculty Association because it would compromise him as a professional engineer.
About the issue of universities' resistance to providing remedial education to cohorts of minority students who require it, there needs to be research on how well the function of institutional research, especially the measurement of educational outcomes for students as opposed to degree production, is being handled in American higher education. No doubt the EPS folks are looking at this, but their work doesn't seem to be getting to people in other academic disciplines who need it.
Nice to see that Slaton has at least one cheer for the progressive impulses of the federal bureaucracy.
From Gordon:
Note his use of the Bourdieu term habitus at the very beginning of his article.
Images from Seinfeld and The office come to mind as background for Gordon's article.
Gordon's Foucault-derived notion of managerialism strikes me as control elevated to a value. Why control by management is off-limits in the workplace discussion makes no sense.
Practical experience showed me that coupling issues of respect for individuals with questioning management practices (Gordon, p. 21: "difference will only work as a guiding principle if it's linked to an antiracism that is explicitly antimanagerial") is effective as a strategy for getting some workplace accountability; management will do almost anything to preserve the fiction that their actions toward individuals are fair and divorced from any private agenda.
Gordon does not touch on the concept of "ownership" and how that muddles the discussion of management prerogative. The supposedly objective, rational organizational structure of American corporations and structures that imitate them is rooted in the origins of enterprises in patriarchal families.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Comment from class blog page
To add to Barbara's and Nate's observations, I'm impressed by the social/ethical focus of the book, and how, by choosing to look at classification, it comes in under the radar of some thorny ideological problems with information labor.
The book seems to take the position that classification is normative, and to proceed to explore the resulting problems. Using the discussion on p. 13 about the work of classification as a starting point, I would argue that work creates labor, which produces class consciousness, which is a form of self-reclassification by a constituency. So the question is whether the presence of classification, standards, and so forth, in the world, is enough social work, or whether we need that additional consciousness of class by laboring people to make political sense of it all.
Bourdieu's work on the self-classification of social groups in France in his book about Distinction is a valuable contribution to understanding this issue.
The book seems to take the position that classification is normative, and to proceed to explore the resulting problems. Using the discussion on p. 13 about the work of classification as a starting point, I would argue that work creates labor, which produces class consciousness, which is a form of self-reclassification by a constituency. So the question is whether the presence of classification, standards, and so forth, in the world, is enough social work, or whether we need that additional consciousness of class by laboring people to make political sense of it all.
Bourdieu's work on the self-classification of social groups in France in his book about Distinction is a valuable contribution to understanding this issue.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Betamax to Blockbuster 2
On Introduction:
This is about videos as a form of print culture, not about technology as such. The story of the inception of video culture and the labor it created is bypassed, because the intermediaries Greenberg describes only participated in the culture for a short time, maybe a decade. The unpaid or low-wage labor they contributed to the scene was so ephemeral that it hardly existed in historical terms. These appear to have been members of the leisure class who joined this movement on their way to another social place. The example of Tarantino illustrates this.
There is a difference between empowerment and power. While the hobbyists or enthusiasts may have felt empowered, the power in the industry lay elsewhere. The real story is how power succeeds in hiding labor, even from labor itself.
p. 7 of Introduction:
I'm uncomfortable with the treatment of the pornographic segment of the industry. Tolerance of pornography, like that of any sex worker, is predicated on the notion that this labor is "free" labor, that is, the sex workers or performers "choose" to be employed in this industry. That is debatable, starting with the quality of the choices made.
We need to shift attention away from issues of pornography as speech to the exploitation of workers in the pornographic industry.
Chap. 1:
The crazed joy of the self-taping enthusiasts reminds me of the Cheech and Chong line: "I played Black Sabbath at 78 and I saw God." Having lived through that moment in history it's hard for me to respect it.
The reference to The prisoner is apt for a couple of reasons: the first summer (1968) the show played the picture tube on our tv went out, followed by the sound, so I saw only flashes and heard only muffled dialogue from the final episodes. I've always wanted to watch the whole thing but have never had the time.
The second reason is that if the video people had thought about it they were living through a phenomenon not unlike the predicament of #6.
Later in ch. 1, the comparison of video people to ham radio operators rings true.
More general response:
Were the video people media dupes or a class with revolutionary potential?
These are not workers, although there is work, labor, present in their environment. If the consciousness of work does not exist, what then?
This is like the Gold Rush of 1849: prospectors were not miners, but amateurs who used the moment to "transition" to a new region and a new set of opportunities. Although they faced considerable risks, they weren't around long enough to be oppressed--the word exploitation fits.
Does the video industry at this stage really fit into the category of hidden information labor we are exploring in class?
This is about videos as a form of print culture, not about technology as such. The story of the inception of video culture and the labor it created is bypassed, because the intermediaries Greenberg describes only participated in the culture for a short time, maybe a decade. The unpaid or low-wage labor they contributed to the scene was so ephemeral that it hardly existed in historical terms. These appear to have been members of the leisure class who joined this movement on their way to another social place. The example of Tarantino illustrates this.
There is a difference between empowerment and power. While the hobbyists or enthusiasts may have felt empowered, the power in the industry lay elsewhere. The real story is how power succeeds in hiding labor, even from labor itself.
p. 7 of Introduction:
I'm uncomfortable with the treatment of the pornographic segment of the industry. Tolerance of pornography, like that of any sex worker, is predicated on the notion that this labor is "free" labor, that is, the sex workers or performers "choose" to be employed in this industry. That is debatable, starting with the quality of the choices made.
We need to shift attention away from issues of pornography as speech to the exploitation of workers in the pornographic industry.
Chap. 1:
The crazed joy of the self-taping enthusiasts reminds me of the Cheech and Chong line: "I played Black Sabbath at 78 and I saw God." Having lived through that moment in history it's hard for me to respect it.
The reference to The prisoner is apt for a couple of reasons: the first summer (1968) the show played the picture tube on our tv went out, followed by the sound, so I saw only flashes and heard only muffled dialogue from the final episodes. I've always wanted to watch the whole thing but have never had the time.
The second reason is that if the video people had thought about it they were living through a phenomenon not unlike the predicament of #6.
Later in ch. 1, the comparison of video people to ham radio operators rings true.
More general response:
Were the video people media dupes or a class with revolutionary potential?
These are not workers, although there is work, labor, present in their environment. If the consciousness of work does not exist, what then?
This is like the Gold Rush of 1849: prospectors were not miners, but amateurs who used the moment to "transition" to a new region and a new set of opportunities. Although they faced considerable risks, they weren't around long enough to be oppressed--the word exploitation fits.
Does the video industry at this stage really fit into the category of hidden information labor we are exploring in class?
Monday, March 5, 2007
From Betamax to Blockbuster excerpts by Greenberg
Time has been short so I'm going to give initial reactions with the option to correct them before class tomorrow.
I think I get the drift of Greenberg's argument, that the distributors and retailers formed a socially dynamic community that sold the public and manufacturers on the market viability of video. I hope that there will be a discussion of how experimental film/video art of the 1960s provided a template for this enthusiast community he speaks of. Before any innovation enters into general consumption it is heralded by a lot of cultural work by somebody. Video as art stemmed from a desire to use the generally poor visual quality of television along with its immediacy for subversive ends.
Some other cautions: while it is important to look at the content of process as well as the content of messages, it is dangerous to be too optimistic about the utopian potential of the process, like Jacques Attali in the book Noise, where he saw boomboxes as the answer to modern music. They were not the answer, just the continuation of modern music by other means and a larger number of actors.
One of Jim Cortada's observations, which I think is true, but could be ominous, is that (rough quote) "every industry followed the same pattern" in adopting IT. If it's the same pattern, then the information content resides in that repeated pattern, not in the industry implementation. What we need to know is the impacts, intended and otherwise on the work and lives of individuals--did they move up or just shift laterally?
I think I get the drift of Greenberg's argument, that the distributors and retailers formed a socially dynamic community that sold the public and manufacturers on the market viability of video. I hope that there will be a discussion of how experimental film/video art of the 1960s provided a template for this enthusiast community he speaks of. Before any innovation enters into general consumption it is heralded by a lot of cultural work by somebody. Video as art stemmed from a desire to use the generally poor visual quality of television along with its immediacy for subversive ends.
Some other cautions: while it is important to look at the content of process as well as the content of messages, it is dangerous to be too optimistic about the utopian potential of the process, like Jacques Attali in the book Noise, where he saw boomboxes as the answer to modern music. They were not the answer, just the continuation of modern music by other means and a larger number of actors.
One of Jim Cortada's observations, which I think is true, but could be ominous, is that (rough quote) "every industry followed the same pattern" in adopting IT. If it's the same pattern, then the information content resides in that repeated pattern, not in the industry implementation. What we need to know is the impacts, intended and otherwise on the work and lives of individuals--did they move up or just shift laterally?
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