Factory

Factory
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 870
Release: 1915
Genre: Factory management
ISBN:

Vols. 24, no. 3-v. 34, no. 3 include: International industrial digest.

The Digital Factory

The Digital Factory
Author: Moritz Altenried
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2022-01-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022681548X

"In recent years, tech companies such as Google and Facebook have rocked the world as they have seemingly revolutionized the culture of work. We've all heard stories of lounges outfitted with ping pong tables, kitchens with kombucha on tap, and other amenities that supposedly foster creative thinking. Nothing could seem further from earlier workplaces associated with a different revolution in capitalism: factories, in which employees are required to perform highly circumscribed tasks as quickly as possible to meet quotas--for next to no pay. However, as Moritz Altenried shows in The Digital Factory, these types of workplaces are not so far from the Googleplex as we might think. While recent accounts of the transformation of labor after the demise of the factory highlight the creative, communicative, immaterial, or artistic features of contemporary labor, Altenried uncovers the factory-like conditions in which many new digital workers perform their jobs. These workers, such as video game testers, social media content moderators, and Amazon fulfillment center workers, perform highly repetitive, unskilled tasks for low and often contingent wages. Based on more than five years of research in different sites using ethnography and interviews combined with an analysis of infrastructural technologies, Altenried's book gives us a first-hand account of many new forms of digital labor that drive contemporary capitalism. He shows that though today's factories might look and feel different than they did 150 years ago, they still follow the same logics and produce the same unequal outcomes"--

Manufacturing Consent

Manufacturing Consent
Author: Michael Burawoy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2012-10-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022621771X

Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consent is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.

System

System
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 700
Release: 1921
Genre: Business
ISBN:

Amoskeag

Amoskeag
Author: Tamara K. Hareven
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1995
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780874517361

How the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company shaped the social, ethnic, and economic existence of Manchester, New Hampshire during America's rise as a manufacturing power.