The Making of a Cybertariat : Virtual Work in a Real World - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0850365376 ISBN 13: 9780850365375

Publisher: Monthly Review Press, 1888

Synopsis

A new global labour force is being created working in call centres, homes and electronic sweatshops. New technologies are also transforming daily life. This book presents a coherent conceptual framework within which these developments can be understood. - Explains the impact of technology on the workplace, and relates its arguments and analyses to the work-situations of real people, showing how larger trends influence daily activities and shape the possibilities of collective action. - A portrait of working conditions experienced by both men and women, but focuses especially on the double impact on women both as workers and as consumers.. - Foreword by Colin Leys-a well-known figure in Marxist political analysis- describing the unique contribution of Huws's work. In the development of a new feminist-influenced political economy - Huws has been engaged with the social meaning of the new digital technologies from their first introduction into the workplace in the 1970s. Avoiding technological determinism, Huws locates developments in a long economic and political trajectory, so that their significance for understanding globalisation processes stands out clearly.

About this title

About the Author

URSULA HUWS has been a researcher, an activist and a commentator on labour and technology issues since the 1970s. Her writings have appeared in the Socialist Register, the New Statesman, Das Argument and many other journals. COLIN LEYS is Emeritus Professor at Queen's University in Ontario, and is the author of Politics in Britain.

Review

These essays chart the transformation of work and technology with an acute theoretical originality. Ursula Huws has the rare ability to cut through existing abstract models with a clarity based on an immense practical understanding. The implications of The Making of a Cybertariat are far reaching in rethinking a radical strategy for the future.

--Sheila Rowbotham, author of Promise of a Dream, Women, Resistance, and Revolution and Hidden from History

The moments when a fresh impulse is given to the social sciences by an original spirit deserve to be celebrated, and making the feminist political economy of Ursula Huws available to a wider public is such a moment.

--Colin Leys, emeritus professor of Queen's University, Ontario

Author of Market-Driven Politics

Ursula Huws is without peer as an analyst of life in contemporary capitalism. Her range of knowledge and experience is breathtaking. . . . Her ability to understand the revolution in microeletronic technology and connect it to the transformations of work, the restructuring of gender and class, and the commodification of every facet of social life exemplifies what feminist political economy can do at its very best. . . . Not only a truly educational experience but also a thoroughly enjoyable one.

--Leo Panitch, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy York University, Toronto

Huws is in the myth-busting business. She does it with razor-sharp analysis and wit.

--Joan Greenbaum, professor of Computer Information Systems, LaGuardia Community College and author of Windows on the Workplace

About this edition

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Publication date: 1888
• ISBN 10: 0850365376
• ISBN 13: 9780850365375
• Binding: Paperback