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

Huws, Ursula

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583670882 ISBN 13: 9781583670880

Publisher: Monthly Review Press, 2003

Synopsis

The workplace has been changed in recent decades by the rise of digital technologies. Parts of a single labor process can be moved around the world, with implications not only for individual workplaces, but for the working class as a whole.

Within advanced capitalist countries, the workplace has been made more flexible through cell phones, e-mail, freelancing, and outsourcing. The process often makes the situation of the workers more precarious, as they are forced to pay for the tools of their trade, are expected to be constantly accessible to workplace demands, and are isolated from their fellow workers.

Huws' The Making of a Cybertariat examines this process from a number of perspectives, including those of women in the workplace and at home. It explores changing categories of employment and modes of organization, and how new divisions of race and gender are created in the process. It questions how the virtual workforce can identify their common interests and stand together to struggle for them.

The Making of a Cybertariat is both a testament to the author's remarkable record in the politics of technology over several decades and a vital resource for grasping ongoing debates and controversies in this field.

About this title

About the Author

Ursula Huws is Professor of Labour and Globalisation at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, and founder of Analytica Social and Economic Research. She is the author of The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. 

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: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1583670882
• ISBN 13: 9781583670880
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208