Documents Webster, Juliet 8 results

"Across all the advanced economies, vast swathes of working life are undergoing a series of major upheavals. Over the last thirty or so years, the deindustrialization of the major western economies, the emergence of new economic powerhouses, the global entrenchment of neoliberalism, and the associated shake-up of the capital-labor contract have all radically altered the landscape of employment and work across the globe. In the context of these capitalist dynamics, work is undergoing a further transformation as a whole raft of jobs and tasks are now secured or performed online by means of mobile digital devices, and cheap, widely available Internet access. New areas of work and skill are emerging, while existing jobs are now done in radically different ways as working online becomes ever more pivotal to the professional lives of significant numbers of people. ..."

"The emerging world of virtual work is not tied to physical workplaces or particular locations, but is dispersed and footloose. It is frequently precarious, and blurs the boundaries between work and non-work, production and consumption. Contributors to this wide-ranging volume of case studies identify the growing and diverse army of virtual workers. Building from an overarching introduction which discusses the salient features of virtual work, this collection considers the challenges in analysing the class position of virtual workers. Virtual Workers and the Global Labour Market features international examples of emerging occupations and working conditions in new media, gaming, journalism, advertising and branding, software development and offshore services. Cross-disciplinary insights from across the social sciences inform contributions on labour market entry, employment relations, precariousness, the dynamics of virtual teams, and cyberbullying, in order to illustrate the diversity of virtual work, its circumstances and its labour force."

"Juliet Webster's book is the fifth title in the Longman Sociology Series of undergraduate texts which combines theoretical debates and empirical research in an accessible way. Webster's book covers the issue of technology and gender relations at work offering a novel approach to the ways in which gender relations shape the design, development and implementation of technologies and how gender relations are also shaped by technologies themselves. Gender and technology, in other words, are 'mutually constitutive' and this argument is developed in the opening chapter of the book. Reviewing the theoretical literature on women's work and technology, Webster opts for a 'social constructionist' view of technology which emphasises that technology is not just about physical artifacts but the product of human knowledge and human activities as well. She combines it with a feminist perspective by locating women's relationship to technology in the context of patriarchal and capitalist relations which have historically excluded women from information technology and this exclusion has been reproduced in contemporary work and employment. Webster's position is clearly expressed against the backdrop of a thorough review of women, employment and technology which students will find invaluable."