What price flexibility? The casualisation of women's employment

FdR – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Teleworking practice in small and medium-sized firms: Management style and worker autonomy

In an empirical study of teleworking practices amongst small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in West London, organisational factors such as management attitudes, worker autonomy and employment flexibility were found to be more critical than technological provision in facilitating successful implementation. Consequently, we argue that telework in most SMEs appears as a marginal activity performed mainly by managers and specialist mobile workers

On the move: Twentieth anniversary editorial of the European Journal of Cultural Studies

Twenty years of the European Journal of Cultural Studies is a cause for celebration. We do so with a festive issue that comes together with our first free open access top articles in three areas that readers have sought us out for: postfeminism, television beyond textual analysis and cultural labour in the creative industries. The issue opens with freshly commissioned introductory essays to these three thematic areas by key authors in those fields. In addition, the issue offers new articles showcasing the range of the broad field of cultural studies today, including pieces on the politics of co-working, punk in China, Black British women on YouTube, trans-pedagogy and fantasy sports gameplay, featuring work by emerging as well as established scholars. Our editorial introduction to this celebratory issue offers reflections on how both the journal and the field of cultural studies have developed, and on our thoughts and ambitions for the future within the current conjuncture as we ‘move on’ as a new editorial team

Marx’s "Capital"in the Information Age

This article argues that a media and communication studies perspective on reading Marx’s Capital has thus far been missing, but is needed in the age of information capitalism and digital capitalism. Two of the most popular contemporary companions to Marx’s Capital, the ones by David Harvey and Michael Heinrich, present themselves as general guidebooks on how to read Marx, but are actually biased towards particular schools of Marxist thought. A contemporary reading of Marx needs to be mediated with contemporary capitalism’s structures and the political issues of the day. Media, communications and the Internet are important issues for such a reading today. It is time to see Marx not just as a critic of capitalism but also as a critic of capitalist communications

Paradoxical autonomy in Japan’s platform economy

Crowdsourcing firms, their client firms and the government in Japan have advocated that crowd work provides opportunities for workers to enjoy autonomous working practices, enabling subpopulations such as women and the elderly who would otherwise be excluded from the labour market to find employment. This is far from the case. Instead, crowdsourcing is perhaps better considered a means, enabled by technological advances, by which to flexibilise the labour market. We have been witnessing a shift in the forms of domination and control imposed on labour from a direct, physical and onsite type of control to an indirect mechanism of domination that has rendered workers less visible while suppressing wages. This further implies that the paradoxical autonomy of crowd work is embedded in contemporary antagonism in Japanese employment relations

The Information Economy and the Labor Theory of Value

This article discusses aspects of the labor theory of value in the context of the information industries. First, taking the Temporal Single-System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s labor theory of value as methodology, the paper calculates economic demographics at the level of socially necessary labor time and prices of an example case. Second, the paper questions the assumption that the labor theory of value cannot be applied to the information industries. This paper tests this hypothesis with an analysis of the development of labor productivity in six countries. The paper concludes that the labor theory of value is an important tool for understanding the information economy and the peculiarities of the information commodity

‘Contextualizing and Critiquing the Fantastic Prosumer: Power, Alienation and Hegemony’

Abstract The ‘prosumer’ has emerged to become a central figure in contemporary culture. Through the melding of production with consumption, both mainstream and progressive analysts conceptualize prosumption to be a liberating, empowering and, for some, a prospectively revolutionary institution. In this article, these fantastic associations are critically assessed using an approach that situates prosumption activities, including contemporary online applications often referred to as ‘cocreation’, in three social-historical contexts: capitalism as a political economy dominated by mediated abstractions; capitalist society as a hierarchical order; and alienation as a pervasive norm. Among other conclusions, we find that prosumption (particularly its Web 2.0 iterations), constitutes an emerging hegemonic institution; one that effectively frames and contains truly radical imaginations while also tapping into existing predilections for commodity-focused forms of self-realization

Conservative Fragments in Bacterial 16S rRNA Genes and Primer Design for 16S Ribosomal DNA Amplicons in Metagenomic Studies

Bacterial 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) amplicons have been widely used in the classification of uncultured bacteria inhabiting environmental niches. Primers targeting conservative regions of the rDNAs are used to generate amplicons of variant regions that are informative in taxonomic assignment. One problem is that the percentage coverage and application scope of the primers used in previous studies are largely unknown. In this study, conservative fragments of available rDNA sequences were first mined and then used to search for candidate primers within the fragments by measuring the coverage rate defined as the percentage of bacterial sequences containing the target. Thirty predicted primers with a high coverage rate (>90%) were identified, which were basically located in the same conservative regions as known primers in previous reports, whereas 30% of the known primers were associated with a coverage rate of <90%. The application scope of the primers was also examined by calculating the percentages of failed detections in bacterial phyla. Primers A519–539, E969–983, E1063–1081, U515 and E517, are highly recommended because of their high coverage in almost all phyla. As expected, the three predominant phyla, Firmicutes, Gemmatimonadetes and Proteobacteria, are best covered by the predicted primers. The primers recommended in this report shall facilitate a comprehensive and reliable survey of bacterial diversity in metagenomic studies