Technological change is often be viewed as an exogenous force, a deus ex machina “outside the domain of economic theory” (Schumpeter 1911:11), or an endogenous force, subordinate to the institutional régulation of capitalism (Gentili et al. 2020; Montalban et al. 2019; Spencer 2017). Drawing on neo-Schumpeterian and régulation theory, this paper sublates these antithetical positions to form an alternative approach that re-examines the […]
Category: Research
Cloudwork is absorbing an increasing proportion of the world’s labour and has been significantly boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic (ILO, 2021). We use cloudwork to refer to remotely performed labour mediated by digital labour platforms – companies that connect workers with clients through a digital interface, exert control over and extract value through the labour process […]
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The Wage Theft Epidemic
Originally published for Tribune. Every society with a concept of property also has a concept of theft. They are mutually constitutive, as Proudhon argued in 1840. To privatise public land is a form of theft; to alienate an object from its rightful owner is a form of theft; to plagiarise another person’s idea is a […]
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How Value Weaponises the Machine
See original here. For some time now, a façade of techno-optimism has obscured the political reality that technology is not neutral. While Marx saw both oppressive and liberatory potential in technological systems, recent narratives have tended to neglect how technology has historically been used to deepen exploitation, rather than to overcome it. In his new book, Breaking […]
The coronavirus is an exogenous shock to the global economy, causing panic in the financial markets, a jobs apocalypse and an unprecedented crisis in health services. At the same time, the necessary safety measures are challenging the very nature of work and human sociality. Social distancing and lockdowns have been implemented around the world and in many […]
Below is a series of three blogs (part 1, part 2, part 3) I wrote for Autonomy last year on the history of intelligent machines. This serves as an introduction to anyone curious about artificial intelligence and how it might shape the future of digital automation in work and society more generally. Introduction The notion […]
Image Credit Chris Koch Reposted from Salvage Quarterly According to the speculations of techno-futurologists, left and right, the machines are here to liberate us. Most of the discourse is dominated by the neoliberal right such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and Andrew Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England. Their arguments, avoiding questions […]
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A Note on Fieldwork
A key element of the fieldwork involves the contrasting narratives of management and workers with regard to conflict and cooperation in the workplace. Through exploring contrasting accounts between workers and mangers at the sectorial level, I will be able to articulate the politics of ‘service’ production in the workplace. From the data, I hope to be […]
Currently, there is resurgence in scholarship on Marxian conceptions of value. However, much of the discourse has remained within the realms of heterodox economics, political economy, and philosophy. I would like to set out a new line of inquiry, which shifts the aims of this research from the abstract and quantitative toward the concrete and qualitative. Following this line, we will investigate aspects […]
My research aims to investigate the politics of service production in the UK hotel sector through exploring experiences of work, specifically with regard to labour processes and management. As service industries have come to dominate many advanced economies, studies of work have increasingly moved toward the areas of health, finance, and education. However, with few exceptions, […]
Matthew Cole 