| Panel: Cyberspace Economics: New Opportunities and Challenges |
Gary Chapman, Executive Director, 21st Century Project, Austin, TX David Hakken, Professor of Anthropology and Director, Policy Center, State University of New York Institute of Technology, Utica/Rome, NY Ross Rieder, Organizer, Snohomish County Labor Council, AFL/CIO |
Amy Borgstrom: Civic Networking For Community Economic Development: Acenet’s Approach
Amy Borgstrom
Executive Director, ACENET,
Athens, OH
Introduction
Networking works most effectively, as Robert Putnam has powerfully illustrated in Making Democracy Work, in communities that develop a history and norm of working together. It is increasingly clear that there is a direct connection between building healthy regional economies and increasing opportunities for collaboration and participation in civic life. Where citizens have the opportunity to participate in decision making in the realms of government and social service, new opportunities proliferate. We think that civic networks can play a catalytic role in providing opportunities for skill building, collaboration, and support leading to economic growth, and a more responsive and responsible community, as well as equitable access to information.
The vision that drives us is that civic networks can support and amplify the transformation of our low-income community from a preoccupation with problems to an opportunity-seeking orientation. We imagine a community where the relationships are so thick and diverse that small groups of people are continually getting together both face-to-face and through the civic network to create new activities that make our lives and our communities healthier and more prosperous.
For the last five years, ACEnet has experimented with the use of civic networks to enable community-based microenterprise and small business assistance programs to increase their effectiveness. We currently view civic networking and the use of Internet-based applications as a key amplifier of our community-based economic development efforts.
Our current approach consists of three complementary strategies: we use civic networking to link microfirms with high value markets; to create networks of firms and service providers within communities; and to enable community-based microenterprise and small business assistance programs around the country to work collaboratively and learn from one anothers' experience. This approach is based on the assumption that the most lucrative markets require a level of sophistication that can best be achieved if community groups and firms in low-income communities both locally and throughout the country find new ways to work together.
About ACEnet
ACEnet was founded eleven years ago by a group of community members interested in transforming the depressed regional economy in ten counties of rural, Appalachian Ohio. Our efforts are designed to result in a community which is flexible, adaptable, opportunity seeking, and thus able to thrive in the new world economy. ACEnet currently works with over 150 farm families, start-up entrepreneurs, and very small manufacturing firms focusing on high-value specialty markets for specialty food and wood products. Most of these firms are family businesses or have fewer than five employees. Our experience has revealed a critical need for access and training in new technologies for these firms if they are to successfully compete in high-value markets.
In the last five years we have enabled many small firms to computerize their businesses. We operate a program in which firms can lease a donated computer for six to twelve months, then borrow money from the ACEnet loan fund to purchase their own more sophisticated machine.
We have played a lead role in the formation of the Southeastern Ohio Regional FreeNet (SEORF), a community-based information and communication service, or civic network. SEORF provides local and regional information, opportunities for electronic communication, and Internet access. SEORF currently resides on a SUN SPARC 20 workstation provided through a grant to ACEnet from the United States Department of Commerce, and is jointly administered by a steering committee with representatives from the Ohio University Telecommunications Center and Department of Computer Sciences; two local high schools; the local small business development center, and ACEnet.
We have also enabled twenty-six local entrepreneurs to access new markets through the Public WebMarket, an Internet commerce project directed by the Center for Civic Networking (http://civic.net/webmarket). This project not only enables small enterprises to reach distant markets, but it also includes surveys and guestbooks designed to elicit information about the site, the products, and generally provide an excellent profile of potential customers for the participating businesses.
Finally, ACEnet has recently purchased a Web-based conferencing software program and is establishing new user-friendly, interactive discussion forums for small firms, both in southeastern Ohio and in other rural communities. In April 1996, ACEnet hosted a meeting with 10 organizations from low-income communities from around the country who are working with small food processing businesses. The group is now communicating with each other through an electronic mail list to continue to develop the network. During the coming year, interactive forums will be set up so that small enterprises in all of these rural communities will be able to work cooperatively to develop new markets and new product areas.
Markets, Networks, and Collaboration
We currently see ourselves facilitating the convergence of several different movements in the laboratory of our community, and moving this convergence forward into new territory. Community networking was born out of the free-net movement initiated by Tom Grunder and the Cleveland Free-Net in the mid-1980s. Their key features are an emphasis on access for those who cannot otherwise afford it; training in the use of the community network; and the development of local or regional information content. Different community networks emphasize different elements, and more recently, community networks have become increasingly diverse in their audience, focus, and strategies for sustainability in an uncertain funding environment.
Community computing centers, on the other hand, focus on access and training and don't concern themselves with creating content or informational content which is unique to a locality. They have typically been located in poor urban neighborhoods. Industrial modernization centers and telecottages have also focused on creating physical places where individuals can gain new skills and make their businesses more competitive. And both non-profit and for-profit organizations are increasingly inventing civic networking applications for very specific civic purposes, such as online voting, social service information referral services, distance education, and telemedicine.
All of these converging approaches can be described as facets of civic networking. Civic networking is not new. The candidates' forums sponsored by the League of Women voters, a bird watching club, or a community clean-up initiative are examples of civic networking. The difference is that positive community-based joint activities can now occur in both face-to-face situations and be amplified and supported by interactive technologies. Aside from overcoming barriers of distance and geography, computer-based networking can help transform the way people relate to one another, and be employed to facilitate joint activity.
The key elements that need to be developed for civic networking to act as an engine for economic growth are: a compelling vision and genuine excitement about the opportunity; an organization to facilitate the process and build leadership in the community; and sufficient capacity in the community to build local assets, especially in terms of dollars for training and technical assistance. A community culture that includes a track record or tradition of successful collaboration across sectors and jurisdictions is not required for success, but certainly simplifies the process.
In our case we have been building the social infrastructure for collaborative projects for ten years, so that our many partners both locally and around the country are ready to begin to carry out some of these projects in a computer mediated environment. We have face-to-face relationships with over 150 firms with varying degrees of interest in and experience with new technologies. Our vision, capacity to communicate that vision, and commitment to ensuring that southeastern Ohio is able to take advantage of the opportunities represented by civic networking are in place. Our key challenge is to build community assets to develop the technology infrastructure and skill to use it.
The tool we selected to apply to this challenge we call the joint design process. When a problem or need is identified, key community organizations are brought together with small businesses to design a new program or service targeted directly to meet that need. The result is the rapid modernization of small firms engaged in a continual improvement process. The stakeholders not only design and implement new programs and services, but also evaluate, reflect upon, and revise their efforts to accommodate their own learning and rapid change. In this paradigm, the term continuous improvement is not simply applicable to production processes or customer satisfaction, but can describe the learning processes of entire firms, industries, organizations, governments and communities. Civic networking can be used to proliferate and disseminate this learning rapidly among all those involved.
Linking Firms With High Value Markets
One of the current critiques of microenterprise business assistance programs is that the businesses created are so marginal that microentrepreneurs continue to live in poverty. Part of the reason for this is that many self-select local, low-value markets. We are experimenting with an approach that overcomes these limitations: we encourage firms to select higher value sectors-such as specialty food products or computer services-and help sets of potential entrepreneurs link to these markets.
A key characteristic of specialty or high value markets is that they tend to require ongoing, rapid development of new products or services in response to changing needs and trends. Thus, one of the most important services a microprogram can offer entrepreneurs is access to a continual stream of market intelligence-information about trends and market locations that can be used to help firms find customers and develop new products. One way this can be accomplished is by developing an Internet web page that links firms to key data bases and other sources of information targeted to their particular sector. For example, a page designed to meet the needs of specialty food producers might link to a USDA study on freeze-drying technologies for small firms or to a survey of specialty retail stores.
Another strategy is to enable microfirms to market their products or services on the World Wide Web. ACEnet's Public Webmarket project is a cultural marketing site where consumers are able to browse through graphically presented information about locally-produced items and the people who make them, learn about the culture and geography of the community, and conclude their online visit with an order. The site currently focuses on microenterprises located in Appalachian Ohio and the Big Island of Hawai'i, and will soon expand to include small businesses in rural North Carolina. Project participants are currently seeking funds to expand this site so that urban microfirms can become involved by the end of 1996.
Participation in this project has enabled one entrepreneur to turn the living room of her remote country farmhouse into a tiny retail space where she sells herbs that she grows. She's a mom with four kids who had never used a computer before she became involved in the project and accessed a machine through our computer lease program. She is now avidly downloading e-mailed orders and messages from herb enthusiasts around the world, and is also interested in working on telecommunications policy issues relating to universal access in rural areas.
Another project participant, the Cooley family have ancestors who founded the town of Coolville Ohio in the 1840s. Their gourmet vinegars are featured on the Public Webmarket. They had never touched a keyboard before, and now are downloading their own e-mailed orders. More important, they saw early on the power of the medium to break down stereotypes of Appalachian people and describe on the web the fact although they are indigenous Appalachians, they attended the Impressionist exhibit when they were at a trade show in Chicago, and also enjoy the ballet.
Appalachian Ohio has a long history of respect for relationalism, and collaboration, though t his is seldom recognized publicly. Collecting cultural stories from the firms involved in the Public Webmarket, our national online marketing site, to use as part of that site's marketing strategy has been a powerful means to expand our local sense of community. In addition, ACEnet will explore how the Internet can be used to undo some of the damaging cultural stereotyping which has become institutionalized through the media. We will continue to collect these stories, recording the culture of both the historical and current community, and share this with the world via SEORF.
Creating Local Networks of Firms and Assistance Providers
For firms to succeed in the new economy, they must develop a high degree of creative capacity and adaptability. Networks of firms and service organizations can achieve flexibility, economies of scale and lead to the learning that is required to compete in the global business environment. Civic networking can amplify the efforts of networked firms to develop markets and products. For this reason, ACEnet is placing considerable emphasis on developing a model for a civic networking system that amplifies and supports microenterprise access to new markets.
The Southeastern Ohio Regional FreeNet (SEORF) came about when two local high school teachers were able in just over a year to forge a unique collaboration with Ohio University, the local public television station, and various community groups resulting in low-cost public access to local and regional information and the Internet for area citizens. SEORF had its virtual groundbreaking in October of 1995 and now has over 4,000 registered users.
ACEnet is currently working with others in the business and educational community to figure out ways that middle and high school students can start their own businesses to meet the growing need for technology training and technical assistance. A group of students will soon be working on a business plan for a company that will provide hardware and software consulting, systems troubleshooting, repair and rehab, and web page design.
In the meantime, ACEnet continues to run a computer lease program supported by a revolving loan fund whereby very small manufacturing firms lease used, donated machines at an extremely low, negotiated rate. They are also provided with training and technical assistance. This has led, for example, to the Runges, owners of a mom and pop machine shop operation with three employees, to increase their profitability sufficiently to purchase their own more sophisticated system, returning the original leased machine to ACEnet to lend to another firm.
We've also provided this service to Debbie Paxton, Sue Reall, and Shirley Strite, three women with home-based knitting businesses in extremely isolated locations in West Virginia. They serve as coordination, shipping and distribution hubs for a network of about forty home-based knitters working with a non-profit, Appalachian by Design, to open up new markets. With the loaner computers, they are able to exchange CAD files and other business information with each other and their customers, filling orders for custom knitwear that's sold all over the world.
ACEnet will continue to expand its computer lease, loan and training program so that firms have access to the technology. Local computer trainers and specialists have been brought together, both face-to-face and then online, so that they can become acquainted with the needs of the firms and can develop a set of training workshops and an online help desk. In addition, ACEnet is developing tools for community organizations to continually assess their own computer needs and make sure that adequate support is available, both from staff and consultants.
We are currently setting up a firm-to-firm interactive conferencing area on SEORF where private conferences will be available for firms to make deals and work on joint product lines. In addition, specialized training forums-focusing on topics such as equipment options, loan application processes to purchase new technology and so forth-are being organized. A total of ten public access sites, located at four public libraries, the local cable access office, in a main street book store, the Adult Basic Literacy Lab, a small business incubator, a community center, and a business development center serve as virtual offices for area entrepreneurs.
So far results of this local networking have included several new joint ventures. A local pasta firm has worked out an arrangement with a single mother who is interested in starting a Caribbean and African catering business to supply her with an African herb mix to ship with tiger shaped pasta for the Disney Corporation. Four local high schools, the local joint vocational school, and the local community action agency collaborated with ACEnet on a joint proposal to train fifty high school students to own or work in their own computer-based businesses. And the steering committee of the Southeastern Ohio Regional Free-Net was able to develop new policies and design a new user interface using itself as the design and decision making platform.
Enabling Collaboration and Learning Nationwide
Accessing and developing high value markets takes time, skill, and the creation of market-specific support structures. ACEnet has begun a project to experiment with the creation of networks among community-based programs for this purpose. With the support of the Ford Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, ACEnet staff members recently convened a pilot group of ten organizations, all involved in working with specialty food firms, to design a combination face-to-face and online network. Participants included representatives from microenterprise assistance providers, training businesses, and community development corporations from the District of Columbia, Virginia, Maine, New York, Illinois, South Carolina, Ohio, Nebraska, California, and Washington.
This group identified five concrete projects that subgroups are interested in working on together. Some participants are working on formalizing the group's identity, others are focusing on the electronic communication element, and others are looking at specific sub-market areas. Before the face-to-face meeting was over, the group from Maine was developing a supply relationship with the group from Washington State, which has an immediate use for Maine's surplus dogfish population in cancer-preventative nutraceutical products. ACEnet will also be sharing the results of our national experimentation with local firms and service providers.
Challenges
Media attention to the so-called " information superhighway" has created a sense of heightened expectation in our communities that often can't be met due to infrastructure limitations. For example, as the Internet increasingly moves to a graphical, point and click interface, it is difficult for community-based systems to keep up with the technology and offer the services that community members see on TV and in magazines. In addition, the twenty nine counties of Appalachian Ohio are served by six different telephone companies. The only major commercial provider of Internet access that doesn't require a long distance call is also one of the most expensive. In one county there's a long distance charge to call from the high school to the county seat.
ACEnet works in collaboration with other non-profit organizations all over the country in a number of different contexts. The sense of heightened expectation occurs here, too-everyone wants to get online. How do we develop appropriate, affordable platforms for communication, collaboration, and mutual learning with fragmentation? And how do we transfer key group process skills like facilitation to the online environment?
So far in our community, public access to technology has been driven by schools, libraries, public broadcasting, and other non-profits rather than commercial providers. We need to develop ways to design and carry out increasingly sophisticated public/private partnerships to ensure equitable access and innovative applications.
Free-Nets and other community-based or civic networks have played a key role in ensuring affordable public access to local and regional information. In addition, they provide local citizens with the powerful experience of creating and providing information of interest to them to a global audience. But these systems face increasing pressure in terms of maintaining long term sustainability. We need more experimentation in terms of developing hybrid forms where business usage can help defray the operational expenses of providing low-cost, public access.
Due to environmental realities, all non-profits are analyzing or should be analyzing where we are in relationship to markets. In order to survive, we all have to act more like socially responsible businesses and less like charities that need to obtain funding from other charities so we can give away products and services. That old paradigm, aside from no longer being particularly feasible, also leads to an unhealthy relationship between non profits and funders and non-profits and our constituents. A more positive approach is to build upon the social and human assets in our community by becoming social capitalists.
For civic networking initiatives, which include any community effort that uses technology as a tool, to be most effective, the organizations that host and facilitate them must learn to value our own work, realize we have valuable things to offer, cost these items and offer them to targeted markets. In this way we can subsidize our efforts on behalf of those who can't afford these services. Particularly in an information society we have to start giving ourselves credit and realize that we are producing valuable information resources, communication tools, and replicable applications that we can own, market, and for which we can be compensated.
This doesn't mean we have to abandon our values. It means we can sell our value-added products to those that can afford them in order to insure access for those who cannot. Indeed just as we want to insure that our communities can be positioned to access the opportunities available in a global, information based society, so do we.
For example, we are designing ACEnet's Internet presence as a large web with free things in it where customers can move very easily to purchasing things of very high value to them at prices they are willing and able to pay. On SEORF, small food firms can participate in an open discussion forum on market trends for free, but have to subscribe to products such as a digest of specialty food trend information, or order a specific key work search of our database of retail and mail order purchasers for a fee.
This switch to a more entrepreneurial stance means investment up front in assessing needs, creating products, and learning how to carry out a marketing cycle. New applications need to be developed in a market-driven way that resembles the product development cycle in the private sector. We all need to learn about how we can market in the networked environment where there are incredible opportunities for one to one, customized, targeted, and narrowcast marketing.
For more information contact:
June Holley, President jholley@tmn.com
Amy Borgstrom, Executive Director amyb@seorf.ohiou.edu
The Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (ACEnet)
94 N. Columbus Rd.
Athens, OH 45701
Gary Chapman: Community Computing Networks and Hierarchies of Value
Gary Chapman Coordinator
The 21st Century Project
LBJ School of Public Affairs
Drawer Y, University Station
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78713
gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu
Abstract:
The U.S. economy and that of the rest of the world are experiencing increasing income inequality, the product of a wide variety of factors, including technological development. Perhaps the most significant factor is the synergistic relationship between technology and upheavals in the world's "hierarchies of value," or the structures of economic circulation. In previous eras, local hierarchies of value kept money and skills circulating within a community. Vertical markets, technological integration, industry concentration and globalization have all changed this picture dramatically. Now it is common -- indeed the rule -- for locally produced value to be captured by remote companies, companies that are arrayed on a newly forming global pyramid of value. This is perhaps the chief problem of low-income communities, which have seen their local economic bases disappear, replaced by empty lots, closed stores, vacant residences, and unemployment.
In order to reverse this trend, new hierarchies of value need to be created in low-income neighborhoods. Can community computer networks and community computing centers contribute to this? This talk will take a look at the challenges facing community networking activists in promoting economic development, as well as some of the tools that may be at hand.
Outline
Introduction to the problem – The Disappearance of Work
The Case of Wal-Mart – Technological Imperialism
The Problem of "Disintermediation"
Changing Hierarchies of Value – The New Global Pyramid
Intervening in Communities – Creating New Hierarchies
Mobilizing Resources – What Tools Do We Have?
The Biggest Challenge – The Lack of Demand
Conclusion – Community Computing as a Movement
David Hakken: Does Virtual Work Mean Virtual(ly No) Community?
David Hakken, Professor of Anthropology
State University of New York Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome
hakken@sunyit.edu
1. Introduction
Significant changes are taking place in work, both its labor-for-income and unpaid forms, and in technology. What are the connections between these changes? What are the implications of these connections for projects like community computing?
This paper presents one way of conceptualizing the changes taking place at work, the notion that a fourth, cyber-cultural stage in the evolution of the labor process is emerging. Building on research in work sociology and anthropology, this "stage" approach is notable for the way it helps differentiate significant, long-term developments from more ephemeral, short term ones. It shows how, for example, significant changes in the way we work correspond with significant reorganizations of other social processes--e.g., community.
The paper goes on to outline two plausible alternative forms of the new social arrangements which might correspond to a mature cyber-cultural labor process. The "information rich, information poor" form would be essentially a devolution to something like manufacture, with a small proportion of skilled, privileged workers and a mass of marginal, disadvantaged, ex- or para-laborers finding work outside the wage relationship. In contrast, the "cyberspace" form would institutionalize de-commoditized forms of social interaction less tied to place to accomplish a de-centering of social life somewhat away from the labor process.
A strategic approach to community computing initiatives would view them as interventions to promote this "cyberspace" alternative and fight against devolution. Such strategic intervention can only be successful, however, if we understand the kinds of social forces within which we must operate and learn to use the opportunities they present. The paper concludes with some examples of community computing initiatives which appear promising in this regard.
2. The Three Stages of the Labor Process Heretofore
To get to the point where we can appreciate the implications of contemporary changes in the labor process, we must encapsulate several hundred years of recent history, albeit in a severely truncated form divorced from most nuance. At most places on earth sometime within the past 400 years, labor (activity in exchange for a wage or salary) has become the dominant social relationship, the one through which most people, directly or indirectly, obtain their means of subsistence. The term "craft" can usually be applied to the initial forms of the labor process, in that the same person, theoretically at least, was master of, and often actually carried out, all stages of waged activity. The social geography corresponding to the predominance of the craft stage is carried over from the feudalism of a large number of villages, into which craft work was "put out," and a few towns where guild craft work was being transformed into by purchase of labor as a commodity .
The second stage, beginning in the late 18th Century in the North of England, can be called "manufacture." Relatively large numbers of craft workers were collected into structures first called "manufactories" (later shortened to "factories") and the craft labor process was stretched out. This allowed substitution of cheaper "unskilled" labor (the activity of those whose time was less valued socially--initially, children, women, slaves, criminals, and people with visible disabilities) for those aspects of craft processes which required less technical skill. Sometimes this also involved introduction of machinery, but the social innovation of a detailed division of craft activity into simpler repetitive motions, as Adam Smith recognized, was the key innovation. Developed along with the transformation of rural work into labor, manufacture (literally, "to make by hand") corresponded to the rise of the industrial city as the most noticeable entity of social geography.
The third stage, beginning in the late 19th Century, is machinofacture. One of the "problems" of manufacture from the perspective of the capitalist was her dependence upon a small number of skilled manufactory workers. Indeed, the systematic concentration in manufacture of skill in as few "hands" as possible had the consequence of increasing the power of the few skilled workers. Science-based technology was only one of the resources drawn upon to redesign labor processes so that the skilled labor could be eliminated. Machinofacture labor processes are dominated by large, more or less autonomous machines run by "operators" or semi-skilled, as opposed to skilled or unskilled, laborers.
The machinofacture stage was also marked by a corollary expansion of white collar, paper manipulating, essentially ancillary to physical production workers, made necessary by the Tayloristic separation of conception from execution. This parallel paper labor process was staffed by an army of engineers, managers, secretaries, clerks, messengers, filers, accountants, sales staff, etc. This paper process ran along side the physical labor process of production and soon cost as much to run.
Over time, some socially visionary employers like Henry Ford, the success of mass trade unionism, and the state imperatives of mass warfare combined with machinofacture in a social form often called "Fordism." Marked by mass production and mass consumption, the notable social feature of Fordism is the ability, in general, of labors to afford to purchase the things they make. Perhaps the "near" or "working class bedroom" suburb is the distinctive feature of the social geography corresponding to Fordism.
3. Engineering Culture: The Possible Emergence of a Fourth, Cyber-cultural Stage in the Labor Process
Recently, labor has been changing rapidly at the same time computers have become ubiquitous. Most prolix, technological determinist, "Computer Revolution" talk, on the left as well as the right, explains the former in terms of the latter. CR talk needs to be deconstructed into more precise notions about the extent of social transformation to be associated with computerization: Whether it represents a species transformation, a fundamentally new type of social formation, no change of real significance, or a new stage in the current social formation type. I suggest we see the connection between change at work and computing as a further development of the labor process, and thus of the employment social formation, as outlined above.
Twenty five years of work sociology and anthropology, as well as fifteen years of fieldwork in proto-cyberspace, have convinced me that the best way to conceptualize the current changes in work institutions is to speak of the possibility of a fourth stage in the evolution of capitalist- and employment-mediated work. Today's workplace increasingly manifests a second parallel process. At the company which Gideon Kunda calls "Tech," the object of his masterful book, Engineering Culture, new workers take classes in "the culture" and "Tech talk," and all workers participate in and give public testimonials at the periodic speeches by managers which have much more the flavor of a high school pep rally than a New England town meeting.
In this perhaps to become dominant fourth, increasingly virtual, cyber-cultural stage, the wellspring of value added is understood to be the collective performance of the workforce. The successful organization is held to be the one able to realize capital by getting its workers to participate most fully in the act(s) of labor, while at the same time convincing customers of the performance’s authenticity.
In this new stage, it is the effectiveness of the ensemble which results in value formation. However, the thrust of previous evolutions has been to individuate the labor process, to "breaking it down" and inhibit social relations of solidarity. This contradiction is acknowledged by the management literature on "quality," where the key to handling it is located in the ability of the organization to attain a high level of commitment from each individual "spontaneously" rather than coercively. This is why what is called "work" or "organizational culture" is now recognized as central to the reproduction of capital. Whereas machinofacture meant replacing skilled labor with machines wherever possible, the new stage involves something of a retreat from manic mechanization and a re-emphasis on person's capacities readily to participate in performance of culture as the prime source of value added.
When first applied, computers were used largely like other machines in machinofacture, to enable the elimination of skilled labor. As the stage is maturing, however, the role of computers seems to be shifting to the facilitation of cultural performance in the production and realization of value. Indeed, many of the conflicting outcomes characteristic of work practices mediated by Advanced Information Technology (AIT) arise from the contradictions between the older, replacement role of technological artifacts in machinofacture and the newer, supportive role in "cultural cyberfacture."
To an anthropologist, this process of making the culture in the workplace both explicit and representing it as the key to value, a glorious new form of commodity fetishism, is the contemporary workplace development worth watching. This development has significant practical implications as well. There is a large business literature indicating that the profitability correlates of advanced information technology (AIT) are highly variable. Variation in the degree of success in the production and marketing of workplace culture is the best explanation for variation in the profitability correlates of AIT. It is their contribution to the production of workplace culture which is the characteristic most predictive of AITs contribution to profitability.
4. Some "Virtual" Phenomena at Work Whose Existence is Explicable in Terms of the Cyber-cultural Labor Process
That the relationship of computing to the rise of the cyber-cultural labor process is highly ideological is suggested by Ken Erickson’s recent studies of meatcutting in the US Midwest. While aware of the extensive interest in and talk about computer-based machines for high tech animal disassembly, Erickson finds virtually none of these rhetorically featured artifacts actually in use "on the shop floor." Instead, the only significant recent technological innovation has been to increase to three the number of protective layers (of leather) worn by workers. This "armor" separates meat cutters' activities from their own and their colleagues bodies, while they continue to disassemble carcasses, hung from automated moving overhead chains, in more or less the same way they have since the 1880s.
While the actual labor process has changed little, what has changed is the virtual elimination of trade unions from the industry, elimination of most of the experienced workforce, a drastic cut in average wages, a substantial decline in substantive worker skill as well as length of employment ( which in the plant Erikson studied now averages about six months), an increase in workplace accidents, and a shift to Third world workers. Accompanying these changes, which are similar industry-wide, is a noticeable growth in time spent on safety training, QWL, and other "culture" committees. All these factors, including the last, are encountered so frequently that we are justified in seeing them as parts of a new meatcutting regime.
In new age meatcutting, one can only assume that the primary role of computing--frequently invoked but rarely used--is ideological. The technological incantations performed here wrap a particular workplace intervention with the aura of general inevitability. As the technological "bridge to the future" decouples space from place, work is decentered from the material and recentered on the cultural.
At a place like Sun Microsystem with its high turnover rates, it is the need to make work public which accounts for the expanded army of "culture workers"--trainers, information sharers, communication specialists--as well as the huge time allocated to "team building" and similar activities. As such organizations reinvent themselves as "virtual," the "terms and conditions" of the job become more difficult to define, but the actual social interactions at work become more important. My colleagues and I at the State University spend an increasing proportion of our time responding to ever-more bizarre initiatives to form badly-conceived "partnerships" and "strategic alliances," coupled with thinly veiled attacks on the very notion of accessible public higher education. I call this the Ivan Boesky/hostile takeover era in public higher ed. Increasingly, as at Kunda’s Tech, the business of the contemporary organization, working through BPR, TQM, JAD, QWL, etc., is the production and manipulation of culture, the marketing of the organization itself, even to itself, rather than goods or services.
In an earlier era, the problem of how to design a usable computer was conceived in individualistic, psycholgistic (as well as sexist) terms, e.g., the "man/machine interface." As evidenced by the popularity of approaches like Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Groups Support Systems, Joint Application Design and Participatory Design, computer professionals have apparently finally discovered what work ethnography knew all along: That work is a profoundly social activity. The design problem of cyberspace has thus become how to develop information systems that support work socially.
At Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the answer is, "through ubiquitous computing." This is the partly a question of designing office environments with the equivalent of "a monitor in every sandbox": "live" white boards which, like an Apple Newton, automatically convert written script into digitized information, one of a wide range of Input/Output devices which allow rapid access everywhere. More important than the hardware, however, is the conceptual shift involved in making everyone equally responsible for the shared data bases to which they all have equal access. In particular, for such environments to work, information must be a truly shared resource, not something held by those with power.
Organizational theorists are no longer the only ones to have less and less tolerance for the traditional hierarchical organization, in which information flowed up from the bottom, and control flowed down from the top. Instead, we get
· "Team" forms of organization, and more cooperative, role-permeable, basketball or soccer-like, rather than football-like, teams;
· Matrix organizations, where people take up multiple roles in different projects, based on their personal preferences, and where there is no permanent responsibility structure;
· Internal networks, perhaps congeries of mini-hierarchies, teams, and matrixed projects, within the ‘same" organization; and/or
· External networks, similar to internal ones except that they cross organizational as well as geographic boundaries.
In such situations, it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about "the organization" and "the work" as we have in the past; both organizations and work practices become "virtual."
5. Possible Social Correlates of Virtual Work
Forth generation virtual labor processes frequently interact with important social practices in other domains.
It is but a short step from making computing possible everywhere in an organization to seeing an organization as possible wherever there is computing. Contemporary organizations are increasingly decoupled from place. For at least some organizations, this also means their boundaries become socially permeable as well as geographically diffuse.
For example, Phil Endress, the Mental Health Commissioner with whom I work in Oneida County, New York, likes to describe his job as "reinventing government outside of government." Initially, this meant privatization; his office has gone from employing over 130 people, most of whom were involved in delivering mandated mental health services to indigent clients, to about six. Those who were privatized are delivering similar services to similar clients, but they are employed by twenty or so not-for-profit agencies on thirty-odd different contracts.
But only for the moment. The "end of welfare as we know it," managed care, and block granting together mean further changes. For example, the 15 Heath Maintenance and Behavioral Health Care Organizations interested in managing public funds under contract in Oneida County will not want to have to contract with each service agency, let alone each private service provider. "Networking" is the future for those organizations which are to survive when programs are no longer mandated but outcomes are. Similarly, without services to provide, or regulations to enforce, what happens to the County Mental Health Department? Does it disappear, or does it find the new kinds of roles:
· mediator between HMOs/BHCOs, on the one hand, and networks of providers on the other;
· facilitator of networking, through identifying and removing blocks to establishing relationships;
· collector of data and promoter of information sharing, both about existing organizations and of data about populations served and unmet needs; and
· monitor of the public good, especially identifying "holes in the safety net."
My point is that such virtual organizations are increasingly likely to be the mode. This is not primarily driven by technological artifacts but because of Technology Actor Networks created by the coming together of new social policies, other social developments, and new artifacts: Despite my best efforts to find them, I know of very few NFPs which use AIT to model, let alone create, these new virtual organization TANs. Instead, like most private and public organizations, they use AIT, if at all, for management information systems, not as general systems for directing organizational change and strategy.
The mark of the stabilization of each of the previous transitions in the labor process was the development of a distinct social geography: the city with manufacture, and the working class suburb with machinofacture. What social geography will eventually correspond to the developments I’m labeling "virtual work," even if such forms will ever constitute a stable form, remains unclear. There are, I think, two possibilities worth considering.
Option one is a social geography characterized by an "information rich, information poor" fault line (see, e.g., Jeremy Rifkin’s, The End of Work). The specter raised in popular accounts is that of a small group of highly qualified, AIT "with it" individuals who derive substantial social privilege from their control of the technical infrastructure of cyber-cultural labor processes. A mass of "non-techies," in contrast, find themselves without social support because of their marginal role in the dominant labor process, with unstable or no job, living in deteriorating cities or suburbs, in "Max Headroom-," "New Jack City-", Neuromancer-, He, She, and It-like states of social collapse. Their "communities" increasingly exist in only the merest empirical sense. Public sector programs have largely disappeared, and states shrunken to more or less ineffective apparatuses of repression.
This option, in social formation reproduction terms, is more accurately seen as a devolution back to a social geography quite like that associated with manufacture. A break in the Fordist social contract has taken place, with masses unable to purchase the goods produced. Indeed, the revival of virtual "home work" has been identified by some as evidence of a neo-craft, "putting out," often labeled "neo-craft" but better called "neo-feudal" labor process.
The other plausible option is harder to define. This "cyberspace" form, by institutionalizing de-commoditized forms of social interaction less tied to place, would also be marked by a shift of social interaction out of the labor process. The, at least in identity terms, relatively more "labor free" individual (this term was suggested to me by ex-coal miners in the English North) would construct an identity out of multiple both physical and virtual activities. Those most able to contribute to the social construction of such relationships would be valued out of the recognition that they provide the essential quality necessary for value realization of any form, including as capital. An increasing range of social relations would be, relatively speaking, decommoditized. Increasingly, such individuals would construct relationships of solidarity in cyberspace as well as "IRL."
Early in the computer era, the typical use of computers to replace workers pointed toward devolution to neo-manufacture as a more likely option than cyberspace. Recent waves of downsizing and contractions in effective local, regional, and national state powers can also been seen as more compatible with option one.
However, the fact that downsizing has generally not occurred in phase with the most extensive computerization, and that the phasing of computerization and declining state power are similarly weakly related, leave room for doubt. Moreover, the labor process can be framed in more collective terms (as in, for example, computer-supported cooperative or group work) and given more semiotic, less simplistically materialist readings of the role in it of cultural performances. A labor theory of value, re-energized in this way, helps explain the retreat from Taylorism in cyber-cultural labor processes as strategic, not just tactical.
6. Virtual Community or Virtually No Community
To repeat: it is not at all clear that the possible forth stage will, along with the necessary distinct social geography, stabilize. Whether new labor processes like virtual or telecommuting work are to be associated with a new mode of employment society, or whether they imply reversion to "division of labor" manufacture or even "putting out" is yet to be determined. As with other social innovation, however, it is important to realize that a major source of this indeterminacy is itself social: the outcome depends upon how people act. Given the options I have outlined, do we choose to act collectively in ways more likely to result in option two, "cyberspace," or don’t we?
To illustrate what I mean, consider the miserable state of the labor movement in the United States, something on which I feel I can comment given my moderately extensive career as both a labor activist and work scholar. The business unionism model in the US (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the political unionism of Britain and Sweden) appear to be less and less relevant. In a labor process organized around cultural performance, the role of a trade union dedicated strictly to collective bargaining would be more marginal even if the dynamic force of capital reproduction had remained the same. As a representative form, and as a form organized to defend worker rights by forcing both work force and manager to lump workers, collective bargain-based trade unions can both interfere with individual performance and stifle work-group collective innovation.
At times in their history, however, US trade unions have been less tied to collective bargaining. As social unionism, conceived in broader social terms, they have unleashed collective social and well as individual creativity. Nordic experiments involving and legislation mandating worker participation in the design of work suggest some new terrain on which such a social unionism for the contemporary era might be built. If able to transcend dependence upon localism, a trade union movement could be built around extending more substantive forms of worker participation, especially identification of those points where the logic of capital reproduction interfere with the work process and general social, as well as worker, well-being. At a minimum, to be successful such trade unions would have to establish strong links with other progressive social movements, perhaps in coalitions regarding large civil technology projects or other consumer issues.
The glaring contradiction between the vision of individual empowerment and the elimination of collective empowerment in the new model of the labor process remains itself a potential source of inspiration for new democratic social movements. It is within this context that I feel strategic views of community computing should be developed. Such projects, for example, seem to me to be rich in possibilities for identification of non-place bound but quite effective forms of solidarity; the net has already demonstrated its value as a tool for communicating outside of broadcast and official channels, as well as a way to alert public opinion and organize at least some forms of support--e.g., the Zapatistas, or more currently, the virtual guerrillas of Columbia. This seems to me to be a rich area for the kind of collaboration between community computers and researchers for which Doug Schuler has called.
7. Conclusion
In conclusion, I draw your attention to EP Thompson’s pithy characterization of workers, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963): As being a significant presence at their own social birth. Like the Chartists, Luddites, and Republicans to which Thompson draws attention, late Twentieth Century cybernauts can only chose to be more or less reluctant co-creators of the future; we are, perhaps by changing forms of work, compelled to be colonizers of one sort or another. Community computers can also chose to create together or separately, but by exploiting the potentials provided by this possible transition to a new form of the labor process we are like to be more effective.