INTRODUCTION

As we noted in Chapter 2, one argument suggests we have entered a new informational and network economy predicated on ‘knowledge generation, information processing, and symbol communication’ (Castells 2000: 17). For Castells, technological networks are therefore an excellent illustration of the power of culture at work in today's society. While networks are ‘complex structures of communication constructed around a set of goals that simultaneously ensure unity of purpose and flexibility of execution by their adaptability to the operating environment’ (Castells 2009: 21), their common properties reside not in these structural characteristics as such, but in their cultural and communicative qualities (Castells 2009: 20; see also Lash 2002; Lash and Urry 1994). Other theorists similarly argue that we have witnessed a shift towards ‘workerless factories’ in which people conduct day-to-day work activities outside the confines of physical offices, and are assisted to do so by the likes of global information flows, high-technology, computerisation, tertiary occupations and flexible working hours. Some further argue that these ‘cognitive’ abilities accumulated inside and outside of work, associated with everyday cultural and social life, and ‘interacting with automated and computerised … systems’, are now ‘directly productive of capital’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 132–3; emphasis added). That is to say, everyday life, culture, creative and informational workplaces are today part thought to be ‘productive’ (see also Böhm and Land 2012; Fish and Srinivasan 2011; Fleming 2015).

This chapter, like the others, disputes some of these core ideas about the contemporary economy, and does so by drawing on arguments made throughout the book. First, we will challenge in this chapter the assertion that these relatively new workplaces can be automatically counted as being part of productive capital. Instead, many of the changes that have occurred in the digital workplace are mediated through, and following Mandel (1971), ‘industrialised’ ways of working in unproductive commercial sectors, which are founded on the ‘mechanisation, standardisation, over-specialisation and parcellisation of labour’ (Mandel 1971: 387). That is to say, the increasing rationalisation and standardisation of work, which is often similar to that found in Fordist factories, operates in unproductive circuits and sectors with an emphasis on decentralised work structures (Sawchuk 2013; Sweet and Meiksins 2008: Tomaney 1994).