Paolo Carpignano
Bio
| Paolo Carpignano is Associate Professor of Sociology and Media Studies at The New School in New York, where he is the coordinator of the Master /Ph.D. program in the Sociology of Media. Writer, consultant and producer for production companies in the United States, Brazil, and Italy. Author of articles in Sociology, Social History and Media Theory, and co-author of Crisis and Workers' Organization and The Formation of the Mass Worker in the USA. He is the author of the online project Televisuality. and he is currently working on a book on the relationship between work and media. |
Abstract
Old skill, new skill, or no skill?
The paper will trace the genealogy of the current crisis of work by revisiting the canonical transition between fordism and post-fordism, and will propose an historical and conceptual context for the discussion of digital labor. But rather than focusing on the institutional changes in labor processes and management strategies, it will look at them from the point of view of the changing nature of skill. Thus, the paper will critically examine notions such as craftsmanship, deskilling, multitasking which have been used to describe the quality of labor in manufacturing, mass production and distributed production, and in so doing it will question traditional dichotomies such as unproductive and productive labor, employment and unemployment, expertise and amateurism, free labor and waged labor, etc. In particular, the paper will focus on the present financial crisis and what it dramatically reveals about the structural changes taking place in the nature of labor practices. It will be argued that the financialization of daily life and the systemic condition of “precarity” and “forced entrepreneurship” are but some aspects of the blurring of the distinction between labor skills and “naked living”. Ultimately, the paper wants to be a contribution to the questioning of the notion of labor, not only as an analytical category but also as subjective practice.