News from Analytica Social and Economic Research Ltd.

News from Analytica

Occasional newsletter from Analytica, July, 2000.

SHARP RISE IN TELEWORKING IN THE UK

The results of the Spring 2000 UK Labour Force Survey are now out and reveal a rapid growth in technology-dependent homeworkers. - up to 1.5 million, from 1.2 million a year ago, a 19% increase. People working from home and requiring a telephone and computer to do so now account for 5.5% of the British workforce. Including the people who use these technologies but say that they could manage remotely without them brings the total up to 1.8 million - 7% of the workforce. Only three out of ten of these teleworkers are women, confounding the stereotype of the female homeworker. A fuller breakdown of the figures can be found here

EMERGENCE NEWS

Research on the EMERGENCE project is now well under way. The questionnaire for the employer survey has been translated into seventeen languages and pilotted successfully and the main fieldwork phase has now commenced. The results will be analysed in the Autumn and launched at a conference in Budapest on October 24th and 25th, to be called Where in the World? E-work Location in a Digital Global Economy(Okay, I know...but you have to have an acronym to apply for funding to the European Commission and this more or less makes 'WEDGE'). This conference will bring together a diverse range of participants including people from regional development agencies, academic researchers, statisticians, various international bodies, corporations and NGOs with an interest in the delocalisation of work using information and communications technologies. The emphasis will be on identifying policy agendas rather than research for research's
sake. But of course the results will also inform the next stage of the project's work, which will involve more qualitative work.

We think the conference will be really exciting. There will be case-studies from India, South Africa, Morocco, Canada and Australia as well as various regions in the EU and Eastern Europe. We are trying to get as broad a spread of representation as possible with a limited number of places so attendance will be by invitation. But if you feel you deserve an invitation please email me on analytica@dial.pipex.com and we'll consider it. We are still not sure whether we will have money to subsidise attendance but in cases of hardship will do our very best.

More information on EMERGENCE (which stands for Estimation and Mapping of Employment Relocation in a Global Economy in the New Communications Environment) can be found here

WHAT TO CALL IT? PART 2

The discussion in the last newsletter about what term to use for office/information/knowledge/tele/white-collar/e-work provoked quite a few responses from readers. One of the most interesting was from Alice de Wolff in Toronto, who commented, 'Our experience is that there are two issues - one, to find an adequate description, and two, to find one that the workers involved relate to. We haven't managed to bring them together in any satisfactory way. When we use language
other than "office workers", or "administrative professionals" (not my favourite), or "administrative assistants", the people who do the work don't think it's about them. I am most comfortable with "information workers", because I actually think it describes much of the work very well, and suggests a central location in the "information economy". I use it, and "front line information workers" when I'm speaking with groups of office workers, and think it works well when used in context. But if we try to use it as a title of a document, event, etc., very few people relate.'

As a result of this contact I am now the proud owner of the excellent An Activist's Guide for Front-Line Office Workers written by Alice de Wolff for the Ontario Federation of Labour (published in 1998). Amongst much other good stuff, it includes an interesting section on 'principles of fair conduct for temporary employment agencies'. Further details from http://www.ofl-fto.on.ca

WOMEN GIVE TECHNOLOGY A NEW IMPULSE

This inadequate translation doesn't begin to capture the dynamism of the German 'Frauen geben Technik neue Impulse', the name of the organisation which organised an international conference called 'Frauen in der Informationsgesellschaft' last year in the framework of the German presidency of the EU. The report of this conference is now published. It contains a range of interesting papers, some in German and some in English, including one by me called 'the flexibilisation of work in the information society and its implications for women and men in Europe' and lots more. details from http://www.frauen-technik-impulse.de

MORE THEORETICAL STUFF

'Material World: the myth of the Weightless Economy', the article I wrote for the 1999 Socialist Register is currently being translated into German and French. Meanwhile the original English version is now available online at http://www.yorku.ca/org/socreg/ (go to the 1999 issue and it is the second article). I recently finished writing a piece for the 2001 Socialist Register which takes some of these ideas further and looks in particular at the issue of class in relation to
office/information/knowledge/tele/white-collar/e-work (No, sorry, I still haven't come up with a good name for it, but the article does air some thoughts on the underlying reasons why this is so difficult). This will be published in November 2000.

A STIMULATING READ

One of the most thought-provoking books to come my way this year has been John Chris Jones's long-awaited The Internet and Everyone. Extraordinarily difficult to classify (Jones once described me as a 'generalist' and the term applies much more forcibly to his work than to mine), this is an astonishing combination of poetry, philosophy, drama and practical insights into many aspects of design organised in as non-linear a manner as is possible given the constraints of the printed book medium, in a multi-layered interplay between the rational and the intuitive.

In the author's own words, 'What I promised in the synopsis was to map out in some detail the idea of 'creative democracy' - the despecialisation of industrial living to the point where professional jobs are deconstructed into new families of intelligent software enabling anyone and everyone to take over the continuous re-forming of the culture in every act and every thought'.

My only reservation about this lies in the elision between those in 'professional jobs' and 'everyone'. What about the people who are not in professional jobs? Having said this, the book is much more sensitive to the experiences of the real body in the here-and-now and contains much more wisdom than any of the fashionable texts on the 'information society' I have read so far. And Jones himself has lived on next-to-nothing in the quarter-century since he gave up his professorship in Art and Technology at the Open University and cannot conceivably be accused of elitism or insensitivity to the poor.

For those who are new to his work, I recommend his deceptively simple reflection-cum-visual poem 'the phone' which can be found on http://www.ellipsis.com/softopia/index.html Or you might care to read a short combined review of several of his books (including his classic 'Design Methods' and 'Designing designing') which I wrote a few years ago, and which is on the web here. That this was published in the academic journal 'Anarchist Studies' (almost, but not quite, an oxymoron!) in 1994 illustrates the extraordinarily difficult task of locating a suitable home for a discussion of such multifaceted work: which is radical, but not marxist; neither wholly art nor wholly science; and transcends all possible disciplinary boundaries. Any ideas for where to place the next review, anyone?

'The Internet and Everyone' is published by Ellipsis: details from: http://www.ellipsis.com

CALL CENTRES

We're still doing a lot of research on call centres, but unfortunately the resource list which I had hoped to have ready by now will have to wait until the next newsletter. Sorry about this. But in the meanwhile here are a few tit-bits:

http://www.labournet.org.uk/1998/August/call.html - an article for the ICFTU called 'Call centres - the new assembly lines' by Luc Demaret with Pat Quinn and Samuel Grumiau

http://www.union-network.org/UNIsite/Events/Campaigns/call_centres.htm- information from all over the world about call centres from a trade union perspective. UNI (Union Network International) was formed when FIET (the former International Federation of Commercial, Clerical, Professional and Technical Employees) merged with CI, MEI and IGF, on January 1st 2000

http://www.eclipse.co.uk/pens/bibby/ofcc1.html contains the text of Andrew Bibby's report for FIET entitled 'Organising in Financial Call Centres'

And if you search through the publications on http://www.ncl.ac.uk/curds you can find details of a number of studies including a downloadable executive summary of a study on gender and call centre employment (Belt, V, Richardson, R, Webster, J, van Klaveren, M and Tidjens, K (1999), Work Opportunities for Women in the Information Society (WOWIS): Executive Summary of the Final Report, Report to the Information Society Project Office (ISPO) of the European Commission, Newcastle, CURDS.)

http://www.callcentres.com.au/ is a site designed for call centre managers in Australia which often includes lively discussions which give a good feel of what is going on

NATURE, ART AND TECHNOLOGY

My article with this title (subtitle: 'Towards the Emergence of a New Relationship?') was published earlier this year in the journal Leonardo, MIT Press, Vol 33, No. 1, pp 33-40, 2000. In the context of a general discussion about the problematic relationship between 'nature', 'technology' and 'art' it looks at the convergence between Artificial Life (AL) technologies and the 'Emergent Art' movement and explores some of the social implications. Writing it was very odd. Although it was triggered by other factors, it drew on several previously disconnected experiences in my life (observing my father's work as a designer of moving 'water sculptures' in the 1950s, being a student of art history in the 1960s, encounters with the radical science movement in the 1970s, research on the social impact of technology in the 1980s, teaching epistemology to social research students in the early 1990s, and - oddest of all - my own recently discovered identity as a photographer). When I have a bit more time I hope to be developing some more visual work on a new web-site called www.entropica.net but, apart from the registration of the name, this hasn't yet developed beyond the twinkle-in-the-eye stage.

THE RICHARD MCKOY BAND

And finally, for those of you who came to my party and were frustrated by the mis-print in the invitation, the place to see pictures of the band is here Londoners may like to note that Richard McKoy and various band members will be performing with Julie Dexter at the jazz cafe in Camden Town on August 3rd. Aren't I lucky to live next door to such talent!

NOTE

All contents of this newsletter are copyright © Ursula Huws, 2000. However you are free to pass it on to anyone for non-commercial purposes provided the text, including this copyright notice, is not changed.

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this page was last revised on September 26th, 2001					all contents of this page © Ursula Huws, 2001