Occasional newsletter from Analytica, June, 2001.

EMERGENCE

EMERGENCE is a large three-year research project, started in 2000 and currently in progress in 23 countries, which is measuring and mapping the delocalisation of work using new information technologies. The project continues to take up enormous amounts of time (hence the long interval since the last newsletter) and give birth to progeny.

EMERGENCE Australia is well under way, and we are now carrying out extra interviews in Denmark, as well as developing proposals to extend the survey and case studies to a range of central and eastern European and Asian countries, plus North America.

EMERGENCE has also co-parented STILE, a new project led by our Belgian partners, HIVA, to do further work on statistical indicators of eWork.

The first two major publications from EMERGENCE will be launched next week. The first is 'Where the Butterful Alights: the Global location of eWork', an analysis of the existing statistics on eWork at a global level (by country) and a European level (by region), including a cluster analysis which groups countries according to their likelihood of becoming major players in the new global division of labour in information-based business services. The second is 'eWork in Europe' and presents the results of the survey of employers in the first 18 countries - the fifteen EU countries plus Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Further information on these can be found on the EMERGENCE web-site, http://www.emergence.nu The site also contains other information, including the papers from last year's conference in Budapest ('Where in the World: eWork Location in a Digital Global Economy') and past EMERGENCE newsletters to which it is possible to subscribe free of charge.

In the pipeline are some more qualitative findings - the results of 60 case-studies of telemediated work relocation - many involving relocation across national boundaries, as well as several more reports on specific aspects of the project's work.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS IN VARIOUS LANGUAGES

ENGLISH

Published on the internet by the European Trade Union Confederation is the report I wrote for the Euro-telework project called 'Equality and Telework in Europe'. It can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.euro-telework.org The executive summary is also available in FRENCH, GERMAN, ITALIAN and SPANISH.

Not much else right now. My 'real' writing had been much delayed by endless proposal-writing.

ITALIAN

Published only in Italian is 'Societa dell'informazione, occupazione e cittadinanza Sociale' in 'Lavoro e Welfare della New Economy', L'Assistenza Sociale , October-December, 2000, edited by Maria Luisa Mirabile, pp 10-25 I do of course have the English original which can be posted on the Analytica website if there is sufficient demand for it.

FRENCH

The piece I wrote for the 1999 Socialist Register ('Material World: the Myth of the Weightless Economy') has been published in French as 'Un Monde Materiel, le Mythe de l'economie virtuelle' in 'Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information: Nouvelle Donne Sociale?', Critique Communiste, No 159/160, Autumn, 2000, pp 13-26.

As a result of feedback on this, I have become aware of an excellent kindred book by Jean Gadrey called 'Nouvelle Economie: Nouvelle Mythe' published in 2000 in hardback by Flammarion in Paris. A paperback will be out later this year. Highly recommended.

My 'The Making of a Cybertariat', which was published in the 2001 Register has also been translated into French but I don't know when or where it will be published.

There is also some information about the EMERGENCE project in French on http://www.emergence.nu

SWEDISH

This is rather stale news, but I have forgotten up to now to announce on the web-site the publication in Sweden of 'Distansarbete Kraver en Valfardsstat' in 'Manniskan Jobbeet & den Nya Industrin', a book edited by Lars Skold and Gunnar von Sydow published about in 1997 by the Svensa Industritjanstemannaforbundet (SIF) I am told by Swedish friends that the translation isn't that good, and misses a central point about autonomy, power and gender, but this is the only
published version of the article that exists at present. Again, it can be posted on the website if there is sufficient demand

GERMAN

A couple of things should be coming out soon in German - the translation of my Socialist Register article(s) in the journal 'Das
Argument', complete reference: 'Der Mythos der weightless economy’ in Die Neue Őkonomie des Internet, Das Argument, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften 238, 2000

and a paper I wrote for a conference on Globalisation organised by FORBA in Vienna in October, 2000, which will be published as a book, but I'm afraid I don't yet have precise details of either.

Some EMERGENCE material also exists in German - see http://www.emergence.nu

Finally, some older things which have been translated into German:

'Telearbeit in Europa/Teleworking in Europe' in Arbeit 2002:Zukunft der Frauen/Employment 2002: the Future for Women, Cyba, E. and Knipp, M. (eds) Federal Ministry for Women's Affairs, Austria, in association with the European Commission and Archimedia (bilingual German/English), Vienna, 1999

'Flexibilisierung und Sicherheit: Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen europäischen Gleichgewicht', in Zilian, H.G. and Flecker, J (eds), Flexibilisierung - Problem oder Lösung?. Edition Sigma, Berlin April, 1998

HOMAGE TO HENRY NEUBURGER

Having a conversation with Henry Neuburger was like discovering a previously unsuspected extra room in your mind. He had an astonishing ability to enter another person's intellectual world, apparently abandoning any preconceptions of his own, and engage seriously and incisively with your concerns; sometimes playing devil's advocate and deftly demolishing your arguments; sometimes taking them a dizzy step further than you could have imagined: always constructive; always open-minded; always creative; always, finally, generous and self-effacing.

When he died I felt uniquely bereft. Then I discovered that he had played this role for many, many other people: such an array, in fact, of the best and most creative British economists that I feel humbled and honoured to have had any share of his attention. It is clear that, although he published rather little under his own name, Henry had a profound, albeit indirect, influence on a whole generation and lives on in the work of a surprisingly disparate range of other thinkers.

Now, Neil Fraser and John Hills have put together a reader in his honour, 'Public Policy for the 21st Century: Social and Economic Essays in Memory of Henry Neuburger', published by the Policy Press in December 2000. The contributors include economists, statisticians, sociologists and others with a contribution to make to the socio-economic underpinnings of public policy, most of them leaders in their field.

That Henry should be the glue that holds them all together is - to those who knew him - both remarkable and unremarkable. To those who didn't, it is almost incidental: the book stands in its own right as an introduction to almost all the major issues facing policy-makers today: taxation, transport, health, housing, pay; the cost of parenthood, the national accounts, macroeconomic policy . . .

More information from http://www.policypress.org.uk

The book Henry wrote with Neil Fraser was 'Economic policy analysis: a rights-based approach', published by Avebury in 1993. It contains the best anatomisation of cost-benefit analysis I have ever read and is characteristically trenchant in tone. Who else would preface the chapters of such a book with quotations from Jane Austen and E.M.Forster?

SHORT STORIES

Another dear friend, Judy Savage, died in April. Whilst she was in her terminal illness, it emerged that she had written some extraordinary short stories, based on a period of her childhood when she was evacuated from London with her brother, her sister and her self-absorbed bohemian mother to a largely hostile village during the Second World War. The 'minor cruelties' of the title she gave the collection are described with an honest, unblinking gaze, with no trace of self-pity. The prose is spare; each story a distillation which stands on its own. It is hard to judge the work of a close friend so (with her permission) I gave them to some others - mainly people in the publishing trade - to read, and here are some of the things they said:

'They make the hair stand up on the back of your neck'

'Perfect little gems. It's a crime this talent was not discovered years ago'

'The dark, feminine underside of Laurie Lee's England'

'A "Hideous Kinky" of the 1940s'

'Although I'm from a different generation, "Minor Cruelties" brought back vivid memories of my own childhood - losing something valuable, being packed off to school an hour early when the clock changed, dressing up - I could practically smell the clothes'

Unfortunately, publishers don't like authors who can't attend book signings and don't have a second book on its way, so, to cut a long story short, Analytica has now ventured into the fiction publishing business. We hope to have the book published by the end of July and it will be possible to order it over the Internet. Details from http://www.minorcruelties.com

If you would like to be emailed with details when it is published, please send a message to info@minorcruelties.com

CHANGES AT ANALYTICA

Combining the management of several large international projects with the huge amount of travelling I have to do has created administrative strains here and made it difficult to keep up with some things, including correspondence and keeping the website up-to-date. If you have been affected by this please accept my apologies. From August on, I hope things will improve. A new general manager, Linda Butcher, has been appointed and will start work as soon as construction work on the new offices is completed.

Although Analytica is expanding in London, this does not affect our continuing close relationship with the Institute for Employment Studies in Brighton which continues to host our large research projects and provide management, administrative and research support. The relationship between Analytica and IES is in many ways a case study in teleworking. We hold regular team meetings by videoconference, and Hilary Williams, the EMERGENCE project officer, who has up to now been based at the IES Brighton offices, is about to move to Jordan, whence she will continue to administer the project from a distance.

LINKS

Sorry, no links this time. But please watch the website which we hope to overhaul in the coming weeks.

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