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This is the eighth occasional newsletter from Analytica, distributed in April 2003. If you would like to subscribe to future issues, press the 'subscribe' button above.
PROJECT NEWSEMERGENCEThe main European EMERGENCE Project formally finished at the end of March with a flurry of publications. These include:* a final report: 'When work takes flight: research results from the EMERGENCE project' * a report on SMEs in the new economy: 'Is Small Finally Becoming Beautiful?' (by Johan dejonckhhere, Monique Ramioul and Geert Van Hootegem, our Belgian partners from HIVA at the Catholic University of Leuven * a report on eWork in EU Candidate countries, by Csaba Mako and Roland Keszi, at the Institute of Sociology in Budapest, our Hungarian partners * a report on eWork in Southern Europe, by Giovanna Altieri, Lorenzo Birindelli, and colleagues from IRES in Italy, with contributions from CIREM in Spain and VFA in Greece This is in addition to the five reports already produced - 'Where the Butterfly Alights: the Global Location of eWork'; 'eWork in Europe: Results from the EMERGENCE 18-country survey'; 'Modelling eWork in Europe'; 'Statistical Indicators of eWork'; and 'Jobs on the Move: case studies in eWork relocation'. The project has also left a large and well-visited website at http://www.emergence.nu which includes: * an 'eReadiness database' which you can use to look up your country or (in Europe) region and compare it with the world (or EU) averages across a range of different variables related to eWork (handy for people writing proposals - it produces graphs and/or tables for you on demand) this can be found on http://www.emergence.nu/erdb and: * a 'regional development toolkit' which, inter alia, guides you through all the sources of funding for regional development this is on http://www.emergence.nu/toolkit You might think that we're all e'd out after this, but no, there'll be a final EMERGENCE conference in Vienna on May 12th-13th. Called 'Real Work in a Virtual World: the Human Impact of Organisational Change in a Global Digital Economy', there are still some places left. Full details from http://www.emergence.nu/events/rwvw.html Furthermore, the Australian EMERGENCE project still has a few weeks to run. There will be a seminar in Canberra, probably on May 30th, to discuss the results of the survey and case studies carried out in Australia. Meanwhile, the Asian EMERGENCE project continues with its ambitious programme of case studies in India, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam plus 'sources' and 'destinations' in Europe, Australia and North America. We were aiming to have the final report completed by September 2003 but the SARS scare has wreaked havoc on our meeting schedule so it may be delayed by a few weeks. And that's not all. We heard last month that Penny Gurstein, at UBC in Vancouver has been successful in raising funds for EMERGENCE Canada and also have a team of colleagues trying to set up EMERGENCE Latin America! TOSCAThe TOSCA project (which looked at social conditions in call centres) came to an end last Autumn, with a well-attended seminar in Paris, organised bythe French trade Union, the Confederation General du Travail (CGT). We produced a handbook, published by the ETUC, called 'How Can We Help? Good Practice in Call Centre Employment'. It doesn't have a price and the remaining copies will be distributed on a first come first served basis (with a charge for postage and packing) , but it can also be downloaded as a pdf file from the TOSCA website - http://www-it.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/TOSCA/ If you have trouble getting through to this site, please don't email us but contact petko.ruskov@rila.bg RESPECTThe RESPECT project was set up to develop professional and ethical codes for the conduct of interdisciplinary, international socio-economic research.This proved more challenging than we expected, partly because of the complexity of the fast-changing intellectual property and data protection laws, and partly because, we realised, it is mainly in the Anglo Saxon and Nordic countries where it is common to find ethical codes in this fields. In other European countries, academic research has been more rigorously discipline-based in the past, it seems. However the situation is changing rapidly and there have been a number of initiatives in the field in the last year or so (including the setting up of ethical committees by most British Universities). This makes us think that we may have had the right idea at the right time. Anyway, the project is coming along nicely and there will be a conference in Budapest on June 12th-13th at which draft codes will be discussed. Further information from the RESPECT website on http://www.respectproject.org STILEThe STILE project, led by HIVA in Belgium, continues to work with statistics bodies across Europe to develop new survey questions which will captureeWork and a variety of other activities connected with measuring and monitoring changes in the labour market and 'e-Economy'. The project will shortly be producing a special newsletter summarising all its work on telework. Further information from http:// www.stile.be OTHER WORKWe are carrying out a policy review for the European Commission's DG Research on all the research projects on the Information Society which werefunded under the 4th and 5th Framework Programmes. Work still progresses on the JANUS project. PUBLICATIONSApart from the project-related publications listed above, since the last newsletter, several things have come out in German:'Die Produktion eines Kybertariats. Die Wirklichtkeit virtueller Arbeit' in Das Argument, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften 248, 2002 (the translation of an article which appeared in Socialist Register in English the previous year) and 'Grenzüberschreitende Verlagerung von eWork: Wo kommen die Jobs hin?' in eWork: Neue Jobchancen - real oder virtuell? Flecker, J. and Zilian, H.G., (eds) Arbeitsmarktservice, Vienna, 2002 (a book based on the proceedings of a conference in Vienna) Other chapters in books of conference proceedings are: 'The Restructuring of Employment in the Information Society and its Implications for Social Protection' in Work Organization and Social Exclusion in the European Information Society, Campus Frankfurt/M, Frankfurt, 2002 and 'E-work in a Global Economy' in Challenges and Achievements in E-business and E-work, Stanford-Smith, B., Chiozza, E. and Edin, M. (eds) IOS Press, Amsterdam, Berlin, Oxford, Tokyo, Washington D.C., 2002 Some time later this year, Monthly Review Press (in the United States) and Merlin (in the UK) will be publishing: The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World Collected Essays by Ursula Huws, with an introduction by Colin Leys. This is a collection of essays going back to the late 1970s. If they have a common theme, it is probably an underlying theoretical model of commodification which I developed over the years. To quote from the introduction: 'This model has over the years helped me come up with counter-intuitive answers to a number of questions including: where do new commodities come from? why doesn't automation lead to mass unemployment? why is the 'knowledge-based' or 'weightless' economy associated with a growth in the consumption of energy and raw materials? and why don't labour saving appliances give us more leisure? ' The publishers have selected the 2001 Socialist Register article as thetitle essay but this is not in fact the most recent piece in the book. It ends with 'Who's waiting?' based on a paper on the Taylorisation of service delivery and the contestation of time I gave at a conference in Bruges last year organised by the European Commission's DG Research and the Belgian Presidency. I am still working on the much-delayed, Reality Check: Managing real people in a virtual world. INSTIUTIONAL CHANGESI am now an honorary visiting professor in international labour studies at the Working Lives Research Institute at London Metropolitan University.This may well become a home for some future research projects. However we still work closely with the Sussex-based Institute for Employment Studies (IES) on large projects, including EMERGENCE, RESPECT and STILE. Meanwhile, Analytica continues to work independently. The latest addition to the staff is Simone Dahlmann who has joined us as a research officer. This means we can add German to the languages we can communicate in. WEBSITEWe are only too aware that the Analytica website has been sadly neglected recently. It never quite recovered from a disastrous upgrade to Windows XPlast summer (what does the XP stand for, anyway? eXPensive? eXPloitative? eXPonentially destructive? or just the eXPLetives it provokes from its unhappy users?) This killed off a lot of the software we were using to keep it updated and left us with some dead links, about which we keep getting complaints. Sorry!!! However we are taking things in hand and hope to be able to sort out the problems fairly soon and relaunch a completely redesigned and up to date site sometime this summer. SPAMThe last newsletter we sent out produced a huge number of bounce-backs, and I have noticed a general trend for messages to come back with statementslike this: Message not received by: XXXX Non-receipt reason: discarded Non-receipt qualifier: not given I suspect this may be because they are being wrongly identified as spam. Perhaps because they are not sent to named recipients (although this sometimes happens with messages which are); or perhaps because over-zealous anti-porn software takes exception to the 'anal' in analytica. I know that some software used by US universities won't allow students to write to the University of Sussex because of the 'sex' in the address. I myself dare not use spam-filtering software because it almost invariably cuts out some legitimate messages which i want to receive (e.g. message sent to multiple recipients by one's project officer at the European Commission). On one memorable occasion I almost deleted a suspicious-looking email with an attachment from an email address in Thailand from someone called Poonporn Limpacom, only to discover in the nick of time that this was the new project officer for the Asian EMERGENCE project, based in the European Commission's Bangkok office, with a highly important communication! As a result, I am now wading through over 300 messages a day trying to sell me cheap printer ribbons or mortgages, urging me to make a fortune working from home, to enlarge my penis or directing me to hardcore pornographic sites. The ratio of spam to wanted messages must be running at around six to one or even more. I have noticed a significant increase in the penis enlargement/pornographic messages since the war in Iraq started and have started to wonder about the connection between US militarism and anxiety about penis size (these emails invariably come from US addresses) and am also becoming increasingly concerned about the violence of the language in the pornographic messages (judging from the language, the larger size seems more designed to inflict pain on teenage girls than pleasure on older women). Is it any wonder, with this sort of stuff flooding inboxes around the world, that it is suddenly becoming OK to express hatred of the USA in a way which would have been unthinkable only a couple of years ago? People without first-hand knowledge of the country must assume that the senders are typical of the general population (in much the same way that daytime tv viewers imagine that guests on the Gerry Springer show are typical US citizens). If I were a religious fundamentalist of some kind then I can imagine feeling that this must be the culture of the devil. It used to be a pleasure checking one's email in the expectation of wanted news from friends and colleagues. Increasingly it is becoming something one dreads. Some of the language and images on the pornographic messages (like one I received yesterday about 'punishment sex') make me feel physically sick. This makes one reluctant to add to the torrent. Please remember to let us know if you'd like to be taken off the mailing list for these newsletters. But accept our assurance that they are never sent unsolicited. MINOR CRUELTIESA reminder that you can still order copies of this book of short stories published by Analytica from www.minorcruelties.com There's a gift-wrappingservice and we can send to any address, so it's a good and painless way to send a birthday present. So far we have had nothing but positive feedback from readers. More information from http://www.minorcruelties.com NOTEAll contents of this newsletter are copyright © Ursula Huws, 2003. However you are free to pass it on to anyone for non-commercial purposes providedthe text, including this copyright notice, is not changed. If this is forwarded to you and you would like to subscribe, please send an email to analytica@dial.pipex.com with the word 'subscribe' in the subject line. To unsubscribe, send an email to analytica@dial.pipex.com with the words 'delete me' in the subject line |
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