This book builds on the idea that peer-to-peer infrastructures are gradually becoming the general conditions of work, economy, and society. Using a four-scenario approach, the authors seek to simplify possible outcomes and to explore relevant trajectories of the current techno-economic paradigm within and beyond capitalism.
The two volumes IFIP AICT 551 and 552 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 15th IFIP WG 9.4 International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, ICT4D 2019, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in May 2019. The 97 revised full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 185 submissions. The papers present a wide range of perspectives and disciplines including (but not limited to) public administration, entrepreneurship, business administration, information technology for development, information management systems, organization studies, philosophy, and management. They are organized in the following topical sections: communities, ICT-enabled networks, and development; digital platforms for development; ICT for displaced population and refugees. How it helps? How it hurts?; ICT4D for the indigenous, by the indigenous and of the indigenous; local technical papers; pushing the boundaries - new research methods, theory and philosophy in ICT4D; southern-driven human-computer interaction; sustainable ICT, informatics, education and learning in a turbulent world - "doing the safari way”.
This book relates Wikipedians’ conceptions of their activities in terms of play, game, work and labour, to their views on Wikipedia and capitalism. The author identifies and compares ideology formations with each other, and with contemporary Marxist theory, providing critical evaluation of the perceived economic relation between peer production and capitalism. The book covers a range of topics including encyclopaedias and the digital revolution; Marxist approaches to cognitive capitalism; and crowdsourcing. The book richly contributes to the emerging literature of critical internet studies, providing a unique intersection of three fields of knowledge: social effects of digital technology; ideologies and politics of cognitive capitalism’s social relations; and the culture of contemporary capitalism. Wikipedia, Work and Capitalism will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including political economy, sociology and digital cultures, as well as social activists, Wikipedians, and peer producers.
This book explores a wide range of emerging cultural, heritage, and other tourism issues that will shape the future of hospitality and tourism research and practice in the digital and innovation era. It offers stimulating new perspectives in the fields of tourism, travel, hospitality, culture and heritage, leisure, and sports within the context of a knowledge society and smart economy. A central theme is the need to adopt a more holistic approach to tourism development that is aligned with principles of sustainability; at the same time, the book critically reassesses the common emphasis on innovation as a tool for growth-led and market-oriented development. In turn, fresh approaches to innovation practices underpinned by ethics and sustainability are encouraged, and opportunities for the exploration of new research avenues and projects on innovation in tourism are highlighted. Based on the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the International Association of Cultural and Digital Tourism (IACuDiT) and edited in collaboration with IACuDiT, the book will appeal to a broad readership encompassing academia, industry, government, and other organizations.
"What's going to happen to my job?" That's what an increasing number of anxious Americans are asking themselves. The US workforce, which has been one of the most productive and wealthiest in the world, is undergoing an alarming transformation. Increasing numbers of workers find themselves on shaky ground, turned into freelancers, temps and contractors. Even many full-time and professional jobs are experiencing this precarious shift. Within a decade, a near-majority of the 145 million employed Americans will be impacted. Add to that the steamroller of automation, robots and artificial intelligence already replacing millions of workers and projected to "obsolesce" millions more, and the jobs picture starts looking grim. Now a weird yet historic mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed is thrusting upon us the latest economic fraud: the so-called "sharing economy," with companies like Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit allegedly "liberating workers" to become "independent" and "their own CEOs," hiring themselves out for ever-smaller jobs and wages while the companies profit. But this "share the crumbs" economy is just the tip of a looming iceberg that the middle class is drifting toward. Raw Deal: How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers,by veteran journalist Steven Hill, is an exposé that challenges conventional thinking, and the hype celebrating this new economy, by showing why the vision of the "techno sapien" leaders and their Ayn Rand libertarianism is a dead end. In Raw Deal, Steven Hill proposes pragmatic policy solutions to transform the US economy and its safety net and social contract, launching a new kind of deal to restore power back into the hands of American workers.
This book explores all aspects of the sharing economy, pursuing a multidisciplinary approach encompassing Service Design, Spatial Design, Sociology, Economics, Law, and Transport and Operations Research. The book develops a unified vision of sharing services, and pinpoints the most important new challenges. The first, more theoretical part covers general topics from the perspectives of experts in the respective disciplines. Among the subjects addressed are the role of the user in co-design and co-production; impacts of sharing services on cities, communities, and private spaces; individual rewarding and social outcomes; regulatory issues; and the scope for improving the efficiency of design, management, and analysis of sharing services. In turn, the second part of the book presents a selection of case studies of specific sharing services, in which many of the concepts described in the first part are put into practice. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of sharing services and of the hidden problems that may arise. Key factors responsible for the success (or failure) of sharing services are identified by analyzing some of the best (and worst) practices. Given its breadth of coverage, the book offers a valuable guide for researchers and for all stakeholders in the sharing economy, including startup founders and local administrators.
This groundbreaking book both explains and expands the growing debate on ecological (environmental) social work at the global level. In order to achieve this, the book strengthens the environmental paradigm in social work and social policy by undertaking further research on theoretical and conceptual clarification as well as distinct reflections on its practical directions. Divided into five parts: concepts; the impact of environmental crises; sustainable communities and lifestyles; food politics; and the profession in transition, this work’s main objective is to place ecological social work as a part of the more comprehensive and interdisciplinary eco-social transition of societies towards sustainability, balancing economic and social development with the limited resources of the natural environment. By focussing on these five core concepts, it shows how social work and social policy contribute to this transition through having a research-based approach and orientation on solutions rather than problem analysis. The book will be of interest to scholars from a broad range of disciplines, including those in social work and social policy, sustainability, economics, agriculture and environmental studies.
As various areas of discipline continue to progress into the digital age, diverse modes of technology are being experimented with and ultimately implemented into common practices. Mobile products and interactive devices, specifically, are being tested within educational environments as well as corporate business in support of online learning and e-commerce initiatives. There is a boundless stock of factors that play a role in successfully implementing web technologies and user-driven learning strategies, which require substantial research for executives and administrators in these fields. The Handbook of Research on User Experience in Web 2.0 Technologies and Its Impact on Universities and Businesses is an essential reference source that presents research on the strategic role of user experience in e-learning and e-commerce at the level of the global economy, networks and organizations, teams and work groups, and information systems. The book assesses the impact of e-learning and e-commerce technologies on different organizations, including higher education institutions, multinational corporations, health providers, and business companies. Featuring research on topics such as ubiquitous interfaces, computer graphics, and image processing, this book is ideally designed for program developers and designers, researchers, practitioners, IT professionals, executives, academicians, and students.
Just what is the “participatory condition”? It is the situation in which taking part in something with others has become both environmental and normative. The fact that we have always participated does not mean we have always lived under the participatory condition. What is distinctive about the present is the extent to which the everyday social, economic, cultural, and political activities that comprise simply being in the world have been thematized and organized around the priority of participation. Structured along four axes investigating the relations between participation and politics, surveillance, openness, and aesthetics, The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age comprises fifteen essays that explore the promises, possibilities, and failures of contemporary participatory media practices as related to power, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring uprisings, worker-owned cooperatives for the post-Internet age; paradoxes of participation, media activism, open source projects; participatory civic life; commercial surveillance; contemporary art and design; and education. This book represents the most comprehensive and transdisciplinary endeavor to date to examine the nature, place, and value of participation in the digital age. Just as in 1979, when Jean-François Lyotard proposed that “the postmodern condition” was characterized by the questioning of historical grand narratives, The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age investigates how participation has become a central preoccupation of our time. Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Pomona College; Bart Cammaerts, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); Nico Carpentier, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB – Free University of Brussels) and Charles University in Prague; Julie E. Cohen, Georgetown University; Kate Crawford, MIT; Alessandro Delfanti, University of Toronto; Christina Dunbar-Hester, University of Southern California; Rudolf Frieling, California College of Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute; Salvatore Iaconesi, La Sapienza University of Rome and ISIA Design Florence; Jason Edward Lewis, Concordia University; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; Graham Pullin, University of Dundee; Trebor Scholz, The New School in New York City; Cayley Sorochan, McGill University; Bernard Stiegler, Institute for Research and Innovation in Paris; Krzysztof Wodiczko, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Jillian C. York.
From the scientific and industrial revolution to the present day, food – an essential element of life – has been progressively transformed into a private, transnational, mono-dimensional commodity of mass consumption for a global market. But over the last decade there has been an increased recognition that this can be challenged and reconceptualized if food is regarded and enacted as a commons. This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective. Chapters do not define the notion of commons but engage with different schools of thought: the economic approach, based on rivalry and excludability; the political approach, recognizing the plurality of social constructions and incorporating epistemologies from the South; the legal approach that describes three types of proprietary regimes (private, public and collective) and different layers of entitlement (bundles of rights); and the radical-activist approach that considers the commons as the most subversive, coherent and history-rooted alternative to the dominant neoliberal narrative. These schools have different and rather diverging epistemologies, vocabularies, ideological stances and policy proposals to deal with the construction of food systems, their governance, the distributive implications and the socio-ecological impact on Nature and Society. The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings.
