Developments in Computing Work: Control and Contradiction in the Software Labour Process
Martin Beirne, Harvie Ramsay, Androniki Panteli · 1998
The labour process literature has tended to show interest in computing not in its own right, but as something which affects its true concerns. It is the embodiment of ‘new technology’ which captures attention, impacting upon (and more likely than not afflicting) work organisation, and potentially threatening to eliminate employment altogether. A distinction between ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ may be vaguely noted, with hardware being ‘the bit you can kick’. The nature of the production system which creates not the machinery but the programs which run on the machinery, so potentially shaping the work of others, has remained a black box in all but a few exceptional studies.1