'Cognitive Capitalism' and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities
By M. D. Angelis, D. Harvie. 2009
116 citations recorded by the source corpus.
One hundred years ago, Frederick Taylor and the pioneers of scientific management went into battle on US factory-floors. Armed with stopwatches and clipboards, they were fighting a war over measure. A century on and capitalist production has spread far beyond the factory walls and the confines of 'national economies'. Although capitalism increasingly seems to rely on 'cognitive' and 'immaterial' forms of labour and social cooperation, the war over measure continues. Armies of economists, statisticians, management-scientists, information-specialists, accountants and others are engaged in a struggle to connect heterogeneous concrete human activities on the basis of equal quantities of human labour in the abstract – that is, to link work and capitalist value. In this paper, we discuss contemporary capital's attempt to (re)impose the 'law of value' through its measuring of immaterial labour. Using the example of higher education in the UK – a 'frontline' of capitalist development – as our case-study, we explain how measuring takes places on various 'self-similar' levels of social organisation. We suggest that such processes are both diachronic and synchronic: socially-necessary labour-times of 'immaterial doings' are emerging and being driven down at the same time as heterogeneous concrete activities are being made commensurable. Alongside more overt attacks on academic freedom, it is in this way that neoliberalism appears on campus.
Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d4b755273496848a26f0c7760f47e5f52a6947b0
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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
In Political Science and International Relations
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Academic sell-out: how an obsession with metrics and rankings is damaging academia (2014, result): “Authors such as De Angelis and Harvie (2009) compare it to the times of Frederick Taylor who used clipboards and stopwatches to measure performance in US factories. May be it has something to do with having a strong neo-liberal public policy regime as suggested by Holmwood (2013) or is a sign of the”