Abstract
Quite a few people have written about the media and management over the past decades. That’s to say, they have written about how ‘the media’ represents ‘management’. This might be a content analysis of how the press reported a particular CEO, something about gender and leadership, or some flighty speculations about evil corporations and 1980s SF films. ‘The media’ here means something like the output of ‘broadcast’ or ‘mass’ communications – newspapers, TV, film, comics and so on. Now, as the age of sender-receiver mass communication becomes the age of information, networks and logistics, the idea of a particular set of institutions called ‘the media’ barely seems capacious enough to cover such ramified relations.
In this book, and quite a few others which are bridging cultural and organizational theory (Beyes et al., 2020; Hristova et al., 2022; Neilson and Rossiter, 2021), the word ‘media’ is returning to some older roots. From the 16th century onwards, it meant something in the middle, something that was between, still preserved in the sense of ‘median’, or ‘mediation’. It’s a relational concept, one that allows for some notion of an intermediation between entities, or more radically, that ‘entities’ are themselves constituted by such relations. So in the book under review, written for the ‘In Search of Media’ series, Andrijasevic refers to the temporary work agency dormitories hosting migrants who work in Foxconn subsidiaries as ‘media’. This might seem odd, but she is focussing on their role in a ‘just-in-time labour’ system which allows for competitive advantage in the ‘time mediated competition’ that supplies us all with electronic devices (p. 48). The dormitory mediates, but most of us never see it.
The word ‘media’ in the title of this book needs to be understood as something like ‘ordering device’, which places this enquiry alongside actor-network and new materialist accounts that attempt to produce a flat ontology in which people and things – the non-human, the more-than human – are treated equivalently. Weihong Bao suggested that there are three common models of the media (p. xi) – linear message, intermediary and environment. What is added here is a focus on managerial organization, on the ordering devices which help to constitute systems, networks, infrastructures and logistics which enable the functioning of global capitalism. This includes the ‘manufacture order form, popular guidebooks, government policy documents, dormitories and temporary work agencies’ (p. xiii) as elements in a geopolitical logistics that moves humans and materials around in order to produce and capture value.
Marc Steinberg’s recapitulation of the history of just-in-time production, Toyotaism, is a helpful reminder that this is by no means a new development. The prehistory of spatially distributed systems for capturing value cannot be traced back to any definitive point – US supermarkets, the putting-out system or the bureaucracy of the Venetian empire. What seems to be new is the way that digital technologies enable the construction of sociodigital assemblages which are really effective at reconfiguring space in order to compress time, and reconfiguring time in order to reorder space.
Importantly, such arrangements are also represented by ‘the (mass) media’ in particular ways. So Julie Yujie Chen’s chapter on platform labour in China shows us how, during COVID19, these delivery workers were celebrated in the state controlled media as ‘everyday heroes’ (p. 84) who brought care to the people. The just-in-time delivery of food is enabled by the just-in-time labour of workers who labour precariously for temporary staffing agencies. All the while, the image of a new economy that transcends time and space is being constructed, built by unseen Chilean copper and lithium miners, Slovakian migrant workers and Filipino sailors on container ships. This new virtual economy touches the earth and the flesh in all sorts of places but such images are rarely circulated.
This is a short book, so it can’t bear too much weight, but there is a nice hint about what an expanded analysis of mass media and relational mediation might look like in the mention of ‘on demand’ streaming in the conclusion (p. 98). The server farms which host the data, the precarious project workers who programme CGI and dress sets, the marketing agencies that ensure social media is aligned to the most profitable demographics, and so on. Because when you start pulling at the network, it goes everywhere, as networks often do.
Such an analysis might seem too ‘cool’, too distanced, since it makes the actor and the camera, the bicycle and the courier, equally important. Where is the politics in such an account, the care for humans, as well as their others? Andrijasevic puts it well when she asks who benefits from this ‘real time’ production (p. 42), which is another way of asking, as Steinberg does, what are the externalities of just-in-time (p. 10)? This sort of collapse of time and space, in which speed is the only imperative to generate value, is one that subtracts dignity from labour and rips the earth apart in search of raw materials. There isn’t enough anger in this book for my taste, not enough about Foxconn suicides and strikes at the assembly plant in Tamil Nadu, but it made me think a lot about being in the middle of the mediations of capitalist world making.
