Shifting New Media: From Content to Consultancy, from Heterarchy to Hierarchy

Lash, Scott; Wittel, Andreas

doi:10.1068/a34207

Cited by 20 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Most of the early research on New Media focused on firms and city-regions, assuming that firm networks were the connective glue that held the emerging Internet-oriented activities together (Braczyk et al 1999). In the late 1990s, however, as firms faced difficulties in obtaining skilled workers in Internet occupations, more attention began to turn to the workforce (Augustsson & Sandberg 2004;Batt et al 2001;Brail 1998;Christopherson 2002a;Gill 2002;Indergaard 2002;Lash & Wittel 2002;Laepple et al 2002;Mayer-Ahuja & Wolf 2004;Michel & Goertz 1999;Pratt 2000;Ross 1998;Sandberg 1998Sandberg , 2002Scott 1998Scott , 2000van Jaarsveld 2004;Vinodrai 2004). 1 Efforts to collect empirical data on this workforce are complicated by the lack of publicly available statistics that accurately define these occupations.…”

Section: What Do We Know About New Media Work?mentioning

confidence: 99%

New media after the Dot.com bust

Christopherson¹,

Jaarsveld²

2005

International Journal of Cultural Policy

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carried out primarily by independent contractors. The use of a multi-skilled contract workforce has increased following the decline in labor demand. In Sweden, New Media workers turned to unions following the downturn to deal with rising unemployment. Germany represents a middle ground case with a largely non-unionized workforce that is, however, influenced by collective industrial relations institutions and norms regarding employer roles. These divergent paths suggest that national policy continues to play a role in shaping work, even in international cultural industries.

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Section: What Do We Know About New Media Work?mentioning

confidence: 99%

New media after the Dot.com bust

Christopherson¹,

Jaarsveld²

2005

International Journal of Cultural Policy

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“…In new media, this essential feature of projects is taken to its extreme when projects are not only realised for a particular client but also with a client (Girard and Stark, 2002): by bringing the client into the simultaneous engineering of different project teams, the discursive pragmatics of`collaborative engineering' unfold (Neff and Stark, 2003). The extraordinary intensity of client involvement is propelled by the inherently systemic and rapidly evolving character of new media (Lash and Wittel, 2002). The commissioning of a prima facie straightforward project like the design of a website triggers a cascade of learning processes by the client.…”

Section: Projects With Clientsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reflecting their emergence from different regional settings and their interrelations with particular client economies, new-media ecologies presumably will be populated by a diversity of organisational forms beyond a transitory formative phase. Nevertheless, the specific character of new-media projects seems to favour a drift of new-media firms rather closer towards the agency than towards the pure studio model (see Lash and Wittel, 2002). First, although varying vastly between different genres and specific products, the short average duration of projects in new media of several weeks seems closer to advertising than to film, with average production times of up to two years or more.…”

Section: Project Capabilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This collection focuses primarily on a fourth type of activity. Starting as providers of web design, new-media agencies (such as Razorfish or IconMedialab) rapidly deepened and broadened their portfolio to``tell their clients that a website is more than public relations and advertising; that it is about connectivity'' (Lash andWittel, 2002, page 1992;Girard and Stark, 2002). By increasingly combining technology consulting, strategic consulting, or content development into a diverse spectrum of company profiles, these new-media agencies further perforate the boundaries between new media and related sectors (Heydebrand and Miro¨n, 2002;Pratt, 2001).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Fragile Sector, Robust Practice: Project Ecologies in New Media

Grabher¹

2002

Environ Plan A

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Unfinished' defines the aesthetic of new media. Internet sites, for example, the emblematic genre of new media, never solidify into a definitive form, they remain ephemeral, patchy,``permanently beta'' (Neff and Stark, 2003, page 3): (1) versions change, systems evolve, applications die. This aesthetic logic of the provisional and transient is also reflected in the organisational practices of new media. In the dizzyingly fluid environment in which new media evolve, organisational practices are driven by the imperatives of bricolage, improvisation, self-organisation, and adaptability.In this theme issue we delve into these organisational dynamics of new media. We share the view that, despite the en masse depreciation of Internet stocks after April 2000, organisational practices generated in and through new media will have a lasting impact (Schultz et al, 2000;Thrift, 2000;. In other words, although with the drastic end of`t he long summer of corporate love'' (Frank, 2000, page 356) new-media firms might have disappeared spectacularly, new-media practices have not. Studying the practices emerging from this``frenzy of capitalist experiment'' (Thrift, 2001, page 430) from different (disciplinary) angles, in our view, yields insights of more general relevance for understanding organisational forms and processes in turbulent environments.The central organisational arena of these practices is the project (Braczyk et al, 1999a, page 6; Heydebrand, 1999, pages 67^69). Of course, projects as`temporary systems' with`institutionalised termination' (Goodman and Goodman, 1976;Lundin and So« derholm, 1995) are not an organisational innovation of new media. They are a long-established routine in industries organised around`one-off' activities such as construction, engineering, shipbuilding, or`old' media such as film (Faulkner and Anderson, 1987;Lundin and Midler, 1998;Winch, 1986). More recently, project organisation seems to have taken hold in a wide range of industries in which it has not previously been part of the canonical repertoire of organisational forms (Ekstedt et al, 1999;Flores and Gray, 2000). This diffusion has been accelerated by codified formulas and routines of planning, budgeting, and managing projects as distinct organisational units (PMI, 1996) which mostly have been set up unambiguously either within or between organisations (Lundin and Midler, 1998). Economic geographies of this type of`managed project' have been examined in a previous Regional Studies special issue (Grabher, 2002a).Although more conventional forms of`managed projects' have also become an essential vehicle for new-media production,`self-organised projects' reflect the genuine emergent character of this field more specifically. In evolving and self-coordinating projects, neither the division of labour between team members nor the coordination of team activities follows traditional management principles (Heydebrand and Miro¨n, 2002). Because design is not compartmentalised but is generalised and distributed throughout the production process...

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“…This happens when individual attempts to invent something new are tested and acknowledged by other members of this milieu and finally 'cumulatively stabilized and amplified by the back-and-forth flow of meaning among them' (Hannerz 1992: 70). This type of social setting is especially conducive to the production of new technologies and post-industrial products such as multimedia applications (see Lash and Wittel 2002).…”

Section: Can Innovation Be Stimulated or Even Induced?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The cultural swirl: anthropological perspectives on innovation

Welz

2003

Global Networks

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As the emergence of a globalized economy transforms the conditions under which economic performance and productivity growth occur, the ability to innovate has come to the fore as the key factor determining the competitive advantage of national economies, entire industries and individual firms alike. Linking the economic concern with the new products and services to more general questions of the social organization of culture, this essay sets out to explore the contribution of anthropology to an understanding of how innovation occurs. Against the backdrop of theories of cultural change and the identification of parameters that define innovative environments, anthropology enquires into how historical contingency and social agency make innovation possible. In-depth ethnographic studies emphasize that innovation is much less dependent on the creative individual than on the interaction within social milieux that create what anthropologist Ulf Hannerz calls a 'cultural swirl'. Such milieux appear to function best when they incorporate heterogeneous actors and are not closed systems but exposed to serendipitous encounters and exchanges with others actors and milieux.How do new things enter the world? Who are the people who generate novel ways of doing things, of looking at the world? When and where are such new ideas most likely to emerge and take hold? And how does the world enter into new ideas? A lively interest in these questions is evident in the work of Ulf Hannerz, underlying his studies of cities and urban lives, his research on the social organization of diversity in complex cultures, and his focus on the cultural dimension of transnational mobility and communication. Enquiry into how historical contingency and social agency make cultural innovation possible is one of the threads most consistently woven into the fabric of his theoretical thought -perhaps a minor thread, but a persistent one in Ulf Hannerz's ongoing enterprise of developing a social theory of culture and a cultural theory of emerging socialities. This theoretical endeavour encourages sociologists and anthropologists alike to transcend the conventional boundaries of their disciplines. It challenges sociology to transform itself into the study of the post-national and the transnational, questioning the location and boundaries of that entity called 'society'. At the same time, it provides anthropology with the theoretical tools to analyse the cultures of late modernity 'at home', from the inside out, as a subject in its own right.For anthropologists taking their cue from the central cultural topics of late modern societies, the concern, or one might even say, obsession with innovation might provide a promising starting point for analysing contemporary cultural dynamics.

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Shifting New Media: From Content to Consultancy, from Heterarchy to Hierarchy

Cited by 20 publications

References 12 publications

New media after the Dot.com bust

New media after the Dot.com bust

Fragile Sector, Robust Practice: Project Ecologies in New Media

The cultural swirl: anthropological perspectives on innovation

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