Machines & Measure
University of Leicester, Friday 16th February 2018
How are machines being used in contemporary capitalism to perpetuate control and to intensify power relations at work? Theorizing how this occurs through discussions about the physical machine, the calculation machine and the social machine, this workshop
re-visits questions of the incorporation and absorption of workers as appendages within the machine as Marx identified as well as new methods to numerate without, necessarily, remuneration. Speakers ask to what extent control is underway via intensified methods
to capture labour power, including affective and emotional labour; and will identify how calculation and numeration serve to abstract labour through prediction, prescription, monitoring and tracking; on the streets, in homes, offices and factories. The ‘black
box’ argument currently fashionable in debates, where digitalized management methods are a(e)ffectively obscured, is challenged, by identifying precisely how algorithmic decision making, automation and machine learning processes operate to control workers
and by theorizing the implications of measure inside human/machine experiences of relations of production.
Hosted by
University of Leicester School of Business, Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy (CPPE) &
Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) South Group
Friday 16th February
11.30 Registration
12.00– 17.30 Talks, discussions
Location: Leicester Creative Business Depot A five minute walk from the train station, this is a great location in Leicester’s cultural quarter.
Speakers include:
Kendra Briken (University of Strathclyde) ‘Welcome within the machine. Human-machine relations on the shop floor’
Frank Engster (Helle Panke, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung) ‘Measure Machine Money’
Alessandro Gandini (King’s College, London) ‘Labour Process Theory and the Gig Economy’
Simon Joyce (Leeds University) ‘Digitalized Management Methods. Black Box or Hidden Abode?’
Adrian Mengay (Friedrich Schiller University Jena) ‘Digitalization of work and heteronomy’
Phoebe Moore (University of Leicester) ‘Quantification of A(e)ffective Labour for Change Management
