precarity and digitisation – it is not just about jobs – COMMEDIA DELLA VITA OR PÁNTA RÊI'S FIRM GROUND

This is the title of a presentation of which the recording is online now.

It had been given during the

INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC-PRACTICAL CONFERENCE on INSTABILITY OF EMPLOYMENT: RUSSIAN AND INTERNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF CHANGING THE LEGISLATION ON LABOUR AND EMPLOYMENT in Moscow at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics [October 26-27 2017]

Overwiew:

The presentation is more in search of the question, not pretending to know answers.

The contribution is crosscutting, mainly offering a theoretical and global in orientation. The aim is to contribute against the background of digitisation to the discussion of the changing world of the organisation of work and underlying process of accumulation.

During the era of ‘industrial capitalism’ the tension between market and society was by and large processed and channelled via the firm – a conclusion we can draw from reading R.H. Coase and Karl Polanyi. However, looking at some of the current trends as they are tied up under keywords of gig-economy, sharing economy, collaborative consumption, collaborative production, on-demand-economy and the like, we are facing at least in some areas of the economy some changes which can be captured by two keywords:

de-firmisation of working frameworks
hybridisation of work or to be more precise employment

What are and what can be the answers? We see precarisation as one route, not suggested but actually taken. But it is a route based on two questionable presumptions: the first is that work has to be organised as labour and the second is that society has to and can bear and even accept major inequalities.

[Part of] The discussion is also recorded and focuses on issues of developments in China..