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2016 | Book

Introduction: Beyond the ‘Creative Class’ Vision Read chapter Read first chapter

The Reputation Economy

Understanding Knowledge Work in Digital Society

Author: Alessandro Gandini

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

Exploring the new professional scenes in digital and freelance knowledge, this innovative book provides an account of the subjects and cultures that pertain to knowledge work in the aftermath of the creative class frenzy. Including a broad spectrum of empirical projects, The Reputation Economy documents the rise of freelancing and digital professions and argues about the central role held by reputation within this context, offering a comprehensive interpretation of the digital transformation of knowledge work. The book shows how digital technologies are not simply intermediating productive and organizational processes, allowing new ways for supply and demand to meet, but actually enable the diffusion of cultural conceptions of work and value that promise to become the new standard of the industry.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction: Beyond the ‘Creative Class’ Vision
Abstract
The introduction illustrates the scopes and the aims of the book, contextualising the evolution of knowledge work across the decades in the encounter between neoliberal policies fostering flexibility in employment regimes, and the vision of a ‘creative class’ of knowledge workers that is revealed today as an unfulfilled promise. The section shows how these aspects intersect with the rise of digital media and the new forms and models of collaborative work and organisation, allowing to build the argument of reputation as a shared cultural conception of value and a form of individual social capital, that extends over digital and non-digital networks of knowledge workers in an increasingly freelance-based labour market.
Alessandro Gandini
Chapter 2. The Rise of a Freelance Economy
Abstract
This chapter gives evidence of how freelancing has come to be the new standard in the entrepreneurialised labour market of the knowledge economy. With the help of secondary data, the chapter details the rise of freelancing and illustrates why this goes hand in hand with the integration of the digital infrastructure in the production and organisation of labour. As the managerial and strategic work around social relations and social capitall, that historically connotes this labour market, meets with digital and social media, it is argued that a cultural understanding of reputation as value is decisive for independent professionals in the digital and freelance knowledge economy to the aim of job to the aim of job procurement. This now comes to the forefront as a shared notion.
Alessandro Gandini
Chapter 3. Reputation, the Social Capital of a Digital Society
Abstract
This chapter discusses how reputation comes to take a prominent position in the job market of the knowledge economy and why it should be considered the form taken by social capital in the digital age. Reputation establishes as the ‘equivalent’ shared by both offline and online domains as an asset that digital knowledge workers must acquire and strategically manage in their network of professional contacts, decisive to get jobs and establish professionally. Reputation links into value as an investment in social relations with the expectation of an economic return, being the source for trust to be established among participant in hybrid contexts of interaction made of digital and non-digital exchanges that do not necessarily imply face-to-face or physical proximity.
Alessandro Gandini
Chapter 4. Urban Knowledge Work: The Cases of London and Milan
Abstract
This chapter gives evidence of the reputational dynamics of social capital and value as these emerge from the study of networks of freelancers in the ‘creative cities’ of London and Milan, dwelling upon what is knowledge work today in these cities and how it is intermediated by digital technologies and social media. The chapter illustrates the network cultures of the urban knowledge economy; the reader meets a variety of knowledge professionals who spend their professional lives constructing networks and engaging in social relations. This gives evidence of the strategic and managerial capitalisation of one’s reputation theorised in the previous section, as it occurs via performative practices of sociality that take place in multiple networked environments.
Alessandro Gandini
Chapter 5. Working Online: An Exploration of Social Recruiting and Digital Marketplaces
Abstract
This chapter evidences how the practices of job search and recruitment within and beyond the networked knowledge economy are being partially or entirely reterritorialised as a result of the intermediation of online resources, and how these are principled on an analogous notion of reputation as value. This is illustrated via the discussion of empirical data from an international study on social recruiting, and a case study exploration of a digital marketplace for contractors, Elance. These examples evidence how the broad knowledge labour market is founded on the logic of the reputation economy and envisages how this promises to remain central in the next decades, simultaneously warning against the risks of an ‘algocracy’ based on the fetishism for algorithms and online rankings.
Alessandro Gandini
Chapter 6. Understanding Digital Work as Venture Labour
Abstract
This chapter discusses how the proposed notion of ‘digital work’ can interpret the way knowledge workers today seem to put aside the unresolved tensions between precariousness, insecurity and the instability of work, to pursue an ideological approach to entrepreneurialism, professionalism and independence as ‘the new way of working’. This narrative, is argued, has surged as hegemonic in the form of a powerful rhetoric of ‘new professionalism’ that conceives knowledge work as a form of venture labour, and envisages freelance knowledge workers as ‘digital professionals’. This is discussed in a broader critical perspective that looks at conceptions of value in various contexts, and especially those more contaminated by collaborative logics of work.
Alessandro Gandini
Chapter 7. Coworking: The Freelance Mode of Organisation?
Abstract
This chapter discusses how digital and freelance knowledge workers within coworking spaces may experiment a potentially new mode of organisation and reterritorialisation for their nomadic forms and models of work. The chapter discusses the notion of coworking spaces as the environments that can rebuild a para-institutional or post-bureaucratic notion of trust among economic actors, that is currently absent in the fragmented and individualised socio-economic context of the knowledge economy. Along this line, coworking spaces are discussed as specific forms of collaborative environments that delink from current sociological understandings of communitarian interaction, to represent the collective manifestation of a network sociality based on publicity and reputation-based notions of trust.
Alessandro Gandini
Chapter 8. Conclusion: The Aftermath of Neoliberalism and the Future of the Left
Abstract
This conclusive chapter returns to reflect on how the various instances discussed insert in the broader neoliberal labour market of the knowledge economy and how these impact a number of aspects—first and foremost, the notion of class. The chapter discusses further implications of this study and particularly looks at what political insights can be taken from the Left in order to interpret how work is evolving within such a changing scenario.
Alessandro Gandini
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
The Reputation Economy
Author
Alessandro Gandini
Copyright Year
2016
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-56107-7
Print ISBN
978-1-137-56105-3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56107-7