Jamie Woodcock
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 125340 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jamie Woodcock |
| PRENOMES | Jamie |
| SOBRENOME | Woodcock |
| ASSINATURA | WOODCOCK J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7097-305X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 202 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 47 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2014 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Work, Employment, and Resistance in Transportation Platforms
Transportation platforms have grown rapidly in the last decade. From private hire drivers, food delivery, and logistics these platforms have reorganised pre-existing forms of transport work through apps and digital platforms. This includes companies like Uber, Baemin, Ola, Deliveroo, Meituan, and Swiggy. Alongside this growth, there have been widespread protests and strikes by platform workers. It has been 6 years since the first strike at Delive…
How can working conditions for online crowdworkers be improved? Institutional experiments for cross-jurisdictional polycentric work
This article articulates the theory and design of the Crowdsourcing Wage Pledge, an action research initiative exploring how academic users of paid crowdsourcing can contribute to improving the working conditions of online crowdworkers. ‘Crowdwork’ describes remote information work comprising short tasks – for example, surveys, transcription, translation, data cleaning – organized through online platforms (for example, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Cli…
Labour and migration in the games industry
The article analyzes how migration shapes the circulation of workers and struggles. The aim is to territorialize both the industry and meanings of work and collectivities for workers. In research on migration and the digital economy, the games industry has been underrepresented. The article builds on labour process theory framework and two case studies, with (1) Brazilian migrants working abroad and (2) workers from various parts of the world wor…
Platform parasitism
Cards against gamification
The discussions on the future of work are pulled between technological optimism and the increasing concerns regarding the precarity brought about by the gig economy. Often, these scenarios fail to meaningfully engage and account for the workers' experiences, whose agency in effectively shaping their working future is denied and obscured behind discourses of autonomy, entrepreneurship and individual responsibility. In the context of the increased …
Platform Worker Organising at Deliveroo in the UK
It has been five years since the first strikes of Deliveroo workers in London in 2016. Since then, workers have continued to organise. The campaigns have involved five different aspects: first, wildcat strike action; second, networks and internationalisation; third, union organising with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain ( iwgb ); fourth, legal campaigning; and fifth, wider leverage campaigns. What is less understood so far is the di…
Composição De Classe E Migração Para Entender O Trabalho Por Plataformas
Este artigo analisa como a migração afeta a composição de classe dos entregadores brasileiros no Reino Unido. Embora pesquisas agora indiquem que a migração desempenha papel importante no trabalho por plataformas no Norte Global, pouco se sabe sobre as maneiras específicas como isso ocorre na prática. Demonstramos como a migração é um aspecto constitutivo desse setor no Norte Global e como a condição de migrante gera experiênciase comunidades com…
Guerrilla Democracy
Combining cutting-edge theories with empirical research, this timely book offers an in-depth analysis of current platform-based radical movements to show how digital technologies revolutionise political and economic organising. This is an invaluable contribution to the emerging literature on the relationship between technology and society.
Guerrilla Democracy
Guerrilla Democracy
The liberating promise of big data and social media to create more responsive democracies and workplaces is overshadowed by a nightmare of election meddling, privacy invasion, fake news and an exploitative gig economy. Yet, while regressive forces spread disinformation and hate, 'guerrilla democrats' continue to foster hope and connection through digital technologies. This book offers an in-depth analysis of platform-based radical movements, from…
Guerrilla Democracy
The Fight Against Platform Capitalism
So far, platform work has been an important laboratory for capital. Management techniques, like the use of algorithms, are being tested with a view to exporting across the global economy and it is argued that automation is undermining workers’ agency. Although the contractual trick of self-employment has allowed platforms to grow quickly and keep their costs down, yet it has also been the case also that workers have also found they can strike wit…
Guerrilla Democracy
Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
The memory of the Vietnam struggle for liberation continues to loom large even into the new millennium. For many, it was the war that gave birth to the US counterculture, the catalyst for a radical energy spurred on by their conviction that their own freedom should not be won by the blood of a repressed people halfway across the world. For others, it remains a testament to the possibility of a heavily outgunned and out-resourced force defeating a…
Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
The Fight Against Platform Capitalism
So far, platform work has been an important laboratory for capital. Management techniques, like the use of algorithms, are being tested with a view to exporting across the global economy and it is argued that automation is undermining workers’ agency. Although the contractual trick of self-employment has allowed platforms to grow quickly and keep their costs down, yet it has also been the case also that workers have also found they can strike wit…
Game Workers and the Empire
This article investigates some of the key debates that have emerged within the nascent union organising project Game Workers Unite, with a specific focus on its UK branch (GWU UK). The analysis is based on a period of participatory observation and a series of interviews with board members of GWU UK. This article evaluates Game Workers Unite (GWU) in relation to other recent attempts at unionising the game industry. It concludes that the strategie…
Towards a Digital Workerism
Digital technology is playing an increasingly visible role in the organisation of many people’s work—as well as large parts of their lives more broadly. The concerns of emancipatory technology studies, or other critical accounts of technology, are often focused on finding alternative uses of technology. In many workplace contexts—from call centres to platform work—the imperatives of capital are deeply written into these technologies. Yet at the s…
Exposing and re-placing leadership through workers inquiry
The literature on leadership place and space offers us an understanding of how the built environment, geography of location and socio-economic forces can coalesce to shape (and be shaped) by leadership practices. Missing thus far, however, is an account that constitutes leadership space and place through antagonism and struggle, crucial if we are to acknowledge the agency of workers in leadership practice. We therefore outline a workers inquiry a…
Systematic evaluation of gig work against decent work standards
Growth of gig work – short-term tasks organized and mediated by digital labor platforms such as Uber and Upwork – is the focus for an increasing body of research. Yet there has been a lack of systematic frameworks that could evaluate this type of labor against decent work standards, and inform consumers and others about relative adherence to those standards across platforms and sectors. In this article we report the development of the “Fairwork f…
Work, play, and precariousness
Professionalised competitive digital gaming or ‘esports’ has grown to a point where millions of dollars are being awarded in competitions watched globally by tens of millions of viewers. Previous analyses of the phenomenon have examined the role(s) of labour in esports performed by various actors – players, tournament organisers, sponsors, game developers – but these have yet to be unified into a ‘big picture’ of esports labour, especially when c…
Lives on the Line
The Limits of Algorithmic Management
Much of the existing research on platform work has focused on the role of data and algorithmic management. These new techniques of management need to be critically understood, but there is a risk of overemphasizing the importance and power of these techniques. The obscuring processes of data collection and analysis make it hard to comprehend how data is being used in practice. Less is known about the ways in which workers are resisting these meth…
The Socio-Technical Entanglements of Live Streaming on TWITCH.TV
The website and platform Twitch.tv is the overwhelming market leader in the live broadcast (“streaming”) of user-created videos over the internet, known primarily for the streaming of video game play. In both 2016 and 2017 over two million people regularly broadcast on the platform, resulting in over a million years of video content in total viewed by over one hundred million people (Twitch, 2017). The deep newness of this phenomenon, alongside t…
The Workers’ Inquiry from Trotskyism to Operaismo
This article discusses different approaches to conducting a workers’ inquiry. Although there is a certain level of ambiguity in the term, it is taken to mean a method for investigating the workplace from the point of view of the worker. The article aims to examine the methodological concerns involved with conducting a contemporary inquiry and to consider the different debates that have emerged from its use. It examines a particular set of example…
Gamification
Gamification' is understood as the application of game systems - competition, rewards, quantifying player/user behaviour - into non-game domains, such as work, productivity and fitness. Such practices are deeply problematic as they represent the capture of 'play' in the pursuit of neoliberal rationalization and the managerial optimization of working life and labour. However, applying games and play to social life is also central to the Situationi…
The Affective Labor and Performance of Live Streaming on Twitch.tv
This article explores affective and immaterial labor on the leading live-streaming platform, Twitch.tv, which boasts over one hundred million regular viewers and two million regular broadcasters. This labor involves digitally mediated outward countenance, including being friendly to viewers, soliciting donations, building parasocial intimacy with spectators, and engaging audiences through humor. We offer an examination of streamers broadcasting a…
The Fairwork Foundation
This paper introduces the Fairwork Foundation, a research initiative that is also developing an intervention around the quality of work on digital labour platforms. Lacking the ability to collectively bargain, many platform workers have little ability to negotiate wages or working conditions with their employers. As a result of this new, digitally-managed market for work, many workers have jobs characterised by long and irregular hours, low incom…
And Today's Top Donator is
This article examines cultural and economic behavior on live streaming platform Twitch.tv, and the monetization of live streamers' content production. Twitch is approximately the thirtieth most-viewed website in the world, with over 150 million spectators, and 2 million individuals around the world regularly broadcasting. Although less well-known than Facebook or Twitter, these figures demonstrate that Twitch has become a central part of the plat…
Spectres of Marxism
This article is a critique of Mike Savage's 'From the "problematic of the proletariat" to a class analysis of the "wealth elites"'. It first rejects the notion of the 'problematic of the proletariat' - the importance of a dividing line between the working and middle class - instead situating the argument within contemporary debates on class analysis. The critique introduces the broader context of neoliberalism and financialization, alongside a co…
Live Streamers on Twitch.tv as Social Media Influencers
Twitch.tv is one of the most successful online live streaming platforms in the world, with 200 million viewers, 2 million regular “streamers,” and a market value of over $1billion. In this paper, we offer a first conceptualization of streamers as social media influencers, and how effectively they can perform strategic communication for sponsors. We draw on extensive ethnographic research and over a hundred semi-structured interviews with streamer…
The impacts of live streaming and Twitch.tv on the video game industry
This article explores the growing importance of live streaming, specifically on website and platform Twitch.tv, to the games industry. We focus not on live streaming as a form of media production and consumption, but instead explore its newly central role in the contemporary political economy of the whole video games ecosystem. We explore three cases: streaming newly released games and the attendant role of streaming in informing consumer choice;…
Platform Worker Organising at Deliveroo in the UK
It has been five years since the first strikes of Deliveroo workers in London in 2016. Since then, workers have continued to organise. The campaigns have involved five different aspects: first, wildcat strike action; second, networks and internationalisation; third, union organising with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain ( iwgb ); fourth, legal campaigning; and fifth, wider leverage campaigns. What is less understood so far is the di…
Fast Food Shutdown
This article discusses the Fast Food Shutdown, a strike on 4 October 2018 that involved Wetherspoon, McDonald's, TGI Fridays and UberEats workers in the United Kingdom. It compares the different strategies of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers' Union at Wetherspoon and Industrial Workers of the World at UberEats. The two case studies, drawing on the authors' ongoing ethnographic research, provide important examples of successful precarious worker…
Systematic evaluation of gig work against decent work standards
Growth of gig work – short-term tasks organized and mediated by digital labor platforms such as Uber and Upwork – is the focus for an increasing body of research. Yet there has been a lack of systematic frameworks that could evaluate this type of labor against decent work standards, and inform consumers and others about relative adherence to those standards across platforms and sectors. In this article we report the development of the “Fairwork f…
Towards a Digital Workerism
Digital technology is playing an increasingly visible role in the organisation of many people’s work—as well as large parts of their lives more broadly. The concerns of emancipatory technology studies, or other critical accounts of technology, are often focused on finding alternative uses of technology. In many workplace contexts—from call centres to platform work—the imperatives of capital are deeply written into these technologies. Yet at the s…
The Limits of Algorithmic Management
Much of the existing research on platform work has focused on the role of data and algorithmic management. These new techniques of management need to be critically understood, but there is a risk of overemphasizing the importance and power of these techniques. The obscuring processes of data collection and analysis make it hard to comprehend how data is being used in practice. Less is known about the ways in which workers are resisting these meth…
Precarious workers in London
This paper discusses precarious workers in London. The aim is to consider the particular challenges and possibilities for resistance in the context of London. It addresses the theoretical questions of precarity and its significance in post-Fordist capitalism. The innovations of the Operaismo—in terms of workers' inquiries, the concept of class composition and the strategy of refusal—provide the theoretical basis for the paper. The paper draws on …
Fighting games and Go
This paper examines the varied cultural meanings of computer game play in competitive and professional computer gaming and live-streaming. To do so it riffs off Andrew Feenberg's 1994 work exploring the changing meanings of the ancient board game of Go in mid-century Japan. We argue that whereas Go saw a de-aestheticization with the growth of newspaper reporting and a new breed of 'westernized' player, the rise of professionalized computer gamepl…
Composição De Classe E Migração Para Entender O Trabalho Por Plataformas
Este artigo analisa como a migração afeta a composição de classe dos entregadores brasileiros no Reino Unido. Embora pesquisas agora indiquem que a migração desempenha papel importante no trabalho por plataformas no Norte Global, pouco se sabe sobre as maneiras específicas como isso ocorre na prática. Demonstramos como a migração é um aspecto constitutivo desse setor no Norte Global e como a condição de migrante gera experiênciase comunidades com…
Work, play, and precariousness
Professionalised competitive digital gaming or ‘esports’ has grown to a point where millions of dollars are being awarded in competitions watched globally by tens of millions of viewers. Previous analyses of the phenomenon have examined the role(s) of labour in esports performed by various actors – players, tournament organisers, sponsors, game developers – but these have yet to be unified into a ‘big picture’ of esports labour, especially when c…
A History of Uber Organizing in the UK
This article details Yaseen Aslam's experience of organizing at Uber. Yaseen is the National General Secretary of UPHD (United Private Hire Drivers), a branch of the IWGB (Independent Workers Union of Great Britain). He is a co-claimant, with James Farrar, in the employment rights court cases against Uber in the UK. The article is the outcome of co-writing with Jamie Woodcock, presenting Yaseen's first-person perspective. It builds on the method …
Cards against gamification
The discussions on the future of work are pulled between technological optimism and the increasing concerns regarding the precarity brought about by the gig economy. Often, these scenarios fail to meaningfully engage and account for the workers' experiences, whose agency in effectively shaping their working future is denied and obscured behind discourses of autonomy, entrepreneurship and individual responsibility. In the context of the increased …
Organizing in the Game Industry
The videogames industry is often talked about as a “new” or “young” industry. Compared to many existing industries it is, of course, comparatively new. However, the first videogame—the iNimatron/i—was made in 1940 and briefly featured at the World’s Fair. Programmers working for the military were hacking games onto computers in the 1950s; iSpacewar!/i, made by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student Steve Russell, was being distribute…
How to beat the boss
This article provides an overview of the growth of game worker organising in Britain. These workers have not previously been organised in a trade union, but over the last 2 years, they have developed a campaign to unionise their sector and launched a legal trade union branch. This is a powerful example of so-called 'greenfield' organising, beyond the reach of existing trade unions and with workers who have not previously been members. The article…
Exposing and re-placing leadership through workers inquiry
The literature on leadership place and space offers us an understanding of how the built environment, geography of location and socio-economic forces can coalesce to shape (and be shaped) by leadership practices. Missing thus far, however, is an account that constitutes leadership space and place through antagonism and struggle, crucial if we are to acknowledge the agency of workers in leadership practice. We therefore outline a workers inquiry a…
Precarious workers in London
This paper discusses precarious workers in London. The aim is to consider the particular challenges and possibilities for resistance in the context of London. It addresses the theoretical questions of precarity and its significance in post-Fordist capitalism. The innovations of the Operaismo—in terms of workers' inquiries, the concept of class composition and the strategy of refusal—provide the theoretical basis for the paper. The paper draws on …
Spectres of Marxism
This article is a critique of Mike Savage's 'From the "problematic of the proletariat" to a class analysis of the "wealth elites"'. It first rejects the notion of the 'problematic of the proletariat' - the importance of a dividing line between the working and middle class - instead situating the argument within contemporary debates on class analysis. The critique introduces the broader context of neoliberalism and financialization, alongside a co…
Co-Creating Videogames
John Bank’s Co-creating Videogames is a detailed workplace ethnography that explores the concept of co-creation in digital production. In the context of videogames, this refers to a process that ta
The work of play
The video games industry in the United Kingdom is profitable and growing at a time when the broader economy is still failing to recover. This has attracted the interests of politicians, committing large investments and tax breaks. Although the headline figures are impressive, the overall structure of the industry is less clear. Within this there are many new organizations, often shaped by start-up culture. Less is known about how work is being or…
Fighting games and Go
This paper examines the varied cultural meanings of computer game play in competitive and professional computer gaming and live-streaming. To do so it riffs off Andrew Feenberg's 1994 work exploring the changing meanings of the ancient board game of Go in mid-century Japan. We argue that whereas Go saw a de-aestheticization with the growth of newspaper reporting and a new breed of 'westernized' player, the rise of professionalized computer gamepl…
Digital Labour in the University
Universities have been the site of a variety of shifts and transformations in the previous few decades. Both the composition of students and academics are changing (to a lesser or greater extent), along with the ways in which teaching and research is supported, conducted, and delivered. The effects of neoliberalism, privatisation, precarious employment, debt, and digitalisation have been highlighted as important factors in understanding these cha…
Gamification
Gamification' is understood as the application of game systems - competition, rewards, quantifying player/user behaviour - into non-game domains, such as work, productivity and fitness. Such practices are deeply problematic as they represent the capture of 'play' in the pursuit of neoliberal rationalization and the managerial optimization of working life and labour. However, applying games and play to social life is also central to the Situationi…
‘It’s like the gold rush’
This paper explores the lives and careers of video game live broadcasters, especially those who gain their primary real-world income through this practice. We introduce the dominant market leader – the platform Twitch.tv – and outline its immensely rapid growth and the communities of millions of broadcasters, and tens of millions of viewers, it now boasts. Drawing on original interview data with professional and aspiring-professional game broadca…
Live Streamers on Twitch.tv as Social Media Influencers
Twitch.tv is one of the most successful online live streaming platforms in the world, with 200 million viewers, 2 million regular “streamers,” and a market value of over $1billion. In this paper, we offer a first conceptualization of streamers as social media influencers, and how effectively they can perform strategic communication for sponsors. We draw on extensive ethnographic research and over a hundred semi-structured interviews with streamer…
The Affective Labor and Performance of Live Streaming on Twitch.tv
This article explores affective and immaterial labor on the leading live-streaming platform, Twitch.tv, which boasts over one hundred million regular viewers and two million regular broadcasters. This labor involves digitally mediated outward countenance, including being friendly to viewers, soliciting donations, building parasocial intimacy with spectators, and engaging audiences through humor. We offer an examination of streamers broadcasting a…
The impacts of live streaming and Twitch.tv on the video game industry
This article explores the growing importance of live streaming, specifically on website and platform Twitch.tv, to the games industry. We focus not on live streaming as a form of media production and consumption, but instead explore its newly central role in the contemporary political economy of the whole video games ecosystem. We explore three cases: streaming newly released games and the attendant role of streaming in informing consumer choice;…
And Today's Top Donator is
This article examines cultural and economic behavior on live streaming platform Twitch.tv, and the monetization of live streamers' content production. Twitch is approximately the thirtieth most-viewed website in the world, with over 150 million spectators, and 2 million individuals around the world regularly broadcasting. Although less well-known than Facebook or Twitter, these figures demonstrate that Twitch has become a central part of the plat…
The Socio-Technical Entanglements of Live Streaming on TWITCH.TV
The website and platform Twitch.tv is the overwhelming market leader in the live broadcast (“streaming”) of user-created videos over the internet, known primarily for the streaming of video game play. In both 2016 and 2017 over two million people regularly broadcast on the platform, resulting in over a million years of video content in total viewed by over one hundred million people (Twitch, 2017). The deep newness of this phenomenon, alongside t…
Sociality and Monetization on Live Streaming Platforms
This panel presents ongoing research into online “live streaming” platforms, which offer the live broadcast of individuals’ activities - primarily but not exclusively digital gameplay - over the internet to potentially massive worldwide audiences. The largest platform in this area (on which we focus) is Twitch.tv, already the 30th most-viewed website in the world, with comparable platforms boasting large viewing numbers in China, Korea, and Japan…
Games of Empire Ten Years On
The panel will retrospectively evaluate the significance of the seminal text Games of Empire (2009) for new media and game studies, reflecting on the contribution of autonomous Marxism to the study of digital culture today, as well as the methodological move it performed in tracing continuities and discontinuities between sites of production and play. Each paper will take one or two key concepts from the original book, including Empire, multitude…
Digital Workerism
The use of digital technology has become a key part of contemporary debates on how work is changing, the future of work/ers, resistance, and organising. Workerism took up many of these questions in the context of the factory – particularly through the Italian Operaismo – connecting the experience of the workplace with a broader struggle against capitalism. However, there are many differences between those factories and the new digital workplaces …
Operaísmo Digital
O uso das tecnologias digitais tornou-se parte essencial dos debates contemporâneos sobre como o trabalho está mudando, o futuro do trabalho e dos trabalhadores, incluindo as resistências e a organização. O operaísmo levantou muitas dessas questões no contexto da fábrica - particularmente por meio do Operaismo italiano - conectando a experiência do local de trabalho a uma luta mais ampla contra o capitalismo. No entanto, há muitas diferenças entr…
The Fairwork Foundation
This paper introduces the Fairwork Foundation, a research initiative that is also developing an intervention around the quality of work on digital labour platforms. Lacking the ability to collectively bargain, many platform workers have little ability to negotiate wages or working conditions with their employers. As a result of this new, digitally-managed market for work, many workers have jobs characterised by long and irregular hours, low incom…
Organizing in the Game Industry
The videogames industry is often talked about as a “new” or “young” industry. Compared to many existing industries it is, of course, comparatively new. However, the first videogame—the iNimatron/i—was made in 1940 and briefly featured at the World’s Fair. Programmers working for the military were hacking games onto computers in the 1950s; iSpacewar!/i, made by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student Steve Russell, was being distribute…
Exploitation
Exploitation involves an unfair relationship, in which one party benefits at the expense of another. Due to this unfairness, exploitation is a highly emotive concept, involving value judgments from different perspectives. In order to comprehend exploitation in sociological terms, it needs to be considered in this relational manner: understanding who is being exploited, why, and by whom. Throughout this entry, the key themes of exploitation will b…
Fast Food Shutdown
This article discusses the Fast Food Shutdown, a strike on 4 October 2018 that involved Wetherspoon, McDonald's, TGI Fridays and UberEats workers in the United Kingdom. It compares the different strategies of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers' Union at Wetherspoon and Industrial Workers of the World at UberEats. The two case studies, drawing on the authors' ongoing ethnographic research, provide important examples of successful precarious worker…
A History of Uber Organizing in the UK
This article details Yaseen Aslam's experience of organizing at Uber. Yaseen is the National General Secretary of UPHD (United Private Hire Drivers), a branch of the IWGB (Independent Workers Union of Great Britain). He is a co-claimant, with James Farrar, in the employment rights court cases against Uber in the UK. The article is the outcome of co-writing with Jamie Woodcock, presenting Yaseen's first-person perspective. It builds on the method …
How to beat the boss
This article provides an overview of the growth of game worker organising in Britain. These workers have not previously been organised in a trade union, but over the last 2 years, they have developed a campaign to unionise their sector and launched a legal trade union branch. This is a powerful example of so-called 'greenfield' organising, beyond the reach of existing trade unions and with workers who have not previously been members. The article…
Guerrilla Democracy
Combining cutting-edge theories with empirical research, this timely book offers an in-depth analysis of current platform-based radical movements to show how digital technologies revolutionise political and economic organising. This is an invaluable contribution to the emerging literature on the relationship between technology and society.
Guerrilla Democracy
Sociology (31 obras) · Political science (29 obras) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (22 obras) · Law (20 obras) · Computer Science (19 obras) · Business (18 obras) · Politics (16 obras) · Digital Games and Media (14 obras) · Economics (13 obras) · Engineering (13 obras)