Television at Work

Reviewed by: Television at Work: Industrial Media and American Labor by Kit Hughes Blake Atwood (bio) Television at Work: Industrial Media and American Labor By Kit Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 296. Over the last half century, there has been no shortage of American television shows dedicated to the workplace. From early sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks (1952–56) to feminist shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77) to more recent satires like The Office (2005–13), workplace series remind us of the centrality of labor to American life and the important role of television in communicating and critiquing ideas about labor. Yet, as Kit Hughes's important new book, Television at Work, shows, to limit our analyses of the relationship between television and labor to such representations of the workplace would be to overlook the important role that television played in the workplace. Building on the work of scholars like Anna McCarthy and Lisa Parks, Hughes uproots the television from the home as a normative site of analysis and instead studies how televisual technologies have been implicated in life outside of the domestic sphere. Based primarily on trade publications, Television at Work argues that technologies such as CCTV, videocassettes, and satellite played a significant part in shaping the experience of the workplace between the 1950s and the 1990s—a period when labor practices were already transforming tremendously in the United States with the shift to a post-Fordist economy. Although early manufacturers struggled at first to convince companies of the usefulness of television to business, it would eventually take hold and remain a mainstay for decades, even as the technologies that constituted television transformed over time. As Hughes writes, television figured prominently in work life throughout the second half of the twentieth century, including "extensive private television networks to distribute live and taped programming, leased satellite time for global 'meetings' and program distribution ... complex closed-circuit television (CCTV) data search and retrieval systems ... the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation ... videocassettes for training distributed workforces, and wired cantinas for employee entertainment and team-building" (p. 2). This is a lost chapter in the history of American television, one that has now been masterfully recuperated and detailed in Television at Work. Of course, television was not the first communication technology to shape the experience of labor—nor would it be the last. In Television at Work, Hughes goes to great lengths to situate television into a longer history of workplace media, including the telegraph, telephone, and radio. Each of these technologies became commercial ventures whose unique affordances were bent to maximize profit. [End Page 240] However, Hughes argues that television's incorporation into the workplace tracked something unique. It gained momentum as a corporate technology at the same time that other transformations were taking place in the American labor force—including the rise of service and white-collar positions, the feminization of work, a move away from manufacturing, and an uptick in information technologies. Thus, the large-scale adoption of television by corporations helped to inaugurate a "symbiotic relationship between 'knowledge industries' and corporate expansion," with television as both a "logistical tool" and "conduit for cultural production" (p. 19). Aligning itself closely with the subfield of media industry studies, Television at Work reconfigures how we understand audiences. Media scholars have long acknowledged that media help construct audiences as consumers. Hughes, through her discussion of industrial media, shows that media technologies also interpellate workers. In one fascinating example, Hughes discusses the rise of the industrial use of videocassettes, which were the perfect vessels for worker trainings to be completed at home on unpaid time. Hughes provocatively suggests that videotapes began to blur the lines between work/home and labor/leisure well before personal computers did. She writes that videocassettes encapsulated the managerial fantasy that "at any time, anyone anywhere (or, everyone everywhere) can be incorporated into ever-expanding corporate networks of communication and control" (p. 163). Television at Work is a book rich in material, analysis, and original research. It eloquently maneuvers between small case studies of particular technologies and larger historical trends in the economy, management theories, and labor practices. Despite its many strengths

Economic shortage · Labor history · Labor relations · Media studies · Normative · Political science · Sociology · Vanguard · Work (physics) · Engineering · History · Law · Media Studies and Communication