Television at Work

Industrial Media and American Labor

By: Kit Hughes

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Paperback | 20 January 2020

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296 Pages

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23.39 x 15.6 x 1.68

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Television has never been exclusive to the home. In Television at Work, Kit Hughes explores the forgotten history of how U.S. workplaces used television to secure industrial efficiency, support corporate expansion, and manage the hearts, minds, and bodies of twentieth century workers.

Challenging our longest-held understandings of the medium, Hughes positions television at the heart of a post-Fordist reconfiguration of the American workplace revolving around dehumanized technological systems. Among other things, business and industry built private television networks to distribute programming, created complex CCTV data retrieval systems, encouraged the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation, used video cassettes for training distributed workforces, and wired cantinas for employee entertainment. In uncovering industrial television as a prolific sphere of media practice, Television at Work reveals how labor arrangements and information architectures shaped by these uses of television were foundational to the rise of the digitally mediated corporation and to a globalizing economy.

Industry Reviews

"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." -- Blake Atwood, Blake Atwood is an associate professor of media studies and chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut, Technology and Culture "While the book emphasizes the subtle manipulation and shifting relationship between management and labor, interviews with key media producers round out this fascinating look at corporate television ... A recommended acquisition for media history collections." -- R. Davis, CHOICE "Hughes' research is a fascinating addition to our historical and contemporary debates about medium specificity and the evolution of television." -- Karen Petruska, Media Industries Journal "While the book emphasizes the subtle manipulation and shifting relationship between management and labor, interviews with key media producers round out this fascinating look at corporate television. . . .A recommended acquisition for media history collections." -- CHOICE

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