From the point of view of companies and in terms of production, the line is indeed hard to draw; knowledge and labor pertinent to a particular ad hoc project or product are dispersed over the whole network of production. But from the point of view of workers, the line between themselves and the network of which they are nodes seems, in some respects, to be getting ever thicker and more impenetrable due to the redefinition of “work” and, in effect, the dismantling of this social category.
D<sub>ISMAN</sub>T<sub>LING</sub> “W<sub>ORK</sub>”
In the discourse on network production, workers are redefined as independent freelancers who are compensated solely for their successful accomplishment (i.e., for the end product they sell, rather than for their labor) and who bear all the costs of their work: equipment, training, unproductive time due to illness, health and other types of insurance, and so forth. In other words, they are piece workers.
All these costs are constructed in the discourse on network production as “externalities”—that is, socially necessary costs that are not accounted for in the compensation system (between workers and employers) or in the price system (between sellers and buyers). Instead, these costs are transferred to individual workers—that is, desocialized, or privatized. For example, Melcarek’s success story encapsulates—almost by construction—another story that remains latent in the article: that of all the other “solvers” who worked on that particular challenge but could not find a solution or who were too late in finding one. Had they been included in the story, we would have gotten quite a different picture. First, the amount of “brainpower” that had gone to waste (i.e., that was not directed into the accumulation process) would have undermined the universality of the argument that the network architecture marks a greater economic rationality.<sup>11</sup> It would in fact uncover the extent to which a networked mode of production such as InnoCentive is economically more rational only from the point of view of companies rather than the system, or society, as a whole.
And second, such depiction would have made clearer the transfer of risks from companies to individuals. This transfer of risks can also be conceived in terms of the privatization of the relations between companies and workers. In network production, companies meet workers at the marketplace to perform a specific task and then part ways. The neologisms that dot the digital discourse succinctly crystallize these new social relations. On the InnoCentive Web site, companies are called “seekers,” workers are called “solvers,” and work (or the problems to be solved) is referred to as a “challenge.” In the mere handful of articles on network production analyzed here, there is almost no mention of the concept of “work” or “labor.” The social category and subject formerly known as “worker” has almost completely evaporated in the digital discourse and is instead referred to by a plethora of other labels, which are themselves very revealing. They can be categorized into three fields of meaning— flexibility, democracy, and creativity and passion—all of which succinctly encapsulate the radical transformations of work entailed in network production. Table 5.1 presents a summary of these terms.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age