2.2.10. Cultural Work
Based on Lukács’ idea that mental work creates culture that is simultaneously economic and transcends the economy, we can design a dialectical model of cultural work (see figure 2.1, see also Fuchs 2015, chapter 2).
Using a stage model allows us to identify and relate diferent levels of cultural work (see figure 2.1). Cultural work is a term that encompasses organisational levels of work that are simultaneously distinct and dialectically connected: cultural work has an emergent quality, namely information work that creates content and is based on and grounded in physical cultural work, which creates information technologies through extractive and industrial work processes. Physical work takes place inside and outside of culture: it creates information technologies and its components (cultural physical work) as well as other products (noncultural physical work) that do not primarily have symbolic functions in society (such as cars, toothbrushes or cups). Cars, toothbrushes, or cups do not primarily have the role of informing others or enabling communication with others, but rather help humans achieve the tasks of transport, cleanliness, and nutrition. Culture and information work however feedback on these products and create symbolic meanings used in contemporary society by companies for marketing them. Cultural work is a unity of physical cultural work and information work that interact with each other, are connected and at the same time distinct.
Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar
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