Papers by Nancy Ettlinger
Knowledge and space, 2024
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Digital Geography & Society, 2024
In the context of extreme societal polarization, activists have mobilized to protest injustices a... more In the context of extreme societal polarization, activists have mobilized to protest injustices and claim their rights, yet such efforts often fall short of goals because demands normally are directed to government or firms
that offer superficial responses. Communitarianism, which broadly strives for autonomy from established institutions, promises the development of self-provisioning communities based on cooperative networks and
participatory, democratic governance that prioritizes use over exchange value and redistribution over profitable activity for individuals. The emergence of Web3 and blockchain technology has ushered in new affordances such as scaling a communitarian enterprise and exchange of value independent of banks or other institutions. Whereas market-based organizations use Web 3 affordances for accounting purposes for profit, communitarian organizations aim to link accounting with designs to inject capital into a commons to support self-governing communities in community-based peer production (CBPP). To exemplify the broad range of approaches to the multifaceted goals of CBPP, I focus on FairCoop and Sensorica. Despite considerable differences, these organizations nonetheless share problems and generally are illustrative of longstanding challenges to communitarian enterprises – digitalized and non-digitalized alike. Perennial problems such as the fraught capitalist/postcapitalist relation, self-interest, uneven power relations, lack of diversity, and the challenge of responding
adequately to societal needs combine with effects of automated governance and associated effects of technocracy
that can dissolve founding values to threaten the integrity of a communitarian collective. CBPP as well as its nondigitalized counterparts are important contributions to humanity, but goals and actual practices can diverge. CBPP requires vigilant designs that complement rather than replace human decision making with algorithmic governance and pay attention to reflexivity and positionality, continual re-design to engage unanticipated problems, and distancing actually existing projects from discourses that reify patterns such as decentralization with the consequence of missing crucial contextual knowledges.
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Antipode , 2024
view Intervention at:
https://antipodeonline.org/2024/08/05/explaining-the-terror/
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Algorithms and the Assault on Critical Thought
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Acme an International E Journal For Critical Geographies, 2014
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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2002
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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2002
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Human Geography, 2010
This article critiques and offers an alternative conceptualization of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ ... more This article critiques and offers an alternative conceptualization of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ using an actor-based and relational epistemology. ‘Culture’ and ‘creativity’ have been socially constructed in scale-specific terms that overlook everyday practices that can diverge from dominant patterns and suggest hopeful possibilities, which ironically are lost in many Left-leaning narratives. Hopeful possibilities are traceable analytically to circuits of material and discursive value, which are inextricably related but can entail different trajectories across scales. Tracing these trajectories requires analytical attention to microscale activity, that is, to individual actors’ material practices, which produce mutable, discursive and material value at multiple scales.
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My intent in this chapter is to offer a definition of precarity that pertains to multiple context... more My intent in this chapter is to offer a definition of precarity that pertains to multiple contexts, and to develop three interrelated arguments. First, I argue that precarity is both ubiquitous and longstanding, that is, not specific to a particular world region or time period. Unbounding precarity in time and space suggests that it is a part of the human condition. Consistent with Foucault’s (2000a, 343) view that power relations are anchored “deep in the social nexus” and crystallize in institutions, I direct attention to precarity in the first instance not at the scale of institutions and state-society relations, but rather in the microspaces of everyday life. Second, I reframe apparent explanations of precarity that actually are more descriptive of specific contexts than explanatory. Drawing from Foucault’s scholarship while also reacting to problems or holes in his conceptualization of governance, I explain precarity across contexts in terms of unpredictable, deleterious shifts in fields of power between governmentality or indirect governance in which power is diffuse, and coercive, sovereign, direct power, which, contra Agamben, I suggest complements but does not negate diffuse power. Foucault recognized the coexistence of governmentality and sovereign governance, but never examined their relation, which is precisely the location of my explanation of precarity. Third, people are subjected to chaotic slippage between fields of power differently because they have multiple, often incoherent subjectivities. If precarity underscores the human condition, it therefore does so unevenly. Subjectivities matter, and recognizing them gives voice to those who refuse the subjection of the terrors of precarity, while helping to interpret implicit complicity in insidious modes of governance.
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Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 2017
Drawing from a critical synthesis of interdisciplinary literatures, this article presents the org... more Drawing from a critical synthesis of interdisciplinary literatures, this article presents the organisational landscape of online work platforms as embedding problems posed to ‘the crowd’ while holding clues for paths of resistance. Organisational mechanisms that underpin online work platforms paradoxically both deterritorialise and territorialise online work and encompass new processes of disintermediation and intermediation, producing unprecedented savings for firms while imposing precarity on crowdworkers. Online work platforms nonetheless have become a tool of ‘development’ in underdeveloped countries for ‘bottom-of-pyramid’ (BOP) populations, a situation I critically examine regarding unique organisational features. Despite principles of online work platforms that would seem to foster the deterritorialisation of work, close scrutiny reveals spatially differentiated labour markets, which matter because the implications for change and the affordances of the new digital infrastruct...
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Space and Polity, 2020
ABSTRACT This provocation unbounds ‘state of exception’ to account for its sustainability and its... more ABSTRACT This provocation unbounds ‘state of exception’ to account for its sustainability and its role in daily life. I argue that sustaining a ‘state of exception’ requires a governmentality to govern and render the exceptional ‘normal’ over time, pointing to the mutual constitution of the two modes of governance. The omnipresent condition of possible shifts between sovereignty and governmentality relocates precarity from a statically defined objectified circumstance to the active slippage between these two fields of power. Yet whereas a ‘state of exception’ can become normalized, subjectivity cannot because the configuration of individuals’ multiple subjectivities differs relative to their lived experiences.
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New Formations, 2019
Futurist Alvin Toffler and critical theorist and historian Michel Foucault both referenced the in... more Futurist Alvin Toffler and critical theorist and historian Michel Foucault both referenced the interface of consumption and production – 'prosumption' – around 1980 in considerably different ways. Whereas Toffler focused on the empirical basis of prosumption at a time of structural unemployment and customised demand, Foucault's rendition was discursive and focused on the subjective dimension of prosumption under neoliberal governance. This article engages both contextual and subjective dimensions of prosumption in the context of digital life in the new millennium. Literature to date has emphasised prosumption from the vantage point of digital consumers, whose daily internet activity produces profit for firms while consumers receive no compensation for the data they produce and thereby are dispossessed of the fruits of their free labour – a perverse dimension of prosumption in the digital era. I extend the notion of dispossessed prosumption from the realm of digital consu...
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Big Data & Society, 2018
Although overarching if not foundational conceptualizations of digital governance in the field of... more Although overarching if not foundational conceptualizations of digital governance in the field of critical data studies aptly account for and explain subjection, calculated resistance is left conceptually unattended despite case studies that document instances of resistance. I ask at the outset why conceptualizations of digital governance are so bleak, and I argue that all are underscored implicitly by a Deleuzian theory of desire that overlooks agency, defined here in Foucauldian terms. I subsequently conceptualize digital governance as encompassing subjection as well as resistance, and I cast the two in relational perspective by making use of the concepts “affordance” and “assemblage” in conjunction with multiple subjectivities and Foucault's view of power as productive as well as his view of resistance as an “antagonism of strategies” in his late scholarship on resistance, ethics, and subjectivity. I offer examples of salient modes of what I call “productive” resistance (as o...
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Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2016
Drawing from literatures in business, the burgeoning field of human computation, and media studie... more Drawing from literatures in business, the burgeoning field of human computation, and media studies together with economic geography and social theory, this paper contextualizes corporate crowdsourcing in regimes of work and specifies and examines the rationalities governing this early 21st century round of exploitation. I refer to “rationalities” in the Foucauldian sense as the calculated ways by which mentalities become inscribed in a regime of practices, in this case, new practices of work. I present crowdsourcing as the means by which the regime of labor is governed in novel systems of production regarding open innovation as well as non-innovative yet skilled microtasks. I engage firm rationalities of decentralization, which have developed differently for innovative and non-innovative activity; wageless work; JIT labor (distinct from JIT production); precarization; informalization; fungibility; and invisibility. In the penultimate section, I draw from Foucault’s conceptualization...
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Geoforum, 2017
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New Left Review, Sep 1, 2014
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Progress in Human Geography, 2008
Working with the assumption that the social and the material are mutually embedded, this article ... more Working with the assumption that the social and the material are mutually embedded, this article suggests that actors in the business world tend to separate social from material concerns despite the entanglement of these two dimensions. This disconnection — a binary logic applied in the context of blurry realities — creates problems, the resolution of which requires change in production logic. The predicament of firms is the apparent inability of actors to develop a production logic that recognizes the entwinement of the material and the social; rather than changing from a unidimensional to a multidimensional logic, strategies continuously oscillate between one unidimensional logic (emphasizing social or material concerns) and another (emphasizing the opposite), thus perpetuating the predicament. The oscillation occurs in both the old and new economies, but is compressed in the new economy. Recognizing this oscillation in the new and old economies requires dehomogenizing each to uncover problems that prompt change. Recognizing the transformation of production logics within the old and new economies requires awareness of, and retreat from, binary logic in academic analysis.
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Journal of Economic Geography, 2003
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Papers by Nancy Ettlinger
that offer superficial responses. Communitarianism, which broadly strives for autonomy from established institutions, promises the development of self-provisioning communities based on cooperative networks and
participatory, democratic governance that prioritizes use over exchange value and redistribution over profitable activity for individuals. The emergence of Web3 and blockchain technology has ushered in new affordances such as scaling a communitarian enterprise and exchange of value independent of banks or other institutions. Whereas market-based organizations use Web 3 affordances for accounting purposes for profit, communitarian organizations aim to link accounting with designs to inject capital into a commons to support self-governing communities in community-based peer production (CBPP). To exemplify the broad range of approaches to the multifaceted goals of CBPP, I focus on FairCoop and Sensorica. Despite considerable differences, these organizations nonetheless share problems and generally are illustrative of longstanding challenges to communitarian enterprises – digitalized and non-digitalized alike. Perennial problems such as the fraught capitalist/postcapitalist relation, self-interest, uneven power relations, lack of diversity, and the challenge of responding
adequately to societal needs combine with effects of automated governance and associated effects of technocracy
that can dissolve founding values to threaten the integrity of a communitarian collective. CBPP as well as its nondigitalized counterparts are important contributions to humanity, but goals and actual practices can diverge. CBPP requires vigilant designs that complement rather than replace human decision making with algorithmic governance and pay attention to reflexivity and positionality, continual re-design to engage unanticipated problems, and distancing actually existing projects from discourses that reify patterns such as decentralization with the consequence of missing crucial contextual knowledges.
that offer superficial responses. Communitarianism, which broadly strives for autonomy from established institutions, promises the development of self-provisioning communities based on cooperative networks and
participatory, democratic governance that prioritizes use over exchange value and redistribution over profitable activity for individuals. The emergence of Web3 and blockchain technology has ushered in new affordances such as scaling a communitarian enterprise and exchange of value independent of banks or other institutions. Whereas market-based organizations use Web 3 affordances for accounting purposes for profit, communitarian organizations aim to link accounting with designs to inject capital into a commons to support self-governing communities in community-based peer production (CBPP). To exemplify the broad range of approaches to the multifaceted goals of CBPP, I focus on FairCoop and Sensorica. Despite considerable differences, these organizations nonetheless share problems and generally are illustrative of longstanding challenges to communitarian enterprises – digitalized and non-digitalized alike. Perennial problems such as the fraught capitalist/postcapitalist relation, self-interest, uneven power relations, lack of diversity, and the challenge of responding
adequately to societal needs combine with effects of automated governance and associated effects of technocracy
that can dissolve founding values to threaten the integrity of a communitarian collective. CBPP as well as its nondigitalized counterparts are important contributions to humanity, but goals and actual practices can diverge. CBPP requires vigilant designs that complement rather than replace human decision making with algorithmic governance and pay attention to reflexivity and positionality, continual re-design to engage unanticipated problems, and distancing actually existing projects from discourses that reify patterns such as decentralization with the consequence of missing crucial contextual knowledges.