Knowledge Workers in the Information Society

Knowledge Workers in the Information Society addresses the changing nature of work, workers, and their organizations in the media, information, and knowledge industries. These knowledge workers include journalists, broadcasters, librarians, filmmakers and animators, government workers, and employees in the telecommunications and high tech sectors. Technological change has become relentless. Corporate concentration has created new pressures to rationalize work and eliminate stages in the labor process. Globalization and advances in telecommunications have made real the prospect that knowledge work will follow manufacturing labor to parts of the world with low wages, poor working conditions, and little unionization. McKercher and Mosco bring together scholars from numerous disciplines to examine knowledge workers from a genuinely global perspective.

This book focuses on the most neglected group in the literature on our information-intensive economy: workers. After authoring several articles on this topic themselves, McKercher and Mosco are to be complimented for advancing this focus by bringing together authors in Europe, North America, and Asia to address the conditions of the diverse work force in the information economy: workers in journalism, film, libraries, telecommunication, digital equipment factories and call centers., The main strength of Knowledge Workers in the Information Society is the breadth of subjects and variety of methodological inquiry, and, although this is a joint effort, Canadian communication 'eminence grise' Vincent Mosco's hand, as editor and author, is very apparent. He and fellow editor McKercher have undertaken a much appreciated project that I hope will continue., At last, we have a book that gives knowledge workers back their agency. With analytical clarity and shrewd judgment, McKercher and Mosco have drawn together an impressive range of contributions from around the world that illustrate vividly, in all their complexity, the hard choices that knowledge workers make each day to balance their urge to creativity with their need to scrape a living and defend working conditions. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand knowledge work as it is in the real world, as opposed to the fantasies of policy gurus.

Catherine McKercher is associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. Vincent Mosco is professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society at Queen's University.