Labor works we're reading

Braverman - Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century - 1974 A Marxist analysis of the takeup of automation in twentieth century capitalist factories. Lilly started reading it and has at least been finding it useful as a way fo summarizing some conversations about the politics and political economy of technologies of work.

Gregg - Work's Intimacy - 2011

Neff - Venture Labor - 2012 Neff examines the choices and experiences of high-tech workers in NY living through dot-com bubble. She addresses not how choices are made but how they are evaluated, and examines the social construction of economic value: how is the notion of risk constructed, and in particular how is it naturalized as economic risk? Venture labor is her term to describe how high-tech workers come to value risk as desirable, and their own labor as a form of investment in the companies that they work with, as a way to make sense of the uncertainty of such work. She says that venture labor is the outcome of a discourse of entrepreneurship entering into non-entrepreneurial labor. A quote:

The people who study governmentality have shown how we internalize these economic desires into our being. No longer are work relations con- structed as conflictual but rather framed as a way that we want to be working. The culture of the era meant people internalized the message that taking risks was desirable and, in turn, internalized the lack of economic security within their jobs.

Marisa has read the introduction and skimmed other sections.