Television at Work

This book explores how work television and waged labor come to have meaning in our everyday lives. However it is not an analysis of workplace sitcoms or quality dramas. Instead it explores the forgotten history of how American private sector workplaces used television in the twentieth century. It traces how at the hands of employers television physically and psychically managed workers and attempted to make work meaningful under the sign of capitalism. It also shows how the so-called domestic medium helped businesses shape labor relations and information architectures foundational to the twinned rise of the technologically mediated corporation and a globalizing information economy. Among other things business and industry built extensive private television networks to distribute live and taped programming leased satellite time for global “meetings” and program distribution created complex closed-circuit television (CCTV) data search and retrieval systems encouraged the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation used videocassettes for training distributed workforces and wired cantinas for employee entertainment. Television at work describes the myriad ways the medium served business’ attempts to shape employees’ relationships to their labor and the workplace in order to secure industrial efficiency support corporate expansion and inculcate preferred ideological orientations. By uncovering industrial television as a prolific sphere of media practice—one that continually sought to reshape the technology’s cultural meanings affordances and uses—Television at Work positions the medium at the heart of Post-Fordist experiments into reconfiguring the American workplace and advancing understandings of labor that increasingly revolved around dehumanized technological systems and information flows.