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"The recent increase in the use of digital self-tracking devices has given rise to a range of relations to the self often discussed as quantified self (QS). In popular and academic discourse, this development has been discussed variously as a form of narcissistic self-involvement, an advanced expression of panoptical self-surveillance and a potential new dawn for e-health. This article proposes a previously un-theorised consequence of this large-scale observation and analysis of human behaviour; that exercise activity is in the process of being reconfigured as labour. QS will be briefly introduced, and reflected on, subsequently considering some of its key aspects in relation to how these have so far been interpreted and analysed in academic literature. Secondly, the analysis of scholars of "digital labour" and "immaterial labour" will be considered, which will be discussed in relation to what its analysis of the transformations of work in contemporary advanced capitalism can offer to an interpretation of the promotion and management of the self-tracking of exercise activities. Building on this analysis, it will be proposed that a thermodynamic model of the exploitation of potential energy underlies the interest that corporations have shown in self-tracking and that "gamification" and the promotion of an entrepreneurial selfhood is the ideological frame that informs the strategy through which labour value is extracted without payment. Finally, the potential theoretical and political consequences of these insights will be considered."

à lire / Digital labor

What Peter Drucker had to say about the temp and freelance economy, unlocked for the weekend. Two extraordinary changes have crept up on the business world without most of us paying much attention to them. First, a staggering number of people who work for organizations are no longer traditional employees of those organizations.

AirBNB vient à nouveau de publier des chiffres pour mesurer l'activité qu'il génère afin de mieux justifier son existence... A New York, il aurait générer 632 millions de de dollars d'activité et participé à la création de 4580 emplois... On voit qu'il est difficile à l'économie du partage de mesurer son apport économique, souligne Emily Badger. L'apport de auto-entrepreneuriat est largement sous-estimé car nous savons mal le mesurer. Or, l'expansion des possibilités de consommation conduit à une augmentation de la consommation estime Arun Sundararajan, spécialiste de l'économie collaborative. L'économie collaborative est plus complexe. "L'impact d'eBay n'a pas tant porté sur les emplois qu'eBay a créé, que sur les centaines de milliers de vendeurs qu'il a généré". Beaucoup de ces plateformes, comme Etsy, AirBNB ou Uber, fonctionnent comme des écoles d'entrepreneuriat. Comme leurs utilisateurs ne sont pas dans les radars de l'économie officielle, cela signifie qu'il faut qu'ils communiquent mieux sur leurs données.

"But that's about to change. Shyp is shifting from signing up couriers as contractors to hiring them as staffers, with the closer ties and legal obligations that such a relationship carries. The new approach will start in the next city Shyp enters: Chicago, where it plans to be up and running this summer. Couriers in the company's current markets-Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, and San Francisco-will transition from contractor status to employees on January 1, 2016."

"Orange vient de créer un espace de co-working rassemblant des salariés volontaires, des startups et des artistes. Objectif : expérimenter de nouvelles manières de travailler et de manager avec moins de contrainte pour mesurer l'impact du numérique sur le travail."

EUWIN is a growing international community of practitioners and researchers committed to new and better ways of working.

L'access à cette communauté: http://portal.ukwon.eu/

"Six months ago, a New York-based consulting company named Undercurrent took a dose of its own medicine by becoming a holacracy: the management structure used by GitHub and Zappos. Here's how they did it."

"So what does that mean for workers over the years and decades ahead? Mr. Autor says that this weakness leaves plenty of opportunities for humans to serve as intermediaries of sorts between increasingly intelligent computers that nonetheless lack that common sense. He invokes the idea of "Polanyi's Paradox," named for the Hungarian thinker Michael Polanyi, who observed that "we know more than we can tell," meaning humans can do immensely complicated things like drive a car or tell one species of bird from another without fully understanding the technical details. "Following Polanyi's observation," Mr. Autor writes, "the tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those demanding flexibility, judgment, and common sense - skills that we understand only tacitly.""

"Economist Gerald Friedman warns that the much-hyped gig economy is a road to ruin for workers"

"Crowd labor platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk operate with few rules and little protection for workers. But a new movement might change the landscape."

In this new reality, a smaller share of Americans enjoy the fruits of an expanding economy. This isn't a fluke of the past few years - it's woven into the very structure of the economy. And even though Republicans and Democrats keep promising to help the middle class reclaim the prosperity it grew accustomed to after World War II, their prescriptions aren't working.

A whole slew of labor platforms have come up over the last couple of years, powering what is widely referred to as the Gig Economy or (rather inappropriately) the Sharing Economy. Remote freelancing (Freelancer, Elance-Odesk) and micro-tasking (Amazon Mechanical Turk) platforms have been around for quite some time, as have classifieds (e.g. Craigslist), all of which enable service providers to find new gigs. But a whole new range of vertical-specific platforms have come up in recent times creating two broad classes of new opportunities: - Higher end gigs: Consulting platforms like Clarity and Experfy now enable highly skilled individuals to find gigs on platforms. - Real world gig coordination: Platforms like Homejoy and Postmates allow people with spare time to find a new source of income in the 'real' world.

Infographie - "50% des salariés se sentent moins stressés en travaillant dans un tiers-lieux. Tel est un des premiers résultats d'une grande enquête menée sur l'utilisation des espaces de coworking par LBMG Worklabs, société spécialisée dans les solutions de télétravail. Premiers résultats en images."

Les robots camions font le travail que les Australiens évitent; évitant ainsi une crise industrielle dans un pays dont la géographie rend les emplois clés indésirables

Like the cultural and professional shifts that arose from white collar, blue collar, and pink collared workers, we are now in the era of the "uncollared worker." The rise of this new uncollared workforce will fundamentally and permanently change the future of work. While some have argued that this shift amounts to little [...]