Television at Work : Industrial Media and American Labor

This book explores how work, television, and waged labor come to have meaning in our everyday lives by describing the forgotten history of twentieth century workplace television. Analyzing how businesses used television to shape employees'' relationships to their labor in order to secure industrial efficiency and support corporate expansion, Television at Work challenges long-held understandings of the "domestic" medium. It also offers a critical prehistory of the use of digital technologies to extend the workday and advance understandings of labor that revolve around dehumanized technological systems and information flows.

Television has never been exclusive to the home. In Television at Work, Kit Hughes explores the forgotten history of how U.S. workplaces used television to secure industrial efficiency, support corporate expansion, and manage the hearts, minds, and bodies of twentieth century workers.Challenging our longest-held understandings of the medium, Hughes positions television at the heart of a post-Fordist reconfiguration of the American workplace revolving around dehumanized technological systems. Among other things, business and industry built private television networks to distribute programming, created complex CCTV data retrieval systems, encouraged the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation, used video cassettes for training distributed workforces, and wired cantinas for employee entertainment. In uncovering industrial television as a prolific sphere of media practice, Television at Work reveals how labor arrangements and information architectures shaped by these uses of television were foundational to the rise of the digitally mediated corporation and to a globalizing economy.