Index. People's Network : Soft Management with Satellite Business Television Narrowcasting -- Persistence of [a] Vision : The Electronically Mediated Corporation Prehistory -- To Extend Vision Beyond the Horizon, to See the Unseen : Industrial Television in the Post-War Era Flow -- Frankly Boring and Agonizingly Slow : Television Moves to the Office Immediacy -- Other Format Wars : Cartridges, Cassettes, and Making Home Work Time-Shifting -- People's Network : Soft Management with Satellite Business Television Narrowcasting -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index.
Summary:
"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 psychologically 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 CCTV data search and retrieval systems, encouraged the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation, used video cassettes 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."-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.