[iDC] Introduction

Wed Sep 24 07:54:01 UTC 2014

Dear Brishen,

I'm looking forward to your presentation on the sharing economy and 
possible legal responses! I'm currently doing a research project on the 
governing of search engines in European contexts.. there's a new 
European data protection law negotiated right now, which is supposed to 
be binding for all European countries.. you can imagine that this is a 
rather tough negotiation process given the fact that countries like 
Ireland (where Facebook, Google and others have found their European 
homes due to tax reasons and liberal data protection laws) and Germany 
or Austria (with a long tradition in strict data protection legislation) 
have very different interests, economic cultures & concepts of privacy 
etc. Besides, US tech companies are heavily lobbying since their 
business models are at risk and the European market is a huge one.. 
against the background of the NSA affair and the fact that more and more 
Europeans are concerned about their personal data the case of the 
European data protection reform serves as an interesting case to study  
how search engines (Google) and others (FB etc) are/ may be governed in 
European contexts.. but also how some sort of European vision is forming 
in the context of data protection primarily understood as a 
counter-voice to the US IT industry etc. - drawing on Jasanoff & Kim 
(2009) I call it a "sociotechnical imaginary" seen as co-produced by 
technological developments and the forming (falling apart) of European 
data protection visions.. I'm in the middle of fieldwork right now 
(doing a media & policy analysis on search engines in the context of the 
reform and qualitative interviews with various stakeholders involved in 
the process), but it might be interesing to compare the European case 
with the American case at a later stage.. especially since "Europe" 
(whatever that is) increasingly aims to challenge US-American practices, 
ideologies, and legislations in this context, on the one hand, and 
remains highly dependent on the US IT industry, on the other, since 
hardly any European internet services exist (not least because all 
successful technologies, which are just a few anyway, have been sold to 
US companies; e.g. Skype having been bought by Microsoft) - which is yet 
another aspect to investigate further..

I'll be presenting something else at the digital labor conference, but 
it might be fun to catch up on these issues nevertheless.. if you think 
our work is related at all.. ;)

In any case, I'm looking forward to meeting you in NYC! Best, Astrid

Am 15.09.14 21:18, schrieb Brishen Rogers:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm really excited for the Digital Labor conference this year, and 
> apologize for my belated introduction. I'm currently an Associate 
> Professor of Law at Temple University, where I teach torts, employment 
> discrimination, and various labor law courses. Before law school I was 
> a community and union organizer for a number of years. My scholarship 
> focuses on the particular challenges facing low-wage and informal 
> workers in the current era of neoliberal globalization. So, right now 
> I have a project on the role of law in constituting and governing 
> global value chains, and several projects on the relationship between 
> basic labor protections and egalitarian distributive justice.
>
> In the past, my work has addressed questions of the relationship 
> between work, worker power, and technology, and I plan to expand that 
> focus in the future. My first article, "Toward Third-Party Liability 
> for Wage Theft" argued in part that Walmart and other mega-retailers 
> use of sophisticated monitoring technologies to drive down prices and 
> otherwise to discipline their suppliers should expose them to 
> liability for those suppliers' subsequent violations of wage & hour 
> laws. A subsequent article published last year ("Justice at Work: 
> Minimum Wage Laws and Social Equality") considered the relationship 
> between wage levels, productivity, employers' decisions to invest in 
> labor versus technological goods, and basic social equality between 
> employers and workers. I am also working on a short piece now (which I 
> plan to present at the conference) on how the so-called "sharing 
> economy" is undermining important public goods, and how regulatory 
> theory may respond.
>
> FWIW, my published articles are available here: 
> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1714048
>
> Again, I'm really looking forward to meeting everyone in November.
>
> Brishen
>
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Astrid Mager

Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA)
Austrian Academy of Sciences
A-1030 Vienna, Strohgasse 45/5
astrid.mager at oeaw.ac.at

http://www.oeaw.ac.at/ita/mager
http://www.astridmager.net

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