An essential account of how the media devices we use today inherit the management practices governing factory labor

This book argues that management is enabled by media forms, just as media gives life to management. Media technologies central to management have included the stopwatch, the punch card, the calculator, and the camera, while management theories are taught in printed and virtual textbooks and online through TED talks. In each stage of the evolving relationship between workers and employers, management innovations are learned through media, with media formats producing fresh opportunities for management.

Drawing on rich historical and ethnographic case studies, this book approaches key instances of the industrial and service economy—the legacy of Toyotism in today’s software industry, labor mediators in electronics manufacturing in Central and Eastern Europe, and app-based food-delivery platforms in China—to push media and management studies in new directions. Media and Management offers a provocative insight on the future of labor and media that inevitably cross geographical boundaries.

Rutvica Andrijasevic, based at the University of Bristol, is an activist scholar with research interests in international labor migration and business. 

Julie Yujie Chen is assistant professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto, Canada. 

Melissa Gregg leads user experience and sustainability in the Client Computing Group at Intel. 

Marc Steinberg is associate professor of film studies at Concordia University. 

"Allison Page’s Media and the Affective Life of Slavery powerfully analyzes how television, film, and new media use slavery to socialize viewers into racialized understandings of American citizenship. Through film, television, apps, and video games, she shows how media representations of slavery underwrote forms of liberal and neoliberal subjectivity. This is one of the most brilliant takes on the intersections between media, affect, citizenship, and race; we would do well to study its insights."—Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale University
 

"Allison Page’s Media and the Affective Life of Slavery offers a compelling and much needed archival media history of how the national story America tells itself about itself is renewed."—International Journal of Communication

"The core of Media and the Affective Life of Slavery is painful and profound but essential to an understanding of the multidisciplinary legacy and impact of slavery in the culture of the United States."—Information and Culture

"Media and the Affective Life of Slavery is an exciting book that breaks new ground even as it participates in some of the most enduring conversations in the field."—Television and New Media

"Pageʼs broad mapping of the media landscape provides an important guide for tracing the counterrevolutionary politics undertaken by media, educational authorities, and the state."—Lateral