Corporate capitalism's use of openness: profit for free?
2020 (English)Book (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
This book tackles the concept of openness (as in open source software, open access and free culture), from a critical political economy perspective to consider its encroachment by capitalist corporations, but also how it advances radical alternatives to cognitive capitalism. Drawing on four case studies, Corporate Capitalism’s Use of Openness will add to discussion on open source software, open access content platforms, open access publishing, and open university courses. These otherwise disparate cases share two fundamental features: informational capitalist corporations base their successful business models on unpaid productive activities, play, attention, knowledge and labour, and do so crucially by resorting to ideological uses of concepts such as “openness”, “communities” and “sharing”. The authors present potential solutions and alternative regulations to counter these exploitative and alienating business models, and to foster digital knowledge commons, ranging from co-ops and commons-based peer production to state agencies' platforms. Their research and findings will appeal to students, academics and activists around the world in fields such as sociology, economy, media and communication, library and information science, political sciences and technology studies.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. , p. 338
Series
Dynamics of virtual work
Keywords [en]
Social responsibility of business, Openness, Exploitation, Ideology, Commons
Keywords [sv]
Företagens samhällsansvar, Öppenhet, Exploatering, Ideology, Allmänningar
National Category
Economics and Business
Research subject
Politics, Economy and the Organization of Society
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-41896DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-28219-6Libris ID: bnpz8tcr8snlxmhmISBN: 9783030282189 (print)ISBN: 9783030282196 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:sh-41896DiVA, id: diva2:1468672
2020-09-182020-09-182024-05-20Bibliographically approved