The People’s Network: Soft Management with Satellite Business Television
The People’s Network: Soft Management with Satellite Business Television
Narrowcasting
Chapter 5 (keyword: narrowcasting) explores the development of private satellite networks to manage distributed workforces in the context of globalization and a “cultural turn” in popular management theories. The late 1980s saw the proliferation of industry-focused subscription channels (e.g., geared toward insurers) and internal “networks” housed by a single company (e.g., Hewlett Packard). Two case studies (Johnson Controls and Steelcase) show how businesses used television to target worker identity in a bid to usurp other modes of affiliation (the nation, class) within the unstable employment environment of the 1980s and 1990s. This is the other side of the multichannel era: the creative deployment of employees as niche audiences. At the same time that post-national consumer identities became lucrative as a means of gathering and selling audiences on the diverse products of flexible specialization, proper cultural management of worker identity supported companies’ profit-maximization strategies (often based in cuts to employees’ material welfare).
Keywords: globalization, narrowcasting, satellite, BTV, satellite business television, management theory, re-engineering, precarity, niche audience, worker identity
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