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Building Momentum For Collectivity In The Digital Games Community, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault
Building Momentum For Collectivity In The Digital Games Community, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault
Management and Organizational Studies Publications
Studies of digital game labor have tended to document problems in the working lives of developers while devoting relatively limited attention to solutions, or to collective representation as a step toward solutions. An increasing number of game developers are dissatisfied with their working conditions, and dissatisfaction is a necessary condition for workers to engage in collective action to gain the representational power needed to achieve change in the workplace. Noting that the landscape of collective mobilization in the game industry has not yet been systematically mapped, this article documents collective actions over the past five decades, and asks, “Are the …
Is The Very Notion Of “Representation” Relevant For The Regulation Game Of Video Game Developers?, Marie-Josee Legault, Johanna Weststar
Is The Very Notion Of “Representation” Relevant For The Regulation Game Of Video Game Developers?, Marie-Josee Legault, Johanna Weststar
Management and Organizational Studies Publications
Using Kelly’s mobilisation theory (1998) to assess their propensity to collective action, this article examines where videogame developers stand regarding the representation of their interests. These workers are good examples of knowledge work in project-based organisations. If Kelly’s model allows in general for projections of unionisation in a given sector, we find this is not the case here. Rather, our study leads us to observe how much the labour market has changed since the elaboration of Kelly’s model, and how much these workers’ needs differ from the options laid out by traditional unions’ action as presented by Kelly. This group …
Is The Very Notion Of "Representation" Relevant For The Regulation Game Of Video Game Developers?, Marie-Josee Legault, Johanna Weststar
Is The Very Notion Of "Representation" Relevant For The Regulation Game Of Video Game Developers?, Marie-Josee Legault, Johanna Weststar
Management and Organizational Studies Publications
In this paper we question whether videogame developers face a representation gap due to the lack of unionization or whether their current means of action are appropriate and sufficient protections against employment risk. To answer this question we will first sketch the working conditions of videogame developers and then describe their individual and collective means of action to face employment challenges. We will then discuss the strengths and failings of these approaches vis a vis unionization and propose potential alternatives that would be a better fit than the traditional Wagnerian model of union representation.