Vincent Mosco

B.A. (Georgetown), Ph.D. (Harvard)
Professor Emeritus

Research Areas

• The Sociology of Communication and Information Technology
• The Political Economy of the Media
• The Sociology of Knowledge Workers
• Communication policy

Biography

Dr. Vincent Mosco is Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, Canada. He is formerly Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society and Professor of Sociology. Dr. Mosco graduated from Georgetown University (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in 1970 and received the Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in 1975.

Dr. Mosco is the author of numerous books on communication, technology, and society. His most recent include Marx is Back – The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today, ed. with Christian Fuchs and published as a special issue of tripleC–Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society (http://www.triple-c.at) 2012, Getting the Message: Communications Workers and Global Value Chains (co-edited with Catherine McKercher and Ursula Huws, Merlin, 2010), The Political Economy of Communication, second edition (Sage, 2009), The Laboring of Communication: Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite (co-authored with Catherine McKercher, Lexington Books, 2008),Knowledge Workers in the Information Society (co-edited with Catherine McKercher, Lexington Books, 2007), and The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2004). The Digital Sublime won the 2005 Olson Award for outstanding book in the field of rhetoric and cultural studies.

Dr. Mosco is a member of the editorial boards of academic journals in the North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He has held research positions in the U.S. government with the White House Office of Telecommunication Policy, the National Research Council and the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment and in Canada with the Federal Department of Communication. Dr. Mosco is a founding member of the Union for Democratic Communication and was a longtime research associate of the Harvard University Program on Information Resources Policy. In addition, he has served as a consultant to trade unions and worker organizations in Canada and the United States. In 2004 Dr. Mosco received the Dallas W. Smythe Award for outstanding achievement in communication research.

Dr. Mosco is currently working on an edited collectionCritical Studies in Communication and Society, ed. with Cao Jin and Leslie Reagan Shade to be published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House and a book on the political, economic, and cultural significance of cloud computing.

Publications

RECENT BOOKS

The Political Economy of Communication
Second Edition

April 2009 280 pages
SAGE Publications Ltd

Paperback ISBN: 9781412947015
Hardcover ISBN: 9781412947008

'Vincent Mosco's heavily revised and thoroughly updated Political Economy of Communication is a masterpiece. (It) is the one single indispensable book that all media students and scholars need to read to understand this vital and growing area of research.'
Robert W. McChesney
Gutgsell Endowed Professor
Department of Communication
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

'Mosco has done all students of communication a great service by updating this book. It captures, summarizes and illustrates an important set of voices and arguments, key interlocutors in the ongoing effort to construct a critical theory and analytic of contemporary communication and culture.'
Lawrence Grossberg
Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies; Adjunct Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

'The Political Economy of Communication is a contemporary classic of media studies. Now, in this comprehensively revised second edition, Vincent Mosco, among the leading media scholars of our or any time, brings his searing insights and crystal prose to bear on the latest issues and debates of the field… An indispensable resource for researchers, activists, and students everywhere. It is a classic all over again.'
Toby Miller
Professor of English, Sociology, and Women’s Studies
University of California, Riverside

Table of Contents:

1. Overview of the Political Economy of Communication
2. What is Political Economy? Definitions and Characteristics
3. What is Political Economy? Schools of Thought
4. The Development of a Political Economy of Communication
5. The Political Economy of Communication: Building a Foundation
6. The Political Economy of Communication Today
7. Commodification: Content, Audiences, Labour
8. Spatialization: Space, Time and Communication
9. Structuration: Class, Gender, Race, Social Movements, Hegemony
10. Challenges on the Borders ... and Beyond 
    

The Laboring of Communication: Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite?
Vincent Mosco and Catherine McKercher, Lexington Books, 2008 

Technological change, corporate consolidation, and neoliberal governments pose significant challenges to labor, especially for workers in the communication and information industries. This book focuses on how traditional trade unions and new worker associations, many growing out of social movements, are coming together to address today’s crisis of organized labor. It documents the creative responses of high tech and cultural workers in the mass media, telecommunications, and computer industries. Drawing on political economy, labor process, and feminist theory, it offers several ways of thinking about communication workers and the nature of the society in which they work. Based on interviews and the documentary record, the book provides case studies of successful and unsuccessful efforts among both traditional and alternative worker organizations in the United States and Canada. It concludes by addressing the thorny issue of outsourcing, describing how global labor federations and nascent worker organizations in the developing world are coming together to develop solutions.

Table of Contents:

Preface and Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: New Responses to Bad Times for Organized Labor
2. Theorizing Knowledge Labor
3. Women and Work: Feminism and Political Economy
4. Convergence, Solidarity, and Labor Power: The Dream of One Big Union
5. Labor Convergence in the Information Economy
6. Beyond Business as Usual: Social Movement Unionism and Information Workers
7. Workers in a Changing Global Division of Labor

References

“While there are many texts describing the knowledge economy and organized labor's decline in North America, I know of no other book that tells the story of how knowledge workers are organizing through convergence in the face of technological change, growing corporate concentration, and neo-liberalism. Nor can I imagine a more compelling set of case studies through which to develop this critical narrative. This book is a welcome addition to scholarship in communication studies, labor studies, and women's studies.”
Leah Vosko, Canada Research Chair, York University

“In this textured empirical and theoretical examination of the workers in new media and information systems, Mosco and McKercher answer Castells' technology-focused network society with a critical sociological study of the conditions of work and the labor struggles in the making of the new global capitalist informational economy.”
Gerald Sussman, professor, Portland State University

“As more and more people line up to join the ranks of the creative class, figuring out how to empower and, if possible, protect them becomes a crucial part of our understanding of the global cultural economy. In this groundbreaking book, Mosco and McKercher offer the foundations for a such a critical analysis.”
Mark Deuze, author of Media Work and professor, Indiana University and Leiden University

The companion volume, KnowledgeWorkers in the Information Society, edited by Catherine McKercher and Vincent Mosco, Lexington, 2007, is now available in a paperbound edition.

View a full list of Dr. Mosco's PUBLICATIONS (216 kB).

 

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