Topologies Of Digital Work

This book provides a unique contribution to the controversial discussion that surrounds the digitalisation and virtualisation of work. With a focus on the new formation of space and place, it critically discusses the idea that places in the context of work are increasingly losing their importance, and becoming more arbitrary with new technical possibilities. Theoretical considerations that deal conceptually with the understanding of space and work are taken into account, as well as empirical results from different professional and work fields across various regions of our globalised world. The book is applicable to researchers and students of sociology of work, media and communications, organization studies, workplace studies, labour process studies, economics, human geography, anthropology and learning sciences. Chapter 1, 4 and 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This edited volume seeks to enhance our understanding of the concepts of space and place in the study of digital work. It argues that while digital work is often presented as 'placeless', work always takes place somewhere with a certain degree of local embeddedness. Contributors to this collection address restructuring processes that bring about delocalised digital work and point out limitations to dislocation inherent in the work itself, and the social relations or the physical artefacts involved. Exploring the dynamics of global value chains and shifts in the international division of labour, this book explores the impact these have on employment and working conditions, workers' agency in shaping and coping with changes in work, and the new competencies needed in virtual organisational environments. Combining different disciplinary perspectives, the volume teases out the spatial aspects of digital work at different scales ranging from team level to that of global production networks.

Although workplace design and management are gaining more and more attention from modern organizations, workplace research is still very fragmented and spread across multiple disciplines in academia. There are several books on the market related to workplaces, facility management (FM), and corporate real estate management (CREM) disciplines, but few open up a theoretical and practical discussion across multiple theories from different fields of studies. Therefore, workplace researchers are not aware of all the angles from which workplace management and effects of workplace design on employees has been or could be studied. A lot of knowledge is lost between disciplines, and sadly, many insights do not reach workplace managers in practice. Therefore, this new book series is started by associate professor Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands) and postdoc researcher Vitalija Danivska (Aalto University, Finland) as editors, published by Routledge. It is titled ‘Transdisciplinary Workplace Research and Management’ because it bundles important research insights from different disciplinary fields and shows its relevance for both academic workplace research and workplace management in practice. The books will address the complexity of the transdisciplinary angle necessary to solve ongoing workplace-related issues in practice, such as knowledge worker productivity, office use, and more strategic workplace management. In addition, the editors work towards further collaboration and integration of the necessary disciplines for further development of the workplace field in research and in practice. This book series is relevant for workplace experts both in academia and industry. This first book in the series focuses on the employee as a user of the work environment. The 21 theories discussed and applied to workplace design in this book address people’s ability to do their job and thrive in relation to the office workplace. Some focus more on explaining why people behave the way they do (the psychosocial environment), while others take the physical and/or digital workplace quality as a starting point to explain employee outcomes such as health, satisfaction, and performance. They all explain different aspects for achieving employee-workplace alignment (EWA) and thereby ensuring employee thriving. The final chapter describes a first step towards integrating these theories into an overall interdisciplinary framework for eventually developing a grand EWA theory. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003128830, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book carries forward recent work on visual patterns and structures in digital images and introduces a near set-based a topology of digital images. Visual patterns arise naturally in digital images viewed as sets of non-abstract points endowed with some form of proximity (nearness) relation. Proximity relations make it possible to construct uniform topologies on the sets of points that constitute a digital image. In keeping with an interest in gaining an understanding of digital images themselves as a rich source of patterns, this book introduces the basics of digital images from a computer vision perspective. In parallel with a computer vision perspective on digital images, this book also introduces the basics of proximity spaces. Not only the traditional view of spatial proximity relations but also the more recent descriptive proximity relations are considered. The beauty of the descriptive proximity approach is that it is possible to discover visual set patterns among sets that are non-overlapping and non-adjacent spatially. By combining the spatial proximity and descriptive proximity approaches, the search for salient visual patterns in digital images is enriched, deepened and broadened. A generous provision of Matlab and Mathematica scripts are used in this book to lay bare the fabric and essential features of digital images for those who are interested in finding visual patterns in images. The combination of computer vision techniques and topological methods lead to a deep understanding of images.

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

Globalisation and rapid technological change have radically transformed labour markets, affecting the lives and prospects of billions of workers. Those in the informal economy, the vast bulk of the workforce in the Global South, have been bearing the brunt.

Providing an insightful analysis of the key issues and significant trends relating to labour within the platform economy, this Modern Guide considers the existing comparative evidence covering all world regions. It also provides an in-depth look at digital labour platforms in their historical, economic and geographical contexts.

The focus of this book is on providing a thorough treatment of image processing with an emphasis on those aspects most used in computer graphics. Throughout, the authors concentrate on describing and analysing the underlying concepts rather than on presenting algorithms or pseudocode. As befits a modern introduction to this topic, a healthy balance is struck between discussing the underlying mathematics of the subject and the main topics covered: signal processing, data discretization, the theory of colour and different colour systems, operations in images, dithering and half-toning, warping and morphing, and image processing.