Ethnography of a Canadian broadcaster: A study of the links among digital technology, flexible labor, and product quality

This dissertation explores the dynamic interrelationships among innovations in communication technology, industry and corporate restructuring, workplace reengineering, flexible labor, and product quality. During the latter decades of the twentieth century, the advent of digital-based computer technology enabled the convergence of media formats, which encouraged the incorporation of media giants and prompted the deregulation of the communication industry. Digital technology also provided organizations with new opportunities to decentralize administration and production and to render labor more contingent and generalized. Despite the social impacts intrinsic to the decentralization of labor, relatively few academic anthropologists study this phenomenon.;The author argues that, in addition to degrading workers' social identity and economic security, downsizing and decentralizing labor and the increased presence of generalized and contingent labor can institutionalize declining quality and quality standards. An ethnographic study of a Canadian radio broadcaster supports this argument. Results of the study demonstrate how increased labor flexibility degrades journalistic quality and threatens the broadcaster's mandate to provide distinctive and high-quality Canadian programming. In turn, the broadcaster's impaired ability to meet its quality mandate diminishes the Canadian government's efforts to promote unity and create a national culture via its mass media.