3D Representation of Network Society

Global Labor Force as Network

                My 3D representation of the global labor force comes from chapter 4 of Castells, “The Transformation of Work and Employment: Networkers, Jobless, and Flex-timers.”  I started with two models of advanced economies (Anglo-Saxon countries, on the one hand, and Germany and Japan on the other) as well as the developing world.  These were represented as metaphorical regions, although they are not, in fact, geographically clustered.  These are the three cans with the flags on them.  Although they are only metaphorical, within the model, they can also be seen as physical entities that are larger than nodes because each country within the categories has its own economy, labor force, and internal social networks.  Castells does not believe that there are hard and fast distinctions between these categories of advanced economies, incidentally, and I also do not mean to imply that in my model.  However, he did distinguish the Anglo-Saxon countries (primarily the USA and the UK) from Japan and Germany in the way that the labor force is allocated between sectors and the way development has proceeded.

The labor sectors are represented by three nodes connected to each can, three chopsticks inserted between nested cans.  These nodes are (1) managerial and professional, (2) manufacturing and (3) services.  Obviously this is also an oversimplification.  The blue tape connects the manufacturing sector of the different models, so that I could represent the fact that manufacturing jobs have shifted from the Anglo-Saxon regions to the developing world.  This is shown by placing wider sections of tape next to the can that has attracted the manufacturing jobs, namely, the developing world. Notice that this is less so for Japan and Germany, who, according to Castells, have maintained a larger portion of the economy in manufacturing.  The yellow threads connect managerial and professional nodes across regions. The number of strands has some correlation to level of exchange.  This exchange could be in terms of migration, say, Europeans moving to Silicon Valley, or in terms of multinational postings, say an American working for Boeing in China.  I suppose it could also represent possible outsourcing of knowledge work, but I wasn’t thinking too much about this last source of exchange and therefore it is underrepresented in my model.  The silver flags connected to the services nodes mostly do not connect to other regions since service jobs tend to be more localized.  Nurses and waiters still have to be physically present to provide their services.  I did put a few strands of gray thread from the services sector of the developing world to the Anglo-Saxon region to show that in the US and Britain, immigrants often move into the lowest skilled of these jobs.  The beans in the cans, incidentally, can represent the labor force in the represented countries.  The cables are supposed to represent the materiality of informational networks.  In other words, there are undersea cables and satellite systems and so on that support the internet, global finance networks, wireless communications and all the rest of the network society that undergirds the global economy which in turn directly affects how the global labor force is deployed.

Below are two additional pictures of my 3D representation.