The time-making capacity of the technology industry and its consequences for public life

Roei Davidson, Noa Rein and Eran Tamir

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2024, vol. 17, issue 1, 55-72

Abstract: In the past few decades, the technology industry has been wielding increasing power over public life as it intervenes in many social domains including education. These interventions occur not only through the products and services the industry sells or provides in these domains but also through direct interactions between technology industry personnel and actors within these domains. Drawing on 23 interviews with Israeli school principals (as well as a supplemental set of 20 interviews with technology industry volunteers and Ministry of Education documents), we identify the prominence of temporality as a dimension of how school principals perceive and, at times, experience their interactions with the technology industry. We find that many principals perceive technology workers’ time as scarcer and more valuable than that of school staff and students. Volunteering technology firms act as time-makers setting the temporal conditions of the interactions which tend to be short-term, irregular, and constantly changing while schools are mostly time-takers, adapting their schedules – with ministry encouragement – to those of firms or avoiding such interactions altogether. We consider how this subverts public actors’ autonomy from private interests while also noting how some educators exercise sovereignty by opposing such irregular interventions.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2023.2261483 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jculte:v:17:y:2024:i:1:p:55-72

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJCE20

DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2261483

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economy is currently edited by Michael Pryke, Joe Deville, Tony Bennett, Liz McFall and Melinda Cooper

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().