Chapter 7: Transnational Crews and Postsocialist Precarity – Globalizing Screen Media Labor in Prague
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Political economists and network theorists offer different assessments of the global relations of motion picture production. While spatially extended webs of productive labor are central to such approaches, neither explains specifically how these webs are constituted or how they operate in peripheral production ecologies. What is more, they do not consider the implications of the knowledge transfers and power hierarchies emerging from such transnational production contexts. By contrast, this chapter offers a concrete analysis of these issues in Prague’s postsocialist film and television industries. It focuses on the segregation of the local work world and on barriers inhibiting transsectoral knowledge...
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7.1: Introduction
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Overview of the chapter focus: analysis of film and television industry labor issues in postsocialist Prague, including the segregation of work cultures, barriers against transsectoral knowledge transfers, and the two-tier production split between international and domestic production.
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7.2: Localized Learning in Global Production Networks
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Distinguishing this chapter's focus on local reasons for labor precarity from the U.S.-dominated neo-Marxist analysis of international production. The process by which Czech workers learn foreign production practices, and the three dimensions of localized learning proposed by Malmberg and Maxwell.
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7.3: Globalizing a Postsocialist Production World – Producers and Production Management as Cultural Interface
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The rise of Prague's foreign services industry since the 1990s. The emphasis on transfer of organizational knowledge and managerial, rather than technical, skills from overseas producers to Czech workers.
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7.4: Multiple Globalizations
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The limitations of knowledge transfer as a result of interaction between Czech and overseas personnel, including the lack of local production reshaping due to the lack of hiring of Czech above-the-line workers or department heads, the limited upward mobility of Czech workers in transnational productions, and the lack of production services companies branching out to original productions.
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7.5: Career Patterns and Precarity in Transnational Project Networks
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Contrasting career patterns: American-born production managers in Prague are fast-tracked compared to their counterparts in Hollywood, while Czech production workers rarely gain promotions to higher creative positions, build internationally known career, or take part in prestigious domestic projects.
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7.6: Conclusion – A Two-Tier, Departmentalized Work World
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The importance of a balanced approach to modeling globalization, that considers knowledge transfers, learning effects, and cultural intermediaries, in analyzing labor issues of the Czech screen industries.
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7.7: Notes
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