“Liquid Life” – Mark Deuze

Liquid Life, Convergence Culture, and Media Work Mark Deuze Bloomington Indiana – USA (Ph) 1-812-3231699 Email: [email  protected] edu URL: http://deuze. blogspot. com Dated: March 19, 2006 Working Paper Word count (excluding references): 7. 917 Author: Mark Deuze (Indiana University) Keywords: Social Theory, Liquid Modernity, Media Work Biographical information: Mark Deuze (1969) is associate professor at Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications in Bloomington, the United States, and Professor of Journalism and New Media at Leiden University, The Netherlands.He received his PhD in the social sciences from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Publications of his work include five books, as well as articles in peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, The Information Society, and First Monday, and he publishes an irregular weblog on new media and society at http://deuze. blogspot. com. Liquid Life, Convergence Culture, and Media Work Abs tract Life today has become analogous with work – and it increasingly displays all the contemporary characteristics of work in what has been described as the ‘new capitalism’: permanent flux, constant change, and structural indeterminacy.Zygmunt Bauman thus argues how we are all living a ‘liquid’ life, which is â€Å"a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty. † In liquid life, the modern categories of production (work) and consumption (life) have converged, which trend is particularly visible in our almost constant and concurrent immersion in media. According to Henry Jenkins, these are the conditions of an emerging convergence culture.In this paper these trends will be explored in detail, coupling insights from contemporary social theory, new media studies and popular culture to show how our modern conceptions of media, culture and society have modernized, and how the emerging media ecosystem can be illuminated by sett ing it against the ways in which those at the forefront of these cultural and technological changes negotiate their professional identity: the mediaworkers. 1 Liquid Life, Convergence Culture, and Media Work In today’s society, argues Zygmunt Bauman, â€Å"work is the normal state of all humans; not working is abnormal† (2005a: 5).Life has become analogous to work. Instead of developing a lifestyle, our everyday efforts and energy go into choosing a work-style: ‘a way of working and a way of being at work’, as one British professional coaching agency describes it. As work becomes a way of life, life increasingly displays all the characteristics of contemporary work, where we have to come to terms with the challenges and opportunities of contingent employment, precarious labour, and a structural sense of real or perceived job insecurity.Ulrich Beck (2000) points at the fundamentally ambivalent prospects of contemporary ‘work-styles’ at all leve ls of society as marked by uncertainty, paradox and risk. The conditions of work at the beginning of the 21st century are in a constant state of flux, brought about by all kinds of job destruction practices in the context of what Richard Sennett (1998) calls ‘workforce flexibility’.This culture of contemporary capitalism manifests itself most directly in the notable change of one’s career from a series of more or less predictable achievements within the context of a lifelong contract to a constant reshuffling of career bits and pieces in the ‘portfolio worklife’, as heralded by Charles Hand as early as 1989 (pp. 183ff). In the portfolio lifestyle, careers are a sequence of stepping stones through life, where workers as individuals and organizations as collectives do not commit to each other for much more than the short-term goal, the project at hand, the talent needed now.The modern categories of life and work at the beginning of ther 21st century ar e thus spilling over, into each other, making each of these key aspects of our human condition contingent on the characteristics of the other. Bauman shows how this increasing fluidity of the everyday, coupled with a prevalent sense of permanent flux, has created the conditions of contemporary ‘liquid’ life as â€Å"a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty† (2005b, p. 2).In this paper I will set the sketched developments and discussions on the centrality of work and the convergence of work and life in liquid modernity against a context of the pervasive and ubiquitous nature of media in our everyday lives. I will show how our almost constant and concurrent immersion in media can be seen as both a reflection as well as an amplification of the hybridization of life in culture of new capitalism. This perspective opens up different ways of looking at seemingly contradictory thus deeply unsettling trends in 2 today’s lived experiences at home, at work, and at play.At the heart of this argument stands a selective reading of contemporary social theories on the changing nature of work by Richard Sennett, Zygmunt Bauman, and Ulrich Beck, coupled with the approaches to new media by Lev Manovich and Pierre Levy, and popular culture by Henry Jenkins. By conceptually linking between the centrality of work in today’s risk society, with the omnipresence of new media and the pervasiveness of the genres, discourses and uses of popular culture, we may open up exciting ways of looking at both historical and contemporary phenomena on the intersection between media, culture and society.New Capitalism The constant uncertainty of everyday liquid life today, as sketched by Zygmunt Bauman, is accelerated and amplified at work following the prevailing management mantras of new capitalism, where stability and solidity as one-time hallmarks of a healthy company now have become signs of weakness (Sennett, 2005: 41). The relationshi ps of capital and labour, argues Manuel Castells, are increasingly individualized and organized around the network enterprise form of production, which integrates the work process globally through telecommunications, transportation and client-customer networks.Such worldwide integration introduces a fundamental aspect of unpredictability to the nature of work, as the success or failure of the local production process becomes almost completely contingent on the fluctuations in the global network – and vice versa, as â€Å"any individual capital is submitted to the movements of the global automaton† (Castells, 2000: 18).Here, adaptive behavior, permanent change, casualization of labor, and continual innovation are all expressed in the executive credo of ‘workforce flexibility’ which according to Bauman has turned from something to be avoided into a virtue to be learned and practised daily (2002: 24). This flexibility for many is synonymous with living in fea r of real or perceived job insecurity. Sennett signals how even affluent and highly educated young professionals fear â€Å"they are on the edge of losing control over their lives.This fear is built into their work histories† (Sennett, 1998: 19). Society today, argues Sennett, uses the feverish development of flexible organisations against the ‘evils’ of routine. Unlike Handy, he sees little promise in this re-interpretation of uncertainty as the corporate strategy of choice: â€Å"Revulsion against bureaucratic routine and pursuit of flexibility has produced new structures of power and control, rather than created the conditions which set us free† (ibid. 47). This 3 flexibility stretches out into both work time and non-work time, which distinction has blurred for many, if not most, people. Adapting to changing management practices, new technologies, and cultivating creativity and talent cannot be necessarily tied to a nine-to-five working weekday, especia lly considering the general lack of corporate investment in employee training.With the slow demise of lifelong full-time employment, continuous searching for jobs, preparing for potential future jobs, as well as managing multiple careers more or less simultaneously have become core elements of everyday lifestyle for many. This inevitably must lead to a more inclusive understanding of work as taking place in differing socio-economic settings and as interconnected with many other, often non-work, relationships (Parry et al, 2005).Work comes in many different shapes and sizes – paid and non-paid, voluntary and employed, professional and amateuristic – and we seem to be engulfed in it all of the time. Working increasingly includes (re-) schooling and training, unlearning ‘old’ skills while adapting to changing technologies and management demands, moving from project to project, and navigating one’s career through an at times bewildering sea of loose aff iliations, temporary arrangements, and informal networks.This perception and experience of working has come to define life and modern society. Additionally our understanding of contemporary work-styles by definition includes structural uncertainty and risk, thus framing every aspect of our lives within that particular context. Precarity The key to understanding this ‘brave new world’ of work is its precariousness, characterized by endemic uncertainty and permanent change (Beck, 2000: 22-3). The nature of work is changing rapidly in our runaway world – some even foresee an end of work in the nearby future (Rifkin, 2004).However real or perceived the insecurities experiences in our everyday work-styles are, its precarite bleeds into every understanding we have of ourselves and who we are. As colorfully described on the Britain-based website Precarity. Info: â€Å"WHAT IS PRECARITY? Precarity stretches beyond work. It includes housing, debt, general instability, th e inability to make plans. We can talk about the subjugation of life under capital, not just the subjugation of labour under capital. Precarity is an instrument of control; it is enforced by those with power 4 upon the powerless.We can't choose how we want to live. It engenders competition in social life. It forces us into a Darwinian â€Å"struggle for existence† on a social level. Precarity is the basic condition of individuals in capitalist society. It divides us, and limits opportunities to get together. People are disempowered and social relations break down. †1 If work and life are increasingly indiscernable in the play of the everyday, the key institutions linking their practices to modernity – work (or: occupations) and the family must also be seen as undergoing a fundamental shift.With the increasing precariousness of labor and the exponential entry of women into the workforce both ‘work’ and ‘family’ have not only changed; thes e core institutions of modern life have thus become integrated. Catherine Hakim (2003) signals a shift in preferences towards adaptive or work centered (instead of home centered) lifestyles that cannot be attributed to societies as a whole, but to particular groups within liquid modern societies – especially those who want to keep up with the demands of contemporary consumer culture.The family has become what Anthony Giddens (2003: 58-9) calls a ‘shell’ or, in the words of Beck, ‘zombie’ institution: people and policymakers alike still refer to the family as the primary unit in today’s society, even though in its traditional connotation of the nuclear family – two married parents and children at home – it has all but died. Instead, our families perhaps must be seen as transitory units similar to what Georges Benko describes as ‘non-places’ like shopping malls or airports.In such spaces existing for temporary convenie nce and the more or less anonymous exchange of goods, services and information, no one is really expected to stick around very long. The family as a traditionally celebrated safe haven from the uncertain world outside, seems hto have turned itself against the values of domestication and ‘settling in’ – it has become the place and space for structural coupling and uncoupling (Bauman, 2003).With a divorce rate of roughly 50% in most capitalist economies, a growing recognition of the normalcy of gay and lesbian lifestyles, the exponential increase among city dwellers of predominantly childless peoples like recent immigrants, aging babyboomers, and empty nesters, and with singles forming 40% or more of the total population of countries in North America and Western Europe it must be clear that the meaning of ‘family’ as an institution, like work, has fundamentally changed.In his assessment of the personal consequences of the changing nature of work in our past-paced capitalist economy, Richard Sennett (1998: 21) laments how no one becomes a 5 long-term witness to another person’s life anymore. Indeed, most of us, rich and poor, are constantly on the move – either as economically and politically desperate migratory sanspapiers or as highly-skilled cultural entrepreneurs in an globally networked marketplace, where knowledge and information have become the primary form of capital (Drucker, 1993).We are not just on the move from parttime job to flexible contract, nor just from one city to the next country; in the particular urban settings of flexible capitalism we also move from from ‘pink-slip party’ to yet another social networking event, from rented apartment to leased living space, from fling to affair, and from single-size servings to disposable everything.Our only shared condition increasingly seems to be the lived experience of being â€Å"permanently impermanent† in the context of constant chang e, which in turn disables us to bear witness to anything other but our own plights, to be solely solved deploying our individual skills and personal resources (Bauman, 2002: 18; Bauman, 2000: 72; Bauman, 2005b: 33). In the beginning of the 21st century we are seemingly becoming blind to each other, which social fragmentation is exacerbated by the undeniable primacy yet deeply unsettling nature of work in everyday life.Jonathan Gershuny (2000), after comparing time-use datasets from twenty different countries (including Australia, Finland, The Netherlands and the United States), summarizes the characteristics of modern industrial societies in terms of a continuos growth in the numbers of skilled workers as a proportion of all employment, and a growth of time allocated to the production and consumption of sophisticated products and services.Even though we tend to spend more time consuming products and services of the information age, and technologies increasingly augment and automate human labour, this does not mean we are spending less time working, as Jeremy Rifkin (2004) has argued. Quite the opposite: new forms of work organization in fact entail intensified demands on the work-time of both permanent and temporary employees (Smith, 1997). The trend towards flexible work started in the 1970s, and has accelerated in the late 1990s, coinciding with the rush of an increasingly information-based global economy to the World Wide Web.It is particularly in this sphere of information- and knowledge-based work where the culture of flexible capitalism has taken root as the dominant mode of labour organization – and where researchers have found both employers and employees in fact preferring a condition of so-called ‘boundaryless’ contingent employment (Marler et al, 2002). A boundaryless career reflects a career path that 6 goes beyond the boundaries of single employment settings, and involves a sequence of jobs between different companies and diffe rent segments of the labor market. As job security and promotional opportunities within larger organizations decline, individuals may view multiple employer experiences in a positive light because it supports skill development, increases marketability, shifts career control to the employee, and perhaps results in better matching career and family life-cycle demands. As such, boundarylessness represents a different conception of job security† (ibid. , 430).Whereas for most workers in traditional temporary and contingent settings their employment situation is far from ideal, many in the higher skilled knowledge-based areas of the labor market seem to prefer such precarious working conditions, associating this with greater individual autonomy, the acquisition of a wide variety of skills and experiences, and a reduced dependence on a single employer (Kalleberg, 2000). The portfolio work-style of the self-employed information or ‘cultural’ entrepreneur can thus be char acterized by living in a state of constant anxiety, while at the ame time seemingly enjoying a sense of control over one’s own career. Bauman warns against overtly optimistic readings of the relative freedom these prime beneficiaries of inevitably unequitable globalization claim to enjoy, as â€Å"it is in a horrid and lamentable insecurity that their targeted or collateral victims suspect the major obstacle lies to becoming free† (2005b: 38). Freedom and security, often seen as mutually exclusive, thus become ambigious in the context of how different people from different walks of life deal with, and give meaning to, the consequences of not having either.It is perhaps the perfect paradox of contemporary liquid life: all the trends in today’s work-life quite clearly suggest a rapid destabilization of social bonds corresponding with increasingly disempowering effects of a frickle and uncertain global high-tech information economy, yet those workers caught in the epicenter of this bewildering shift express a sense of mastery over their lives, interpreting their professional identity in this context in terms of indvidual-level control and empowering agency (du Gay, 1996; Storey et al, 2005).Conditions of real or perceived job insecurity thus do not necessarily mean the workers involved are suffering in silence – nor that the anxiety that comes with a boundaryless, largely contingent, and portfolio worklife necessarily must be seen as a blessing in disguise. The convergence of the time and effort we invest in both production (‘work’) and consumption (‘life’) as signaled by Gershuny does suggest that our most common solution to the increasingly anxious and sometimes exciting developments in society is an endless individual and professional mixing of the cultures of working and living, thus indefinitely 7 lurring the boundaries between them. Crucial to this understanding is the realization that not only are we sp ending more and more time producing – information, knowledge, products, ‘things’ – we are also increasingly engaging in acts of consumption. The rate of consumption in society has greatly accelerated over the last few decades. The values, ideals and practices of consumerism tend to be framed in an extremely negative light – focusing for example on the increasing infantilization, mainstreaming and materialism of contemporary consumer cultures.However, consumerism can also be embraced in terms of its transformative potential regarding elitist, top-down, and otherwise non-responsive social institutions such as the political system (cf. the emergence of the ‘citizen-consumer’), the economy (cf. the ‘conquest of cool’ and the marketing of resistance), and the media (Keum et al 2004; Thomas, 1997; Jenkins, 2006). Indeed, the consumptive trend has been particularly visible in the sphere of knowledge and information-related leisure services provided by the cultural industries.We spend more and more time and money on entertainment experiences – which vary from acquiring consumer electronics to attending multimedia shows, from collecting technological toys to participating in social media online, and from navigating between ‘high’ cultural (cf. theater, museums, opera) to ‘low’ cultural (cf. reality TV, videogames, tabloids) forms of expression.Indeed, our collective quest towards increasingly compelling and diversified leisure like media-centric experiences has turned us into cultural omnivores: attending a play one day, renting a couple of Hollywood blockbuster movies the next; reading the latest installment in the Harry Potter (or the Russian Tanya Grotter) book series this week, spending the following weekend building a Website containing links to all the relevant information about global meteorological and ecological trends online.It certainly seems people have a lot of spa re time on their hands if we add up all these activities. However, Gershuny found evidence of what he calls the ‘end of leisure’: â€Å"each year we have to work harder in our free time to consume all those things that we have been working harder to produce in our work time† (2000: 51). Status in society today thus comes with a price: time outside of work (whether at home, on the road or in the office) has become a scarce commodity, even though we seem to spend more of it all the time. Media in Everyday Life The paradox of more time spent simultaneously at production and consumption can be resolved if one takes into active consideration how both spheres of activity have converged in our increased reliance on media in all aspects of life, in turn facilitated by rapid advancements in information and communication technologies. Next to engaging in all kinds of leisure activities to compensate for strains or other drawbacks on occupational work, work and leisure can increasingly be seen as xtensions of each other – especially for professionals in the knowledge and information sectors of the economy (Blekesaune, 2005). One particular effect this spillover effect has had on our everyday lived reality is the ongoing retreat of people into what can be called ‘personal information spaces’ at home and at work (which for a significant number of people occupy the same space), within which we only talk to and with ourselves.These spaces can be seen as particular physical environments such as turning parts of the house or apartment into a ‘home theater’ and ‘home office’ filled with all kinds of consumer electronics used to consume and produce media content (such as a desktop computer with internet access and a printer, one or more game consoles, a television set, digital video recorder, DVD-player, and anywhere between two to seven loudspeakers).Other examples of such personal information spaces include the ensemble of mobile media technologies we carry around us everywhere we go – devices that seem to socially isolate us while at the same time connecting us to the rest of the wired world (using a cellphone, laptop, Personal Digital Assistant, digital camera, walkman, and other more intricate forms of wearable computing that truly put the ‘personal’ in Personal Computer).Yet these spaces can also be experienced as disembodied – as in our ongoing immersion in persistent online environments varying from virtual workspaces (for example through videoconferencing capabilities and company intranets) to massively multiplayer computer games (World of Warcraft, Everquest, Ultima Online), virtual worlds (Second Life, The Sims Online, Active Worlds), and social networking services (Friendster, Orkut, MySpace). The various ways in which the ever-growing numbers of people both young and old engage with each other through these and other media is sometimes taken as new for ms of community.Manuell Castells for example describes our intensifying interactions online as a new form of ‘hypersociability’, where the social consists of networked individualism â€Å"enhancing the capacity of individuals to rebuild structures of sociability from the bottom up† (2001: 131). 9 Sennett’s act of witnessing (or perceived lack thereof) seems to have moved online, where people move in and out of interactive networked environments, managing their multiple virtual selves (cf. avatars) in persistent gaming, chatting, instant messaging and otherwise connective, digital, and online environments.Market reseach suggests the worldwide number of internet users surpassed one billion in 2005, most of whom access the global computer network from the United States, China, and Japan, with other large user groups in India, Germany, Brazil, Russia, and Spain. 2 Internet user penetration is now in the 65% to 75% range for the leading countries. We use intern et overwhelmingly for interpersonal communication, whether it is in the context of play, love, or work. And yes, these distinct domains of everyday life dissolve in our interactions online. A prominent place for people to look for or advertise new jobs is Monster. om, a Website, which launched in 1994. The site, which has affiliates in 21 countries around the world, currently boasts a million+ resumes and has contracts with close to 150. 000 companies. A growing number of singles – quickly becoming the dominant species in liquid modern societies – seeks and sometimes finds love online. A popular online matchmaking service, Match. com, launched in 1995, currently has more than 15 million members in more than 240 territories on six continents, and operates more than 30 online dating sites in 17 local languages. 3 The free online classifieds community at Craigslist. org operates 90 sites in all 50 U.S. states, and 35 countries, reports three billion pageviews per month â €“ the vast majority of which go to job listings. 4 The most successful businesses on the internet – like eBay, Yahoo, Google, and Amazon – share one fundamental characteristic: the product these companies deliver is connectivity, bringing people together to trade, communicate, interact and exchange knowledge, information, goods, and services. However, not just businesses thrive on interaction and connectivity online. The most often used reference guide on the World Wide Web is Wikipedia, a multilingual free-content encyclopedia, which started in 2001.The encyclopedia is based on the so-called ‘wiki–concept, which means it is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser and an internet connection. Wikipedia contains close to four million articles appearing in over 200 language editions, and gets about one million visitors a day. 5 Weblogs are another excellent example of how witnessi ng has become an increasingly virtual, yet also deeply personal act. Jill Walker provides the following definition: 10 A weblog, or *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Typically, weblogs are published by individuals and their style is personal and informal. Weblogs first appeared in the mid-1990s, becoming popular as simple and free publishing tools became available towards the turn of the century. Since anybody with a net connection can publish their own weblog, there is great variety in the quality, content, and ambition of weblogs, and a weblog may have anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of daily readers. 6 At current estimates, the total number of weblogs worldwide comes close to the 30 million mark, with more than 50. 000 postings per hour, and over 70. 000 new weblogs created each day. 7 Indexing research by Susan Herring and colleagues shows how the vast maj ority (70%) of weblogs are highly personal vehicles for self-expression and empowerment, written almost exclusively by individuals (Herring et al, 2005). However, this kind of individualism in weblogs is in fact quite connective, as bloggers include comment and feedback options with their posts, put up their blogs for free syndication (cf.RSS-feeds), reference and link to other blogs when creating posts, and cut and paste all kinds of content – including moving and still images, text, and audiofiles – from all over the Web as well as their own original work onto their weblog. The area online where the convergence of connectivity, content, creativity, and commercialism reaches its pinnacle is in the realm of computer games. Worldwide, more than 5 million active subscribers participate in massively multiplayer online games. 8 In a massively multiplayer computer game players connect to game servers via internet and interact in real time with other users worldwide.A signif icant part of this gaming experience consist of ‘meta-gaming’: in-game communication between gamers, using all kinds of devices such as headsets, chat commands, and in-game player signals. The playing of multiplayer games both reproduces and challenges everyday rules of social interaction, as the game environment can be seen both as an extension of real-world experiences and as strictly virtual space (Wright et al, 2002). Yet, meta-gaming is not just about the game: it includes any type of social interaction such as talking, loving, and trading. Ted Castranova (2005) for example has shown how we buy, sell and exchange goods and ervices in online games to the extent that such synthetic economies of scale have come to resemble those in ‘real’, offline worlds – if only because of their sheer size. All of these activities must be seen in terms of their concurrence, as we simultaneously engage in them through for example the windowing of computer screens: pressing ‘alt-tab’ gets you from your job resume on Monster to a post on a weblog, from browsing the information in a 11 Wikipedia entry for a presentation to contributing a book review to Amazon, from a purchase on eBay to an exchange in World of Warcraft.It is important to note how through these interactive, interconnected and networked devices and environments our work- and lifestyles further converge, not only facilitating but rather accelerating the blurring of modern life’s traditional boundaries. Contemporary changes in the economy, politics, society and technology thus get expressed in our increasing concurrent immersion in all kinds of media, which immersion in turn amplifies the convergence of the different spheres of activity in everyday life, blurring the lines between work and non-work, work and leisure, as well as between production and consumption.New Media, Culture and Society At the heart of most if not all of today’s new media technologi es saturating our work-life environments is their networked character, which interconnectivity has woven itself into the fabric of everyday existence among the majority of the population in European, Australasian, and North-American countries.Although this certainly suggests many people do not have access to such technologies, in the world of knowledge and information work the dominant presence of internet and other networked media cannot be ignored. In whatever shape or form, media bring the world to our doorstep – and we bring our world into media. No one is ‘outside’ anymore, whether by choice or necessity.This also means that the precarity of contemporary life through media extends to each and everyone of us, and cannot be said to be beholden to any particular group, race, class or gender – even though life’s current precariousness means different things for different people in different settings. In this context it is both fascinating and indee d hopeful that what characterizes most of the ways we engage with worldwide-networked technologies is the extent to which we seem to be doing so through participatory cooperation.Whether it is the online collaboratively authored encycopedia Wikipedia credible enough to challenge the Brittanica, the open source software movement potent enough to ruffle the feathers of Microsoft, the citizen journalism of Ohmynews powerful enough to influence presidential elections in South Korea, the search engine based on treating links as user recommendations Google, or the free-for-all online classifieds listings of Craigslist succesful enough to eat away the profits of corporate newspapers in the United States: the bottom line of all of these practices is collaboration, a 12 lourishing ‘collective intelligence’ particular of cyberculture (Levy, 1997). When asked to explain the worldwide success of Craigslist, founder Craig Newmark hints at collaboration as the key value embedded in t he way we use, design and give meaning to networked information and communication technologies: â€Å"my experience has shown me that most people are essentially good and trustworthy, and want to help each other out.I have been reminded that the rule about treating others the way you want to be treated is a good one. †9 Similarly, the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, base much of their company’s success on letting individual employees and users co-develop new and existing applications like Google Scholar or Google Video, which are made available in so-called ‘beta’ versions first to sollicit suggestions. 0 Considering the commonly voiced concerns of an increasingly fragmented society and a general decline in traditional social capital as defined by people’s trust and in politics, institutions such as church and state, and to some extent others, it may be counter-intuitive to claim that a more engaged and participatory culture is emerg ing (Putnam, 2004).Considering the interactive, globally networked and increasingly participatory nature of new media, it is inspiring to consider a different kind of social cohesion – a form of community that is not necessarily based on what Sennett (1992) has perceived as a purified absence of difference, but rather on Castells’ earlier mentioned notion of hypersociability particular of the network society. Interestingly, none of this participatory or otherwise collective nature of contemporary media is new.Ever since the mid-20th century so-called ‘alternative’ media have more or less successfully emerged next to, and sometimes in symbiotic relationships with other forms of community media (Atton, 2001). One could think of pirate radio stations, small-scale print magazines, local newspapers and community television stations in the 1960s and 1970s, community-based Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and Usenet newsgroups on Internet in the 1980s, and as from th e 1990s a wide range of genres on the Web such as community portal sites, group weblogs, voluntary news services, and so on.The emerging new media ecosystem inspires and is inspired by networks of more or less collaborative end-users, creating what Eric von Hippel (2005) calls ‘user-innovation communities’, where people increasingly create and share their own products and services. Within the particular context of media organizations and cultural industries, much of this community-oriented and at times participatory content production takes place within the walls of commercial media conglomerates.Henry Jenkins’ (2006) work on the popular television and movie industries shows how media corporations at least in part must be seen 13 as co-conspirators in the emergence of a participatory media culture, from Star Wars’ George Lucas encouraging the production and distribution of fan movies to the producers of reality television show Survivor actively participati ng in so-called ‘spoiler’ discussion forums online.This increasingly participatory media enviroment translates itself in the widespread proliferation of networked computers and Internet connections in the home (and increasingly to handheld mobile devices). Recognition of this culture of participatory authorship has come from software developers where they have introduced the concept of ‘open’ design. An advanced form of this type of design is the Open Source Movement, based on the principle of shared and collaborative access to and control over software, and using (or rather: tweaking) it to improve the product for global use.The videogame industry has – since the early 1990s – long acknowledged the necessity of viral marketing and user control in product development by pre-releasing game source code, offering games versions as shareware, and tapping customer communities for input (Bo Jeppesen & Molin, 2003). Participation, not in the least en abled by the real-time connectedness of Internet and however voluntarist, incoherent, and perhaps solely fuelled by private interests can be seen as a principal component of digital culture (Deuze, 2006). Our media nvironment has thus become a key site of how we give meaning to the changing context of how we live, work, and play. Pierre Levy and Jeremy Rifkin are among those who signal an emerging relational or social economy as a direct result from the mechanization, automation, or augmentation of agriculture, industry, and services. Central to this technodeterminist understanding of the global economy would be what Levy calls ‘the production of the social bond’ through the ongoing development of sophisticated systems of networked intelligence.The centrality of using and making media in everyday life reveals our endless fascination with media – with any and all acts of mediation. In this context Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1996) signal a double logic of remed iation, embodied in the recombinant trends of media becoming immediate up to the point they disappear, while at the same becoming increasingly hypermediate, pervasive, and ubiquitous in all aspects of everyday life: â€Å"Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation. It is through our uses of media the complexities of contemporary culture get articulated, as media have come to dominate every aspect of life. What is relevant to our concerns here is the interrelationship between work-time, leisure14 time, and media-time, making the world certainly a much bigger place than it used to be, while at the same time reducing our lifeworld as we retreat dutifully in our personal information spaces and interact with everyone yet ‘seeing’ no one.It is especially through media that for most of us the world has become glocalized, as Roland Robertson (1995) would have it, where global products, peoples and ideas are re-appropriated locally and vice versa. It must be clear that media have become central to our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live. However, as David Croteau and William Hoynes argue, â€Å"in the twenty-first century, we navigate through a vast mass media environment unprecedented in human history.Yet our intimate familiarity with the media often allows us to take them for granted† (2003: 5). The enormous extent to which this is true can be exemplified by looking at how people from all walks of life talk about and give meaning to their media use. Contemporary media usage studies in wired countries like the United States, The Netherlands or Finland tend to reveal how people spend twice as much time with media than they think they do. In the United States for example, people spend on average twelve hours per day using media.Media have become such an integrated part of our lives that most of the time w e are not even aware we are using media. American researchers describe this kind of almost constant immersion with media technologies and content from multiple sources simultaneously available through shared or shifting attention as ‘concurrent media exposure’, rather than popular industryterms such as ‘media multitasking’ or ‘simultaneous media usage’, emphasizing how important it is to avoid implying that our engagement with media is necessarily deliberate or attentive (Papper et al, 2004).We get up in the morning to the sound of the radio-alarm, switch on the television for breakfast, make our first calls using the hand-free set on our way to work, spend most of the day at our desks in front of a computer screen with fax and phone at hand, surf the Web for the latest news, blogposts and shopping deals during lunch hours, watch our favorite sitcoms and sometimes news shows over dinner, and spend the remainder of the day chatting, emailing and instant messaging online.All of this only consists of the kind of media we choose to use, ignoring advertising and marketing messages, simultaneously reading a magazine or newspaper when zapping or zipping past television channels or commercials, reading billboards along the highway, browsing the headlines of a free daily newspaper while in transit, thoughtlessly scanning through radio stations or songs on our walkman, 15 downloading, upgrading, tweaking, installing and uninstalling software, and so on, and so forth.Liquid Life and Media Work Contemporary life thus involves a complex dance between work, play, media, and life in the context of a rapid-changing ‘glocal’ context, the boundaries between which spaces, places and spheres of activity and perception have blurred. In short, the lifeworld today can perhaps best be seen as an ongoing remix of sorts, in terms a new language of how we understand and represent the visible world, our knowledge, human history, and fel low human beings: the language of new media, meta-media, and information culture (Manovich, 2005).As Lev Manovich states, â€Å"today we are in the middle of a new media revolution – the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication† (2001: 19). The key to understanding our increasing opportunity, propensity or even necessity to more or less collaboratively remix our ‘glocal’ lived reality is too see this kind of behavior as a way for us to make sense of the growing complexity and uncertainty of the world around us (and in ourselves).Paraphrasing Bauman it is, in other words, a coping mechanism for dealing with the absurdity of life in today’s liquid modernity. â€Å"’Liquid modern’ is a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines. Liquidity of life and that of society feed and reinvig orate each other. Liquid life, just like liquid modern society, cannot keep its shape or stay on course for long† (Bauman, 2005b: 1).A liquid modern society is one where uncertainty, flux, change, conflict, and revolution are the permanent conditions of everyday life. Bauman makes a compelling argument how this situation is neither modern or post-modern, but rather explains how the categories of existence established and enabled by early, first, or solid modernity are disintegrating, overlapping, and remixing. It is not as if we cannot draw meaningful distinctions between global and local, between work and non-work, between public and private, between conservative and progressive, or between work and life anymore.It is just that these and other key organizing characteristics and categories of modern life have lost their (presumed or perceived) intrinsic, commonly held or consensual meaning. 16 The way we do and understand things is increasingly transformed through and implicat ed by the way we engage the media in our lives. This in turn makes the media as a business, as in those companies that work to create the content of our media, of central importance to any kind of meaningful analysis of contemporary life.Defining the media as cultural industries, Desmond Hesmondhalgh for example shows their prominence for understanding the human condition and our lived reality â€Å"as those institutions (mainly profitmaking companies, but also state organisations and non-profit organisations) which are most directly involved in the production of social meaning† (2002: 11). If the media in the broadest possible sense are the sites of our struggle over meaning and symbolic exchange in society, it ecomes essential to understand the working lives of the people within the cultural industries – if only to understand which values, ideas, circumstances and social contexts define those primarily engaged in the production of of the resources and materials all o f use use to give meaning to our lives. It is in this context that Bauman discusses the typical charactertics of these professional ‘culture creators’, â€Å"who carry the main burden of the transgressive proclivity of culture and make it their conciously embraced vocation, practising critique and transgression as their own mode of being† (2005b: 54-5).Bauman implictly addresses the missing link between the particularities of the human condition in the beginning of the 21st century, our seemingly constant immersion in media, and the centrality of work as the defining principle of contemporary lived reality. The missing link is the changing nature of media work in today’s digital, global and deeply uncertain age, where media workers must be seen as the directors as well as reflectors of liquid modern life, in which life media have become ubiquitous, pervasive, personalized – as well as interactive, participatory, and networked.Media are both the harb ingers of change as well as the self-proclaimed guardians of social order as in the case of for example parliamentary journalists and tabloid reporters: documenting and thus contributing to the maintenance of the status quo while at the same time signaling the disruptive changes wreaking havoc on it from all sides. Indeed, the popular reality of the media gives rise to what Beck has described as the ongoing modernization of modernity, by emphasizing its core characteristics of risk, uncertainty, and paradox.And it is precisely this risk-taking, adventurous yet deeply self-contradictory nature that has come to define the nature of media work, where â€Å"senses of risk are constitutive and often pivotal to the whole economic and social basis of cultural entrepreneurship – risk being central to choices made not only in business but in the lifeworld more generally† (Banks et al, 2000: 453). Mediaworkers are 17 ot only interesting in terms of their contribution to the way we give meaning to our shared reality; who they are, what they do and how they give meaning to their work can also be seen as an indicator of how an increasingly significant part of the global economy organizes itself. Media industries are indeed one of the prime accelerators of a global economy, both in terms of its glocalization and its increased immersion in networked information and communication technologies.Media professionals – those employed in journalism, marketing communications, advertising, public relations, game design, television and the movie industry – embody in their work-styles all the themes of social change in liquid modern times as expressed in this essay, as Simon Cottle for exampe describes how â€Å"a growing army of media professionals, producers and others work in this expanding sector of the economy, many of them in freelance, temporary, subcontracted and underpaid (and sometimes unpaid) positions [†¦] They are also often at the forefro nt of processes of organisational change including new flexible work regimes, reflexive corporate cultures, and the introduction of digital technologies, multimedia production and multiskilled practices† (2003: 3). Indeed, Scott Lash and John Urry (1994) have signaled earlier how the cultural industries have always been post-Fordist avant la lettre, contributing to the culturalization of economic life through a structurating mix of commercially viable yet generic, and innovative, flexible and highly creative production processes.This unique blend of what Bryan Turner (2003: 138) describes as the dialectical process of linearity and liquidity in contemporary consumer cultures turns the media as an industry into the core culprit responsible for cookiecutter-style McDonaldization, as well as the main agent in affecting social, technological and economical change. Convergence Culture In today’s increasingly digital culture, mediawork can be seen as a stomping ground for the forces of increasingly differentiated production and innovation processes, and the complex interaction and integration between work, life, and play, all of which get expressed in, and are facilitated by, the rapid development of new information and communication technologies.Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 291) correspondingly argue how â€Å"the computer and communication revolution of production has transformed laboring practices in such a way that they all tend toward the model of information and communication technologies [†¦] the anthrolopology of cyberspace is really a recognition of the new human condition. † The new human condition, when seen 18 through the lens of those in the forefront of changes in the way work and life are implicated in our increasingly participatory media production and consumption, is convergent. This convergence is not just a technological process, where different types of media forms – audio, video, text – and channe ls – print, radio, television – are integrated into the computer.Following the work of Henry Jenkins (2004), media convergence must also be seen as having a cultural logic of its own, blurring the lines between production and consumption, between making media and using media, and between active or passive spectatorship of mediated culture: â€Å"Convergence is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottomup consumer-driven process. Media companies are learning how to accelerate the flow of media content across delivery channels to expand revenue opportunities, broaden markets and reinforce viewer commitments. Consumers are learning how to use these different media technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact with other users.They are fighting for the right to participate more fully in their culture, to control the flow of media in their lives and to talk back to mass market content. Sometimes, these two forces reinforc e each other, creating closer, more rewarding, relations between media producers and consumers† (Jenkins, 2004: 37). Pertinent to our concerns here is the ways in which mediaworkers are implicated by this convergence culture so typical of today’s media. If convergence is a cultural logic that at its core integrates all of us in the process of producing mediated experiences, how do the professionals involved give meaning to their productivity, creative autonomy, and professional identity?One way of looking at this focuses on the political economy of increasingly conglomerated, transnational media corporations, emphasizing their role in rationalizing and routinizing production for the (glocal) masses: â€Å"Conglomerates have invested heavily in developing synergistic relationships between their various media holdings, integrating their production processes into â€Å"convergence† systems that yield content for different outlets, â€Å"crosspromoting† progr ams in different media, and establishing lines of vertical and horizontal integration in production and distribution† (Klinenberg & Benzecry, 2005: 10). A second approach acknowledges the goals and ideals of contemporary ‘corporate management of global enterprises, but draws our attention more specifically to those people directly involved in the process: the mediaworkers. â€Å"Being environmentally conscious, showing a social conscience and being a good corporate citizen are viewed in modern management theory as benefiting the bottom line. But this management-speak hides the growing focus in the media professions—the cultural boundary spanners—on genuine links between modern 19 organizations and the different individuals and groups in society that deal with them† (Balnaves et al, 2004: 193).Discussion Considering the dominant trends towards cultural convergence of production and consumption both in the way people run their everyday work-lives, and in the way media professionals do their work, it becomes increasingly interesting to observe and understand which values, ideas and ideals get embedded in the globally emerging system of userproducer co-creation. Granted, â€Å"the media business is unusually fluid and superficial† (Sennett, 1998: 80). But as I have shown in this essay, so are life, work, and play. And all of those activities are expressed in the way we use, co-create, and give meaning to media in our everyday lives. The suggested superficiality and invisibility of the media perhaps belittles the valuable, hypersociable and deeply participatory nature of our interactions within and between them.Indeed, the continuous glocal ‘remix’ of liquid modernity’s working and living conditions can be connected to the way we understand the media. The nature of work within an increasingly liquid, collaborative and convergent culture gets meaning in the media industry through product differentiation, wo rkforce flexibilization, and cross-media integration. Yet it also gets expressed in the various ways in which people use and make media all over the world – through ‘prosuming’ (Toffler, 1980) or ‘produsing’ (Bruns, 2004) practices, open source-type applications, wiki-based user co-creation, and other examples of convergence culture. I accept the notion that for most of us, life in liquid modernity is fraught with risk, uncertaintly, anxiety and flux.However, I feel that our analyses should take the next step, and acknowledge how people give meaning to this new human condition: through cultural convergence, participation, and new forms of sociability. It is too simple to argue that the media industries, which are so instrumental in all of these contingencies, either reproduce passive spectators or facilitate active, albeit superficial, engagement. The ways we use and give meaning to media, both as professionals and amateurs, show signs of a more comp lex, or in the words of Jenkins, ‘kludgy’ culture emerging, one that is built on the core elements of the global risk society and thrives on Bauman’s liquid life.I call for further investigation of and among those who bear the brunt of this emergence: the mediaworkers. 20 References Chris Atton (2001), Alternative Media. London: Sage. Mark Banks, Any Lovatt, Justin O’Connor, Carlo Raffo (2000), Risk and trust in the cultural industries, Geoforum 31, p. 453. Zygmunt Bauman (2000), Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Zygmunt Bauman (2002), The 20th century: the end or a new beginning? Thesis Eleven 70, pp. 15-25. Zygmunt Bauman (2003), Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity Press. Zygmunt Bauman (2005a), Work, consumerism and the new poor, 2nd edition. London: Open University Press. Zygmunt Bauman (2005b), Liquid life. Cambridge: Polity Press.Ulrich Beck (2000), The brave new world of work. Cambridge: Polity Press. Morten Blekes aune (2005), Working conditions and time use, Acta Sociologica 48 (4), pp. 308-320. Lars Bo Jeppesen, Mans Molin (2003). Consumers as co-developers: learning and innovation outside the firm. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 15 (3), pp. 363-383. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1996), Remediation, Configurations 4 (3), pp. 311-358. Manuel Castells (2000), Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society, British Journal of Sociology 51 (1), pp. 5-24. Manuel Castells (2001), The internet galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ted Castranova (2005). Synthetic worlds.Chicago: University of Chicago Press. David Croteau & William Hoynes (2003), Media/Society. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Mark Deuze (2006), Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture, The Information Society 22 (2), pp. 63-75. Peter Drucker (1993), Postcapitalist society. New York: Harper Collins. Paul du Gay (1996), Consumption and identity at work. London: Sage. Jonathan Gershuny (2000), Changing times. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anthony Giddens (2003), Runaway world: how globalization is reshaping our lives. New York: Routledge. 21 Catherine Hakim (2003), Models of the family in modern societies.Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing. Charles Handy (1989), The age of unreason. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Susan Herring, Lois Ann Scheidt, Elijah Wright and Sabrina Bonus (2005), Weblogs as a bridging genre, Information, Technology & People 18(2), pp. 142-171. Desmond Hesmondhalgh (2002), The cultural industries. London: Sage. Eric von Hippel (2005), Democratizing Innovations. Cambridge: MIT Press. Henry Jenkins (2004). The cultural logic of media convergence. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7(1), pp. 33–43. Henry Jenkins (2006), Convergence culture. where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.Arne Kalleberg (2000), Nonstandard employment relations: part-time, temporary and contract work, Annual Review of Sociology 26, pp. 341-365. Heejo Keum, Narayan Devanathan, Sameer Deshpande, Michelle Nelson, and Dhavan Shah (2004), The citizen-consumer: media effects at the intersection of consumer and civic culture, Political Communication 21, pp. 369-391. Scott Lash and John Urry (1994), Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage. Pierre Levy (1997). Collective intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. Translated by Robert Bononno. Cambridge: Perseus Books. Lev Manovich (2005), Understanding meta-media, CTheory 10/26/2005. URL: http://www. ctheory. net/articles. spx? id=493. Lev Manovich (2001), The language of new media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Janet Marler, Melissa Woodard Barringer, and George Milkovich (2002), Boundaryless and traditional contingent employees: worlds apart, Journal of Organizational Behavior 23, pp. 425-453. Robert Papper, Michael Holmes, Mark Popovich (2004), Middletown Media Studies, The International Digital Media & Digital Arts Association Journal 1 (1), pp. 1-56. Jane Parry, Rebecca Taylor, Lynne Pettinger and Miriam Glucksmann (2005), Confronting the challenges of work today: new horizons and perspectives, The Sociological Review. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Robert Putnam (ed. 2004, Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 22 Jeremy Rifkin (2004), The end of work, 2nd edition. New York: Tarcher/Penguin. Roland Robertson (1995), Glocalization: Time-space and Homogeneity- heterogeneity, in: Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, Roland Robertson (eds. ), Global Modernities, London: Sage. Richard Sennett (1998), The corrosion of character. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Richard Sennett (1992), The uses of disorder: personal identity and city life, New York: W. W. Norton. Richard Sennett (2005), The culture of the new capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press.Vicki Smith (1997), New forms of work organization, Annual Review of Sociology 23, pp. 315-339. John Storey, Graeme Salaman, and Kerry Platman (2005), Living with enterprise in an enterprise eceonomy: freelance and contract workers in the media, Human Relations 58 (8), pp. 1033-1054. Frank Thomas (1997), The conquest of cool: business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Talmadge Wright, Paul Briedenbach and Eric Boria (2002), Creative Player actions in fps online video games: playing Counter-Strike, Game Studies 2 (2), URL: http://www. gamestudies. org/0202/wright. 23 Endnotes 1 2 URL: http://ourmayday. revolt. org/precarity. info/info. tm (date accessed: 2-12-6). See URL: http://www. c-i-a. com/pr0106. htm. 3 See URL: http://corp. match. com/index/newscenter_press_glance. asp. 4 See URL: http://www. craigslist. com/about/pr/factsheet. html. 5 See URL: http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Wikipedia. 6 See URL: http://huminf. uib. no/~jill/archives/blog_theorising/final_version_of_weblog_definitio n. html. 7 See URL: http://technorati. com/weblog/2006/02/83. html. 8 See URL: http://www. mmogchart. com. 9 Phone interview with Craig Newmark, 1 December 2005. 10 See for example the company profile at CBS ‘60 Minutes’ at URL: http://www. cbsnews. com/stories/2004/12/30/60minutes/main664063. shtml. 24

Myths and Misconceptions about Viruses and Security Essay

Computer viruses, as they are commonly known today, are malicious malware design to destroy and distort the normal working of a computer. The first known origin of computer viruses is estimated to be in the 1960’s CITATION Nat14 l 1033 (Devotta, 2014). The virus was in form of a game called Core Wars, and would self-replicate every time it was run. The group of programmers who developed it also made the first known anti-virus called Reeper. It was not until 1983, that one of these programmers announced the existence of Core Wars CITATION Ant l 1033 (AntivirusWorld, n.d.). In the same era, an influx of personal computers flooded the market and games became very popular. As a result, malicious viruses like Trojan horse were developed and innocent consumers downloaded them thinking that they were nice games only to feel the repercussions later. Since then, many viruses have been developed and continue to cause havoc to our computer experience. A computer virus is a malicious code that is written with instructions to replicate itself in a host computer and attaches itself to files and programs in the machine CITATION All l 1033 (AllAboutCookies, n.d.). Often, this happens without the consent of the user, and once the machine is booted or the infected program is launched, the virus attacks and damages data. In the case where an infected file is saved on a storage device, transfer of that file to another computer repeats the cycle and the virus re-infects the new host computer CITATION Sym10 l 1033 (Symantec, 2010). Viruses are designed to be spread via several media, where they piggyback on emails, programs, or network systems. The same way myths and misconceptions arise after a deadly disease pandemic, the computer world is full of myths about viruses. Some of the most common unfounded myths include; Mac users are virus proof, firewalls block off viruses, formatting and re-installing the operating system of an infected computer and then backing up one’s data gets rid of viruses, using antivirus programs protects one fully from viruses, signs of error messages popping up on one’s computer indicate that the computer is infected, corrupted files and blue screen displays on computers indicate a virus attack CITATION Rak11 l 1033 (Tembhurne, 2011). While some of these misconception hold water, they are not absolutely true all the time. A common scenario for internet users is the appearance of irritating pop-up messages, especially when browsing. While some of these messages are strategies for internet marketing by companies, and are indeed inevitable, it is possible for one to block pop-up messages- without purchasing software. First and foremost, there are free downloadable pop-up blockers that are effective on general browser pop-up ads. Examples include, Google Toolbar, Yahoo Companion Toolbar, Pop-up Stopper, PopUp Blocker, WorldIQ Toolbar and CleanMyPC, just to name but a few CITATION Kio15 l 1033 (Kioskea, 2015). Peer-to-peer file sharing programs are another source of disturbing pop-ups, especially once you install a program downloaded from these sites. To get rid of search, uninstall any unfamiliar programs from the Control Panel. Most browsers today also come with in-built software that block pop-ups, and can be adjusted to block the ads under the Settings tab. A good example is Internet Explorer CITATION Uni04 l 1033 (Iowa, 2004). Using Windows XP Service Pack 2 is also another viable option since the latest version includes a built-in Pop-up blocker CITATION Ram07 l 1033 (Srinivasan, 2007). References AllAboutCookies. (n.d.). Retrieved from All About Cookies.org: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/security/computer-viruses.html AntivirusWorld. (n.d.). History of Computer Viruses. Retrieved from http://www.antivirusworld.com/articles/history.php Devotta, N. (2014, Septemner 4). A short History of Computer Viruses. Retrieved from COMODO Antivirus: https://antivirus.comodo.com/blog/computer-safety/short-history-computer-viruses/ Iowa, U. o. (2004, June). Pop-up blocking. Retrieved from Information Technology Services @ The University of Iowa: https://helpdesk.its.uiowa.edu/articles/june2004/popupblocking.htm Kioskea. (2015, March). How to get rid of Pop-Up ads. Retrieved from http://en.kioskea.net/faq/104-how-to-get-rid-of-pop-up-ads Srinivasan, R. (2007, October 27). How to block Pop-ups? Retrieved from Ramesh’s Site: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/Popups.htm Symantec. (2010). pc tools. Retrieved from http://www.pctools.com/security-news/what-do-computer-viruses-do/ Tembhurne, R. (2011, May 10). 15 Myths and Misconceptions about Viruses and Security Applications. Retrieved from http://rakesh.tembhurne.com/15-myths-and-misconceptions-about-viruses-and-security-applications/ Source document

Supreme Court Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 1

Supreme Court - Essay Example The American government is divided into various arms which perform different functions. SUPREME COURTThe supreme court carries out various functions which include, keeping check and balances on the US executive government. The American constitution empower the supreme court to check and correct the president’s actions. The US Supreme Court is considered to be the most elitist and least democratic institution of the US government This is because it is led by learned judges who are appointed and not elected into their lifetime positions. The supreme court is considered to be the least democratic because the judges are expected to keep checks and balances on the political government, however their actions are not respected thus the debate on their democracy (R. Dye, Zeigler and Schubert).FEDERALISMFederalism is a governership method that allows two or more governing bodies in the same region. Americans uses federalism in governing the Americans using the state laws , federal laws , and local government laws. Federalism has changed greatly in the course of the American history these changes include, eliminating the confederation articles and giving the federal laws supremacy over the state laws (R. Dye, Zeigler and Schubert).CONCLUSIONConclusion the , the supreme court has played a great role in advancing the Americans rights and freedoms over the last six years . These includes legalizing same sex marriages which is in accordance with the bill of rights of the American constitution.

Statement Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

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'Mass education has not brought a decline in religious observance. It Essay

'Mass education has not brought a decline in religious observance. It has, instead, reconfigured the ways in which Muslims kno - Essay Example With time, some of the traditional ways of people have faded away all thanks to the changes that the world has undergone. Everything has taken a turn to a certain direction. The economy has changed; the social lives of people have changed, and the cultural life of people and political atmosphere are different from the past. Whether all this changed have happened all for the positive reasons is yet unknown, but one thing is clear in all this; individuals have become more aware of their surroundings. They have come to see that the world around them is changing. They have acquired the knowledge and are literate enough to distinguish between things. This is one of the major developments that have occurred. Individuals have become more literate. They have come to learn more, and this brings them closer to understanding the changes that have occurred. Literacy has been something that has been taken seriously and it is considered a necessary aspect in the development of an individual. Peopl e now value the aspect of education more than they did a time ago (Kaplan, 10, 2006). They have become literate, and all this is because of development and change. Literacy has brought change in politics, economy, culture and tradition and the social lives of people. ... Much to the contrary, mass schooling and literacy have heightened the public interest in Islam and widened access to Islamic texts. This increasing demand for Islamic knowledge has created a highly charged educational field, where different interest groups and institutions vie for the hearts and minds of Muslims. The main focus will be turned on to two countries that have Muslim influence; Egypt and Turkey (Eickelman, 45, 1992). A number of ethnographic and historical studies that examine the place and politics of Islam in public education will be reviewed in order to give the basis of educational influence on Muslims. By the end of this essay, questions will be answered that relate to literacy and Islam. Questions like, â€Å"What happens to religious socialization when it becomes formalised (set curricula) and centralized (state-controlled)?† will be answered. Another area of interest that will be looked into is the Eickelman’s (1992) suggestion that states that, â₠¬Å"mass education has led to an â€Å"objectification† of Islam†. Also there will be a discussion of Starrett’s (1998) notion of â€Å"functionalization† of Islam – â€Å"putting it consciously to work for various types of political and social projects†. There is also another area of interest that relates to the discussion; Kaplan’s (2006) thesis that the religious nationalists of post-1980 Turkey have promoted an â€Å"Islamic secularity† through school curricula. All this will be put into consideration in order to test whether literacy has brought Muslims closer to them realizing their true heritage and embracing it. Public education is not, of course, confined to formal schooling. Saba Mahmood (2005), for example,

Gay Marriage Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 1

Gay Marriage - Essay Example Massachusetts became the first state to legalize marriage between same-sex couples on May 17, 2004, as a result of a November 2003 decision by the state’s highest court that denying gay and lesbian couples the right to marry violated the state’s constitution. (Smith, 2005:2) Though homosexuality has been being practiced for centuries in almost all parts of the earth, both explicitly or secretly, and men and women belonging to various age groups get indulged into it, yet an overwhelming majority of human societies apparently denounce the same provided it challenges the moral values prevailing in the culture as well as unrestricted permission of the same may put the reproduction system as well as survival of human race at grave jeopardy. Marriage’s role in upholding respect for the transmission of human life is the first event in procreation. Humans undergo unprecedented challenges to that respect because of new techno-science that opens up unprecedented modes of t ransmission of life. (Somerville, 2003:3) The religious leaders including rabbis, monks, priests and bishops particularly condemn and censure same sex relations and marriage due to the very reality that the Scriptures do not allow it at any cost. According to Bible, if a man also lies with mankind, as he lieth with a woman; both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. (Leviticus, 20:13) It is therefore, the Abrahamic faiths, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, rebuke gay sex without granting any space to this activity. Though several western countries, having Christians in majority, have displayed relaxation to voluntary gay sex, yet the Muslim states are still reluctant to bestow such rights upon their subjects. They cite the example of the people of Prophet Lot, tale of whom has manifestly been narrated in the Holy Qur’an, who were pelted with stones from the heavens and destroyed en masses for transgr essing from the right path for openly developing male-male relationships and thus ignoring their women and putting reproduction at stake subsequently. (Al-Aaraf: 80-82)Â  Moreover, other conservative faiths including Hinduism and Confucianism also denounce gay marriage on religious grounds, without giving slightest way to the same. Gay sexual union observes opposition beyond religion too, as a large proportion of scholars, thinkers and philosophers consider it as the violation of morality and thus perversion in the real sense. They declare homosexuals as mentally retarded patients, who are undergoing psychological and emotional collapse or disorder because of some deprivation or incident they have undergone in their past. They are of the opinion that the children who were ransacked, abused and molested could turn as murderers, child molesters, pederasts and rapist as well while adopting criminal line on becoming grown ups. It is therefore the homosexuality cannot be tolerated or ne glected as a curse for society. The price of toleration of serious deviance from a society’s constitutive morality is the loss of a distinctive form of interpersonal integration in community understood as something worthwhile for its own sake. (George, 1993:65). The opposition of gay rights is not confined to the

Individual summary report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Individual summary report - Essay Example The research also revealed that there was a robust demand for sweets in the university, chocolates being the most preferred item, followed by hard-boiled sweets. More imporatantly, majority of the respondents said that they would visit a sweet shop weekly, followed by x% who said they would visit daily! The average consumer expenditure on sweets was determined to be between one and five pounds. Therefore, the market seems to be buoyant and MM would like to cash in on the prevailing demand and the consumer’s willingness to spend. A set of well-defined objectives is paramount for any organistion, irrespective of the scale of operations.Oraganizational and individual objectives must be integrated, and endeavored to be accomplished within a finite time. Clearly spelled objectives, enable devising of appropriate means for the realization of those ends. Thus, strategies and policies can be formulated accordingly. Offering quality products and good customer service are the inherent goals of any organization. It ensures sustainability for a business, and helps in winning consumer’s confidence and brand loyalty. Enhancement of individual experience is also stated, thereby integrating personal and organizational goals. Improving profitability is the most important aspect of any corporate activity. It is an economic index to measure success. However here it is also proposed that how the profit shall be used, ie; charity.Keeping in mind the above objectives, the mission statement was made: â€Å"We endeavor to offer best possible range of confectionary to our consumers conducive to the creation of lasting memories and magic moments.† An analysis of this statement reveals the overriding importance given to consumers and giving them not only quality products but memorable experience as well. Key competitors for Magic Moments are the Students Shop on

Abstract Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 26

Abstract - Essay Example In this study the researcher wanted to identify which markets have a higher predictability of the time series. The researcher even wanted to identify the relationship between the returns of Indian stock market and the R/S ratio. To conduct the study the author obtained the closing stock rates if different indices that were being trades on India’s stock exchange and this data comprises of data obtained from year 2000 to 2010. The researcher identified that all the stock indices that were employed in the study were close to 0.5 Hurst exponents who shows that the returns from the stock exchange are completely random and the market is quite efficient. The researcher even identified that when the values of R/S ratio were elevated, the returns were even increased and when the R/S ratio was low, the returns were even low. The researcher concludes that the R/S ratio can be used making trading decisions and while analyzing a particular trend in the stock

Fasibility on Generic Pharmacy Essay Example for Free

Fasibility on Generic Pharmacy Essay INTRODUCTION According to http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy DRUGSTORE is a common American term for a type of store centrally featuring a pharmacy. Drugstores sell not only branded and generic medicines, but also miscellaneous items such as candy, cosmetics, and magazines, as well as light refreshments. During the height of the war on drugs, many stores removed the term Drugstore from their signage and replaced it with the more politically correct term Pharmacy. A PHARMACY is the health profession that links the health sciences with the chemical sciences and it is charged with ensuring the safe and effective use of pharmaceutical drugs. The scope of pharmacy practice includes more traditional roles such as compounding and dispensing medications, and it also includes more modern services related to health care, including clinical services, reviewing medications for safety and efficacy, and providing drug information. From http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugstore A GENERIC DRUG is a drug defined as a drug product that is comparable to brand/reference listed drug product in dosage form, strength, route of administration, quality and performance characteristics, and intended use. It has also been defined as a term referring to any drug marketed under its chemical name without advertising. Although they may not be associated with a particular company, generic drugs are subject to the regulations of the governments of countries where they are dispensed. Generic drugs are labeled with the name of the manufacturer and the adopted name (non-proprietary name) of the drug. A generic drug must contain the same active ingredients as the original formulation. http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_Drug BRAND-NAME DRUG a drug that has a trade name and is protected by a patent (can be produced and sold only by the company holding the patent). http://audioenglish.net/dictionary/brand-name_drug A DRUG is a substance which may have medicinal, intoxicating, performance enhancing or other effects when taken or put into a human body or the body of another animal and is not considered a food or exclusively a food. http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug In addition to being operated as a private business and selling affordable medicines, our pharmacy are also catering free services such as free medical consultations and check-ups. We are willing to help our fellow Filipinos by giving discount in their medicines especially in terms of calamities like those people who is flood victims and typhoon, our pharmacy is willing also to give substantial discounts to those who would like to buy medicines for donation purposes. In recent years, people demanded for cheaper medicines because of the change in the quality of living. At the same time the generic medicines industry is growing through the years and there are provisions that supports the selling of generic drugs in the Philippines which is R.A. #6675 which is an act to promote, require and ensure the production of an adequate supply, distribution, use and acceptance of drugs and medicines identified by their generic names. Our business proposal is a generic pharmacy. 1.1 COMPANY DESCRIPTION The proponents, Ms Asio, Charis Ann, Ms. David Divine Grace, Ms. Garay, Rosalie, Ms. Llanza, Buengie, Ms. Manto, Noreen and Mr. Montallana, Reynaldo will manage and supervise the entire operation of the Medicure Generic Pharmacy, an unlimited liability company. The proponents combined efforts in the creation of Medicure Generic Pharmacy have serve to come up with detailed plan that encompass the important elements required to succeed in today’s competitive pharmacy environment. In closing, we feel the business plan for Medicure Generic Pharmacy represents a realistic expectation of success for all parties involved. Moreover, we will be providing a benefit to the community by providing a great product and secure jobs to community residents. LOCATION The proponents decided to place the pharmacy in the corner of Jalleville Subdivision along Quirino Avenue San Dionisio Paranaque City based upon the facts that all potential pharmacy locations is far from the Our Lady of Peace Hospital. Our propose location are located in closest to hospital and also it is in the corner which many Barangay’s are located. It is also along in the Quirino Avenue which is most of the passengers and car owners from Las Pinas, Pasay and Paranaque City are pointing this road. CAPITALIZATION Establishing a Generic Pharmacy apparently needs capitalization. In approximation, the proposed business will cost P 1,390,000.00. The 65% of capital will be funded by the proponents and the remaining 35% are loan from the bank. Charis Ann AsioDavid Divine Grace| Php 150,583.33 150,583.33| Garay Rosalie| 150,583.33| Llanza Buengie| 150,583.33| Manto Noreen| 150,583.33| Montallana Reynaldo| 150,583.33| Capital ContributionBank LoanTotal Capital Investment| 903,500.00 486,500.00 Php 1,390,000.00| START-UP SUMMARY The Medicure Generic Pharmacy will incur the following needed start-up cost. * Office Furniture’s and Fixtures * Chairs * File cabinets * Desks * Machineries and Equipments * Computer server with a laser printer, and a back up system, installed with software; Microsoft Office, QuickBooks pro, drug interaction software, Physician Desk, Reference Software detailing side effects and other information pertinent to the customers * Two front counter, storage bins, cash registers * Refrigerators * Air-condition * Store Supplies * Envelopes * Ribbons * Bond papers * Ball pens * Tape * Staples and stapler * Trays * Plastic bags etc. * Store front build out * Signage * Logos * Paints etc. * Lease * Star-up inventory * Generic medicines * Miscellaneous items * Working capital * Contingency fund * Legal fees * * BIR * SEC * MAYORS PERMIT * BUSINESS PERMIT * MERALCO * NAWASA BREAKDOWN OF START-UP COST Office furniture’s fixtures Php 160,000.00 Machineries Equipments160,000.00 Store Supplies 50,000.00 Store Build Out200,000.00 Start-Up Inventory450,000.00 Legal Fees 70,000.00 - Working Capital300,000.00 Total Capital RequirementPhp1, 390,000.00 VICINITY MAP Medicure Generic Pharmacy 1.2 BUSINESS CONCEPT MISSION †¢ To offer the widest range of quality affordable generic medicines putting customer satisfaction above all by serving our clients’ needs efficiently, effectively, providing friendly and professional counseling. †¢ To recognize the importance of our employees in achieving our aspirations, and to keep them highly motivated based on the principles of fair compensation, meritocracy and respect. †¢ To educate the public about quality generic medicines and to provide various community services to fulfill our social responsibilities to our countrymen. VISION THE MEDICURE GENERIC PHARMACY aims to be the leading national chain of drugstores offering quality and affordable generic medicines with superior customer service that will satisfy the customers need. VALUES * Integrity We will commit to truth and honesty in what we say and do, and practice high standards of fairness and ethics at work and in our relationships. * Customer Satisfaction We will serve and interact with our internal and external customers as best as we can, in a professional and friendly manner. We constantly look for innovative products and services that will answer their needs. * Excellence We will aim high in everything we do and continuously seek to improve our level of performance. * Team work We will communicate and cooperate with one another, working together in an harmonious way to achieve the company’s goals. * Respect for the Individual We will show respect, appreciation and concern for every person. We engage in positive relationships based on mutual trust. * Social Purpose We will do believe that it is our responsibility to help the community and our countrymen. We recognize that the nature of our business, especially the corporate focus on quality affordable generic medicines, gives us a unique opportunity to make a very positive contribution to the health of the communities that we serve. TAGLINE Mabisang Gamot at Serbisyong Maaasahan GOAL The Medicure Generic Pharmacy long term goal is to become the number 1 generic drugstore in the Philippines offering a very effective and efficient customer service and having a strong sense of social purpose. HISTORY The proponents come up with an idea of putting up a Generic Pharmacy catering to customers when some of the proponents made a research in one of our major subjects which was Marketing Research. The research was entitled The Perception of the Consumer on the Effectiveness of Generic Medicines in a selected Barangay in Paranaque City. This completes its essence of the outcome of the research and will serve as a basis for future studies on business. We also agreed to come up with a business that was related to our research as mentioned which is a Generic Pharmacy. Since we already have the idea that this kind of business will have a chance in the market due to the needs of the consumers of affordable quality medicines. Since we are Business Administration students major in Marketing Management we are applying all what we have learned. The propose name of our business would be Medicure Generic Pharmacy. â€Å"Medi† is a short word of medicine and â€Å"Cure† means recovery or relief from a disease. We decided to have this catchy for an easy retention to our clients or customers. VENTURE DESCRIPTION The proposed establishment is a generic pharmacy named Medicure Generic Pharmacy. We will be able to sell generic drug prescriptions at reduced prices by carefully maintaining efficiencies and effective operations and by targeting a specific segment of the market or with over the counter and prescribed medication to our customer. Aside from catering generic medicines, we will be able to sell miscellaneous items such as cosmetics, tissues, toothbrush, candy, magazines, as well as light refreshment and etc. We believe that providing over†the†counter (OTC) medications that compliment prescription and miscellaneous items can create a â€Å"one†stop†shop† for the customer. For employees, a more comprehensive line of front†end and over the counter items that consist of items that may be needed during the work day such as tissues, toothbrush can create an added customer convenience. In both instances, providing non†prescription items can eliminate the need for the customer to travel to other settings that offer prescription services. When considering non†prescription items for product placement, durable medical equipment (DME) should also be considered for resell. By focusing on this segment it gives us additional efficiencies we avoid disruptions in cash flow often associated with insurance payments and we can eliminate unnecessary services for the type of knowledgeable, repeat customer taking maintenance-type medication. Our pharmacy will operate from one store that will serve walk-in customers or those persons visited personally and buying over the counter. We will thrive by employing friendly and knowledgeable personnel, which, along with our great prices, will drive the repeat business that we will rely upon. We only expect that as the price of medication continues to skyrocket, the pharmacy will appeal more and more to the customers sense of value and convenience. Concept Description and Statement The Medicure Generic Pharmacy is a business venture that sells generic medicine to customers prescribed medication. We sell also miscellaneous items such as candies, cosmetics, toiletries, baby care products and medical or surgical products to customers for a one-stop-shop experience. We believe that in selling other merchandise assortments except for a generic medicine will serve convenience to our target customer. Our propose location is in the corner of Jalleville Subdivision along Quirino Avenue San Dionisio Paranaque City with a lot area of 25m long and 20m wide. It consists of two (2) POS, shelves, waiting area with seats, parking lot, fire extinguisher in case of emergency and a room for employees with one (1) comfort room. We put three (3) computers with systems including the price per quantity item. This will help the customer to canvass the price for their prescribe medication and other items by asking a pharmacist. We put a storage area where we can store our new delivered products. The pharmacy is fully air conditioned to maintain the quality of our products especially medicines. We hire people to man the pharmacy in a day to day operation. It consists of a one (1) General Manager, Supervisor, Registered Pharmacist, and three (3) Pharmacy Assistant. The Medicure Generic Pharmacy anticipates serving continuously from seven (8) o’clock in the morning up to nine (9) in the evening everyday from Mondays to Sundays. The expected table of operation are as follows.

Private Schools vs. Public Schools Essay Example for Free

Private Schools vs. Public Schools Essay Private Schools VS. Public Schools Parents often wonder how to start off their childrens education. Depending on ones religion or beliefs a private or public school is a choose most parents face. Of course, each school offers its own pros and cons the choice is simple. Public schools offer the best well rounding of a student. While being enrolled in a public school, students are faced with real outside world problems, are with a different blend of students each year, and are also introduced to the latest technology faster. While, a public school the money is offered to them by the state easier then having donations like a private school. Ones child will most likely be with the same students throughout their educational years. Classes arent as big and varied like classes at public schools. While in a public school, children view the wide spread cultures and human beings that make up todays American society. Public schools have a wider variety of classes, which give students an opportunity to choose the classes the want. These classes allow students to pursue a career from the knowledge they have obtained. For example, one might take a business class, which could lead to a career in the business industry. On the other hand, in Private schools they only provide the necessary classes required by the state. In some intermediate private schools, Home Economics and Shop classes Brady 2 arent even offered. Unlike Public schools these classes have been offered since fifth or sixth grade and up. The uniforms in private schools ones child will be wearing would not allow the child to show character in his self. Uniforms may make life easier in the long run, but think of how many different ways in style people express themselves. Theres skater, prep, sporty, gothic, hippie, or whatever is convertible. In public schools, ones child has many different ways to fit in or dress how they feel is convertible to them. The sports in private schools arent that excelled as ones in public schools. Like in private intermediate schools there are not a variety of sports. Public schools offer sports as young as their primary schools. Sports in Public schools seem to be widely known and are more funded. The money that Public schools receive go towards uniforms, equipment, and top of the line coachs. Public schools show to the community that they will educate and well round you child better then Private schools. Private schools will limit your childrens ability to grow. Although your child will receive religion in school as another subject, is it really worth it to you to have your child be deprived of the opportunity that will lead them to be a better person?

The Customer Supply Chain Business Essay

The Customer Supply Chain Business Essay The report consists of a project entitled Pillsbury: Customer Driven Reengineering undertaken as a part of the course curriculum for the subject Business Process Reengineering (BPR). As a part of this project, after reading the case, a discussion took place between all the group members so as to clearly identify the problem definition. As a next step, discussion of the various issues faced by Pillsbury were discusses followed by the evaluation of the efforts undertaken by it. Competitive pressures, technology advances, and demanding consumer preferences were causing all companies in the food industry to reexamine their operations and attempt to eliminate waste and inefficiency throughout the food chain. The Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) effort was a multi-industry project, ECRs goals were to reduce costs and drive inventory levels down throughout the system, while simultaneously enhancing capabilities to meet the needs of diverse consumer market segments. Pillsbury executives were unsure whether their company was prepared for the new ECR environment. So, this report basically includes the entire experience involved in undertaking the planning of BPR at Pillsbury and the various phases it went through during the transition and the challenge faced by it i.e. whether to go for a continuous improvement program having a short term view or a redesign of processes which was more futuristic. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY To understand the practical implementation of BPR classroom concepts To understand the degree of complexity involved in planning BPR implementation To understand the importance of customer driven reengineering approach in order to adopt a pull strategy for the entire supply chain i.e. better matching Pillsburys purchasing, manufacturing, and distribution operations to consumers purchases To understand how to use the available resources in an optimum manner To understand the implications of a continuous improvement program Vs Redesign of processes. To understand the importance and criticality of various performance measures like ABC costing. COMPANY INTRODUCTION Pillsbury  is a brand name used by  Minneapolis-based  General Mills  and  Orrville, Ohio-based  J.M. Smucker Company. Historically, the  Pillsbury Company, also based in Minneapolis, was a rival company to General Mills and was one of the worlds largest producers of  grain  and other foodstuffs until it was bought-out by General Mills in 2001.  Antitrust  law required General Mills to sell off some of the products. General Mills kept the rights to refrigerated and frozen Pillsbury products, while dry  baking  products and frosting are now sold by Smucker under license. Leo Burnett  who created Pillsburys  Doughboy  and  Jolly Green Giant  considers them two of the agencys top five brand icons. ProdPack-Pillsbury-Cakemix-Small.jpg NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS Pillsbury once claimed to have the largest grain  mill  in the world at the  Pillsbury A Mill  overlooking  Saint Anthony Falls  on the  Mississippi River  in Minneapolis. The building had two of the most powerful direct-drive  waterwheels  ever built, each putting out 1200  horsepower  (900  kW). There are now plans to convert it into a loft-style apartment building. The Cunningham Group plans to convert six historic buildings to a mixed-use project varying from 6 to 27 floors in height. The project will include 895 units of housing and 175,000 square feet (16,300  m2) of commercial space, including the Pillsbury A Mill. HISTORY The company originated in 1869 when  Charles A. Pillsbury  bought a share in a Minneapolis flour mill. After the purchase of additional mills and the introduction of enhancements to the milling process, his firm was reorganized in 1872 as C.A. Pillsbury and Company. It was sold in 1889 to an English syndicate, which merged Pillsbury with other mills in their holdings to form Pillsbury-Washburn Flour Mills Company, Ltd., with Charles Pillsbury as managing director. The Pillsbury family regained ownership of the company in the 1920s, and it was incorporated as Pillsbury Flour Mills Company in 1935. In 1972 Pillsbury began purchasing  Burger King fast-food outlets, and it soon came to own the entire chain. Through the  Green Giant Company, acquired in 1979, it began marketing canned and frozen vegetables and frozen prepared foods. It also acquired Hà ¤agen-Dazs, maker of premium ice cream and frozen yogurt, in 1983. Pillsbury was owned by British company Grand Metropolitan, PLC (renamed Diageo PLC) from 1989 to 2001, when  General Mills  acquired most of Pillsburys assets (Burger King remained as a separate division of Diageo until 2002). The Hà ¤agen-Dazs brand was marketed through a joint licensing agreement with  Nestlà ©Ã‚  and General Mills. PRODUCTS The company manufactures a wide variety of consumer food products under the Pillsbury brand, including frozen biscuits and rolls, breakfast foods, cookie dough, cake mixes, and snack foodhttp://s3.amazonaws.com/gmi-digital-library/8b86b131-cccf-4292-b584-d216cf00fdd7.jpgBiscuitsBreads Grands! ® Cinnamon RollsCinnamon RollsBuffalo Chicken Crescent PuffsReady To Bake! ® Partner BrandsStrawberry Marshmallow Pie Biscuits, pies, flour, pizza crust, cookies, crescents, cinnamon rolls and various partner brands like Green Giant and Cascadian Farm. CASE INTRODUCTION Pillsbury entered Customer Driven reengineering initiative expecting to achieve significant levels of cost reduction and efficiency. To its delight, it also discovered a new way to compete. Competitive pressures, technology advances, and demanding consumer preferences were causing all companies in the food industry to reexamine their operations and attempt to eliminate waste and inefficiency throughout the food chain. The Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) effort was a multi-industry project .ECRs goals were to reduce costs and drive inventory levels down throughout the system, while simultaneously enhancing capabilities to meet the needs of diverse consumer market segments. Pillsbury executives were unsure whether their company was prepared for the new ECR environment. The executives perceived that Pillsbury lacked several critical capabilities to win in this new environment. In 1991, Dan Crowley as Controller of Green Giant, had launched an activity-based cost (ABC) initiative to examine the groups high cost structure. The study revealed startling plant-to-plant variations in costs for essentially the same process, large dispersion of actual costs from the companys standard cost per case. In August 1993, Crowley and Slocumb took a BPR proposal to CEO, Paul Walshs, Strategy and Policy Group, which comprised the division presidents of Pillsburys major business units and the top functional department heads. The proposal identified a process which would complement Pillsburys existing strategic plan to achieve top quartile financial performance amongst its strategic peers. The case describes the various efforts undertaken by Pillsbury during this transition and the various phases of the reengineering problem detailing various activities undertaken in every phase. The major challenge faced has been a choice between redesign of processes or continuous improvement because the target set in the earlier stages seemed a bit too achievable in the later stages NEED FOR REENGINEERING Customers perceived Pillsbury as an average company, not the best, not the worst, and without much innovation. John Mann, Senior Vice President and General Sales Manager, and another newcomer to the Pillsbury senior management team, concurred with McWilliams assessment: We were viewed as a laid-back Midwestern company, one that found it difficult to create a sense of urgency.McWilliams felt that Pillsbury had to become a different company if it was to change the perception of customers. Pillsbury executives were unsure whether their company was prepared for the new ECR environment. The executives perceived that Pillsbury lacked several critical capabilities to win in this new environment. First, the company was still organized according to traditional functional lines: purchasing, operations, distribution, finance, and marketing and sales. This organization led to local excellence and optimization of the individual functions but not necessarily to the optimization of the entire value chain. Second, the companys financial measurements and performance measurement system reinforced local optimization. The food market had become fragmented and the majority decisions taken by the consumer were made in the retail environment diluting the effect of the brand image. Thus Pillsbury had another challenge to transform its arms length relationship with the retailers (transaction based) to relationship oriented. DRIVERS FOR BPR AT PILLSBURY Highly competitive environment. Pillsbury lacking the necessary capabilities to compete in such environment. Lack of optimization of the entire value chain. The need to transform the arms length relationship with the retailers. To have an Information system to enable fact based marketing To develop a customer driven supply chain i.e. transition from push to pull strategy of supply chain Eye opening results of activity based costings. The project team prepared the classic ABC whale curve which showed a few product lines producing all the profits, with the remaining SKUs either breaking-even or losing money. Based on the insights from the ABC analysis, Green Giant management closed about a half dozen plants and consolidated operations more efficiently in the remaining plants. Crowley then took on a broader finance role within Pillsbury as Operations Controller and extended the ABC analysis to many of the dough manufacturing plants. Pillsbury now had good insights about the cost drivers for its cost of goods sold. The weak link was developing comparable information for its warehouse, sales, marketing, and promotion expenses. It had no ability to trace these expenses to its customers so that it could produce individual customer PLs. Skepticism that TQM was delivering its promised benefits to the PL bottom line within a reasonable time frame. For example, an internal study compared companies known to have adopted TQM principles with a control sample of non- TQM companies. The study found no discernible difference in financial performance between the two sets of companies. PROCESS MAPPINGS VISION: Crowley and Slocumbs vision of a potential for 15% cost improvement (about $300 million) in a staid and mature food processing company was met with some understandable skepticism and disbelief. Despite that, Walsh and his management team provided to Crowley and Slocumb a modest budget and 90 days to develop a business case to determine whether a $300 million cost reduction was possible. Crowley was appointed to a new position, Vice President for Customer Driven Reengineering, and Slocumb became Vice President for Business Process Reengineering. The business case was to focus on cost and margin improvements in three major divisions: Pillsbury branded products, the Green Giant products, and the frozen pizza businesses. These businesses had $2.5 billion of sales in Fiscal Year 1994. Reengineering: Phase I The Pillsbury team selected a consulting firm to work with them to help build the business case. Three months of analysis led to identifying three core business processes that offered targets for improvement: à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢ Customer Supply Chain à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢ Brand Management à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢ New Product Commercialization The Customer Supply Chain (CSC) was decomposed into three sub-processes: à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢ Total Customer Development à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢ Fast Flow Demand Replenishment à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢ Value Based Sourcing and Supply The team then proceeded to identify the opportunities for process improvement within each of the three CSC sub-processes. C:UsersdellDesktop9-c89015168d.jpg C:UsersdellDesktop10-19289f286e.jpg Value Based Sourcing And Supply The third CSC sub-process, Value Based Sourcing and Supply, focused on Pillsburys extremely complex system of vendors and sourcing arrangements for its more than $500 million of raw material purchases. Historically, Pillsbury had reduced its material costs by exerting price pressure on its suppliers. Further gains from such price pressure were considered limited. The project team believed that more flexible and robust ingredient specification would allow them to select more efficient vendors, and that additional gains could be realized by leveraging vendor resources and knowledge. To gain these benefits, however, vendors would have to become partners with Pillsbury in a total cost reduction process. Cost savings from Value Based Sourcing and Supply were estimated at about $40 million (around 8% of purchases), plus savings in working capital reduction of about $14million. Outputs of phase 1: A business plan that promised margin improvements through cost reductions and revenue enhancements of more than $100 million, plus reductions in working capital of about $25 million. Reengineering: Phase II Phase II was launched in January 1994 to determine whether the business case developed in Phase I was feasible and realistic. About 25 Pillsbury employees, supported by the external consultants, spent four months analyzing customer data bases on more than 100 top accounts, conducted in-depth interviews with key customers and suppliers, and mapping and assessing the state of all existing internal business processes in the customer supply chain. The study of internal processes revealed highly complex, time-consuming processes with dozens of handoffs, and multiple recycling of requests for decisions and resource authorizations. The customer interviews revealed that important food retailers, wholesalers, and brokers were moving aggressively forward with plans for category management. Category management promised to give retailers far more effective management capabilities over their store shelf space allocations, SKU rationalization, and demographic marketing plans. The Phase II studies confirmed the vision established at the end of Phase I (see Exhibit 17) that reengineering the customer supply chain could provide upwards of $100 million in benefits. About half would come from working more closely with customers-adopting a more focused customer segmentation strategy, targeted marketing using local demographic information on consumer purchasing behavior, and exploiting store-specific cost and profitability information to promote the most profitable mix of brands and SKUs for both Pillsbury and the local store. The other half would come from better managing Pillsburys entire supply chain-from growers and other key vendors, through manufacturing, transportation and distribution to warehouses and individual stores. It needed to take activity-based costing (ABC) down to retail store level PLs. The old financial model calculated standard costs per case and produced product line PLs. The new model will measure activity-based costs of entire processes and give Pillsbury customer PLs. Service based pricing: shifting its pricing focus so that it can charge more for special services that some of our customers may desire but that others do not want. It can define a base level of service that everyone receives, with an explicit statement of what that includes. Major change in measurement: performance measurements will need to be driven by customers and consumers expectations THE CHALLENGE In June 1994, the Pillsbury team had completed the customer analysis and was ready to move into redesign. Before the meeting to present the findings and recommendations to the Integration Committee, Slocumb expressed some concern about the current set of recommendations. The business case to achieve $100 million in cost savings and margin enhancements was then credible. But the target may be too reachable. People may obtain the $100 million in cost savings from local process improvements, not from the complete redesign of its high-level business processes that were described in Phase I. the target of $100 million had come to be the objective rather than the fundamental redesign of our Customer Supply Chain. If we get $100 million in benefits, thats certainly a worthy goal, but it will not redefine the organization. We have a choice whether to be a company with a $25 stock price, or take the actions that will take us to a $50 stock price., Tom Debrowski, Senior Vice President of Operations and Chairman of the Integration Committee DECISION Pillsbury should be re-designing the organization around customer and consumer values to create a new and sustainable competitive advantage. It should strive to be the best in providing the freshest product at the lowest cost to retailers along with unique consumer insights from its superior information systems. It can achieve the $100 million without redefining the way they do business. But to achieve the $300 million, it will have to become a very different supply organization. It will have to get the supply chain to a high level of competitive fitness by getting cost savings that will make it more efficient than its competitors, and, then generating growth through its value-added consumer insights, getting the right product to the shelf at the right time at low cost to the retailers. The largest barrier for achieving this level of competitive fitness is introducing and managing change. Multi-skilled, multi-functional teams, including finance, need to be working with our customers. SOLUTION To achieve the $300 million improvements, Pillsbury needed to approach the organization with a completely open mind, to think the unthinkable. It will force it to think completely out of the box if they are going to achieve benefits of that magnitude. They need to stop managing individual functional departments, and begin to manage core operating processes. With the old model, the manufacturer, the distributor, and the retailer each attempts to optimize its own operations. The new way, through reengineering, should enable them to optimally source raw materials, convert to finished goods, distribute to trade customers, and sell to consumers in ways that minimize total system cost. By determining who can do each process in the chain most efficiently, it can let that process get done only once, at the most efficient site. That way it can eliminate waste from the system. REENGINEERING EVALUATION The success needs the following. The Analysis, Design and Prototype yielded the pain areas and laid out the broad road maps. But implementation needs the following to be successful Senior management must drive reengineering initiatives with a well-articulated vision that is appropriate for the situation. IT is an undervalued asset that can be tapped through reengineering to transform a company from a make-and-sell-oriented enterprise to a sense-and-respond-oriented enterprise. Successful implementation of reengineering projects requires the involvement and participation of the companys managers and employees. Consultants and outsourcing are important for various aspects of a reengineering project, but they are insufficient without the buy-in from managers and professionals in the organization. Business process can be streamlined or reengineered, but to change the long-term economic picture, a transformation initiative needs to encompass the reevaluation of communication systems and the sharing of intellectual assets. The organization should have a clear target in mind, whether it is to incorporate a continuous improvement philosophy or a complete redesign of processes. AFTER EFFECTS OF REENGINEERING EFFORTS During the last three years, the entire strategic direction of the company has changed. Selling off the flour mills was an epochal event. It was a major cultural shock to many people inside and outside the organization who thought of Pillsbury as a vertically-integrated flour manufacturing company. They have demonstrated that they can become a consumer-based company that is prepared to get out of operations that do not add value. An integration of the entire value chain was the target driven by the customers leading to a pull based strategy. Information systems were to enhance the communication capabilities to incorporate fact based marketing. Major cultural change was seen with the relationship with the customers transforming from merely an arms length relationship Major improvements in expenses and profitability were expected rendering Pillsbury with the capabilities required in such competitive environment. CONCLUSION The problems initially faced by Pillsbury required a complete redesign of the processes and not merely a continuous improvement effort. Thus the decision taken by the management to extend the target to $300 million was a correct decision if a long term view was to be considered. The major changes that were to incorporated as a result of this BPR effort were necessary for Pills burry to have the necessary capabilities to compete in the highly fragmented and competitive market. The reengineering effort was well planned in various phases describing the various considerations of each phase starting with the development of a business case followed by its feasibility analysis. The areas chosen for improvement were Customer Supply Chain Brand Management New Product Commercialization These areas provided great opportunity for integration of the entire value chain and to transform into a pull based value chain with the customer as the major driver. The efforts undertaken have led to great motivation amongst all the stakeholders and they believe that Pillsbury is not a laid back organization anymore. Their customers are enthusiastic about shifting from changing the way they do business together and are willing to endorse new relationships, such as service-based pricing. LEARNINGS The importance of manufacturer-retailer relationship in this highly fragmented market. The difference in continuous improvement efforts and redesign of processes How to approach a BPR problem in a systematic way demarcating the tasks to be done in a particular order in various phases. The importance of techniques like ABC Costing and the utilization of the revelations such techniques make