Introduction -- Contents discourse: a platform prelude -- Platform typology: from hardware to contents -- The Japanese genesis of transactional platform theory -- Docomo's i-mode and the formatting of the mobile internet -- Platforms after i-mode: Dwango's Niconico video -- Conclusion: the platformization of regional chat apps
In Anime's Media Mix, Marc Steinberg convincingly shows that anime is far more than a style of Japanese animation. Engaging with film, animation, and media studies, as well as analyses of consumer culture and theories of capitalism, Steinberg offers the first sustained study of the Japanese mode of convergence that informs global media practices to this day.
Abstract Where does platform theory come from? What consequences does it have? This article offers one set of answers to these questions by looking at a body of platform theory that developed in Japan in the 1990s and arguably affected the rollout of internet-enabled mobile phones that were, in turn, models for the iPhone and Android phones several years later. Putting this body of theory in dialogue with managerial and economic theory of the platform from France and the United States, this article suggests an earlier genealogy of platform theory, a development that had immediate and long-lasting consequences for the contemporary media landscape.
Who's the client? -- Confidentiality owed to existing and former clients -- The lawyer as intermediary -- Corporate internal investigations : what about confidentiality? -- Parent-subsidiary related party transactions -- The corporate opportunity doctrine and the lawyer's role -- The multiple representation dilemma for the business attorney -- Screening and the personally disqualified attorney -- Business attorney as litigator in corporate settings -- Lawyers taking equity interests in their clients -- Inside counsel -- Counsel as director?
Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution - largely revising the thesis of Karl Polanyi's landmark 'The Great Transformation'. The conventional wisdom has been that in the 19th century, England quickly moved toward a modern labour market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labour contracts, centred on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line.
Important recent research highlights the role of forced labor in the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in the global South. In this article I make the case that coerced labor was central to the first industrial revolution, the classical case of Great Britain. I demonstrate that in an area known as the Black Country for its coal, steel, and related industries, master and servant laws allowed criminal prosecution of workers deemed problematic, to insure labor control in the workplace. Employers relied on these laws when they were unable to use machinery to embed control in the labor process, and when they had recourse to reliable local courts (or petty sessions), in which many were magistrates, so they could rely on convictions under summary jurisdictions for fines, damage payment, and incarceration. I conclude by suggesting that this particular historical case can reorient our perspective on labor coercion and the law across the long arc of modern capitalism.