{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.029593943565037854, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.520179372197309, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Television in the Workplace: Ford and FCN TV

Television is increasingly creeping into non-traditional spaces such as workplaces. As part of that movement, Ford Motor Company of Europe uses television as a key component of communication between top management and subordinates. The company broadcasts over its internal television system various Ford-related video and news stories to its plants in five countries—UK, France, Belgium, Spain, and Germany. As an employee in Ford of Europe's internal-communications team based in Cologne, I witnessed first-hand the inner dynamics of the deployment of television in a pan-European setting. Through television, the company is crafting a transnational corporate identity among its multi-national workforce, interpellating viewers in the various local sites within a larger “Ford family.” While television can act as a unifying force, the deployment of the technology also exacerbates tensions within the transnational entity as inflected by site-specific concerns—white collar/blue collar, international/national, management/union, labor/leisure, and public/private. Layered on top of this multitude of tensions remains the inherently propagandistic nature of developing news for a captive audience. For myself and others at the company, irony became a necessary tactic, to use DeCerteau's terms, to cope with the presence of a potentially monolithic technology in the prototypical transnational corporation.