New Technology, Work and Employment

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Latest documents

• The Living Wage: Advancing a Global Movement, Tony Dobbins and Peter Prowse (eds), Routledge, 2022. 216 pp, ISBN 978‐0‐367‐51487‐7, £32,00.
• Divided we fall: The breakdown of gig worker solidarity in online communities

  The ‘gig economy’ presents a contested new work arrangement where freelancers find work on digital platforms. Subsequently, previous research has investigated how gig workers develop solidarity and take collective action against the exploitative practices of the platforms. However, this research is limited by mostly focusing on solidarity in contexts of local gig worker communities. We investigate whether freelancers who work on a global platform, Upwork, which hires people for diverse and complex jobs, can build up solidarity in a global online community. Applying a mixed‐methods research design, we analysed how gig workers responded to a policy change by Upwork that affected their working conditions negatively. In doing so, we outline how solidarity breaks down in an online community of gig workers, due to them realising different interests and identities. We contribute to recent discussions on solidarity in the gig economy, and online communities as tools for organising.

• Telework quality and employee well‐being: Lessons learned from the COVID‐19 pandemic in Italy

  The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) forced organisations to implement intensive telework for many of their workers overnight. This scenario was completely new, and the emergency caused by COVID‐19 created the possibility of experimenting with new ways of working with an unknown impact on employee well‐being. Drawing on previous literature, we defined a model of telework quality consisting of the following four core domains: agile offices within organisations, functional remote workstations, flex‐time and engaging management. We identified two high‐quality and low‐quality telework profiles using latent profile analysis on a data sample of 2295 insurance and financial sector employees. Demographic, occupational and procedural characteristics were associated with the probability of being in the positive or negative profiles. Our results showed that employees' emotional exhaustion and work engagement levels were related to telework quality. This study suggests that organisations need to consider the quality of telework to effectively adopt new ways of working that foster employee well‐being.

• Issue Information
• Marketization: How capitalist exchange disciplines workers and subverts democracy, By Greer, I. (Ed.), Umney, C. (Ed.), : Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. pp. 192 £17.99.
• Mind the gender gap: Inequalities in the emergent professions of artificial intelligence (AI) and data science

  The emergence of new prestigious professions in data science and artificial intelligence (AI) provide a rare opportunity to explore the gendered dynamics of technical careers as they are being formed. In this paper, we contribute to the literature on gender inequality in digital work by curating and analysing a unique cross‐country data set. We use innovative data science methodology to investigate the nature of work and skills in these under‐researched fields. Our research finds persistent disparities in jobs, qualifications, seniority, industry, attrition and even self‐confidence in these fields. We identify structural inequality in data and AI, with career trajectories of professionals differentiated by gender, reflecting the broader history of computing. Our work is original in illuminating gendering processes within elite high‐tech jobs as they are being configured. Paying attention to these nascent fields is crucial if we are to ensure that women take their rightful place at forefront of technological innovation.

• Platform couriers' self‐exploitation: The case study of Glovo

  This article examines the phenomenon of self‐exploitation among platform couriers, using the company Glovo as a case study. The research, based on a qualitative approach with interviews from 22 different stakeholders, highlights the ways in which precarity, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and gamification intersect to create what are referred to as postdisciplinary control mechanisms. These mechanisms shift the locus of exploitation from the employer to the workers' inner selves, which are compelled to follow implicit guidelines due to their precarious situation. The use of algorithmic management by platform companies like Glovo plays a major role in this architecture marked by overwork, exposure to hazardous conditions, and economic dependence. The article urges policymakers to look beyond platform workers' employment status debate and address the design of algorithms and broader forms of labour precarity, so that policies that successfully improve workers' experience are designed.

• Building coalitions on Facebook: ‘social media unionism’ among Danish bike couriers

  Platform work represents an important challenge for the ‘Danish model’ of unionisation. Using interviews and ethnographic data, this article analyses the strategies of the Danish grassroots union movement the Wolt Workers' Group, representing principally migrant couriers using the food‐delivery platform Wolt. This study is an attempt to map an emergent form of flexible labour organisation based on horizontal, informal online networks while supported in different ways by established unions. We term this strategy of balanced autonomy and support ‘social media unionism'. Wolt couriers' attempts at grassroots organisation via social media is an important and understudied issue, especially their complex relationship to union actors. The ‘social media unionism' explored in this article allows for the formation and maintenance of nimble grassroots mobilisation among workers that are otherwise hard for unions to reach, such as migrants platform workers. We argue that this strategy holds both great possibilities and challenges for the labour movement.

• Work‐on‐demand in patchwork capitalism: The peculiar case of Uber's fleet partners in Poland

  In recent years, global corporations entering Central and Eastern European (CEE) markets have begun to adapt to existing legal regulations through innovative means. Uber's entry into Polish market, for example, involved the use of a supplementary entity—a fleet partner. Based on 42 interviews with Uber drivers in Poland (conducted between 2018 and 2020) and two in‐depth interviews with fleet partners (2021), this article investigates the prerequisites necessary for the emergence of fleet partners within a work‐on‐demand platform and their role in the relationships between different stakeholders. Using the concept of patchwork capitalism adapted for CEE countries, this study shows that additional entities took advantage of institutional hybridity, situating themselves as the intermediary between a global giant and a local regulator, and thereby creating a patchwork gig economy.

• Arise: power, strategy, and union resurgence, By Jane Holgate, London: Pluto Press. 2021. 248 pages. £16.99.

Featured documents

• Getting caught between discourse(s): hybrid choices in technology use at work

  Winner (1977, Autonomous Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 77), in defense of technology determinism, cautioned against ‘throwing out the baby with the methodological bathwater’. His concern was that in so doing STS research would underplay, or be unable to account for, the effects that...

• Online privacy in job recruitment processes? Boundary work among cybervetting recruiters

  This article addresses various ways that cybervetting recruiters (re)construct boundaries around the public–private division. Based on interviews with 37 recruiters in Sweden, we show how the practice of cybervetting is legitimised by the recruiters’ descriptions and accounts in relation to various ...

• Happy riders are all alike? Ambivalent subjective experience and mental well‐being of food‐delivery platform workers in China

  This study draws upon organizational psychology and platform labor research to investigate how socio‐psychological factors affect the mental well‐being of platform workers and help them cope with the challenges of work. Based on a survey study of 500 food‐delivery workers (‘riders’) in China, we...

• Telework quality and employee well‐being: Lessons learned from the COVID‐19 pandemic in Italy

  The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) forced organisations to implement intensive telework for many of their workers overnight. This scenario was completely new, and the emergency caused by COVID‐19 created the possibility of experimenting with new ways of working with an unknown impact on...

• ‘It's like, instant respect’: Coworking spaces as identity anchoring environments in the new economy

  As employment relationships become more tenuous, as work grows increasingly virtual and as professional reputations circulate across online platforms, coworking provides individuals across various work arrangements with shared workspaces oriented towards sociability, visibility and convenience. Our ...

• Affective commitment, home‐based working and the blurring of work–home boundaries: Evidence from Germany

  Analysis of data from the representative German Linked Personnel Panel revealed that, overall, the use of home‐based working is associated with a higher affective organisational commitment on the part of employees. However, this is less often the case when the use of home‐based working involves the ...

• Skilled maintenance trades under lean manufacturing: Evidence from the car industry

  This article explores how skilled maintenance trades have fared under lean automotive manufacturing, a cohort of workers relatively neglected in the literature. Historically, such trades possessed a distinct ‘craft consciousness’ derived from apprenticed‐acquired skill, autonomy in job execution,...

• Enhanced job satisfaction under tighter technological control: The paradoxical outcomes of digitalisation

  Via a multiple case study of work in microfinance institutions in India, this paper reports on the experiences of field officers and branch managers following work digitalisation. It identifies and explains an intriguing post‐digitalisation paradox of reported increased job satisfaction and tighter ...

• Gender and precarity in platform work: Old inequalities in the new world of work

  Platform work creates a work model that is both a curse and a blessing for vulnerable labour market segments. Based on research on female precarity, the article expects that remote platform work—so‐called crowdwork—could especially attract women who need to combine income and care responsibilities. ...

• The role of the capability, opportunity, and motivation of firms for using human resource analytics to monitor employee performance: A multi‐level analysis of the organisational, market, and country context

  The digitalisation of business processes has led to the availability of (big) data which increasingly allows firms to analyse their workforce using HR analytics. On the basis of a cross‐national multi‐level analysis and a data set that covers more than 20,000 firms in all member states of the...