Alex Wood (2020) Despotism on Demand: How power operates in a flexible workplace, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 178 pages, $US12.99 e‐book, $US26.95 paperback

• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Robin Price
• Date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12197

New Technology, Work and Employment. 2021;00:1–3.

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wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ntwe

DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.12197

BOOK REVIEW

Alex Wood (2020) Despotism on Demand: How

power operates in a flexible workplace, Ithaca,

Cornell University Press, 178 pages, $US12.99

e- book, $US26.95 paperback

This is an eminently readable, well- written book that sits midway between a reference littered aca-

demic tome and more populist sociologies of low wage work. Wood builds on his earlier research on

supermarket work in the UK – here termed PartnershipCo – to examine work in the largest supermar-

ket chain in the US – ConflictCo – and to compare workplace practices in the two nations. He revisits,

reshapes and extends traditional labour process theories of workplace control and expands what we

know about workplace control. Flexible despotism is a system whereby the workforce is divided into

the core who consent to their employers control strategies in exchange for good employment condi-

tions and the periphery who move in and out of the firm as required and with poorer working condi-

tions and harsher control strategies.

To do so, Wood returns to Michael Burawoy’s (1979) framewo rks on workplace regimes. Wood

defines workplace regimes as ‘the political dynamics, institutional rules, and norms that workers en-

counter as they go about their daily lives’ (2020, p. 9). Wood, following Gramsci (1971) and Burawoy

(1979), examines the existence of hegemonic workplace practices, but finds that control is more one-

sided than Burawoy argues. As well as managers exerting control over employees by introducing

human resource (HR) policies and practices, these HR practices obscure control and exploitation. For

example, prior studies argue that the algorithms embedded in scheduling software prioritise some

workers over others and are opaque, as are managers capacity to override these systems (see Price,

2016). Wood uncovers how scheduling is explicitly employed to exert control. By tracing the histor-

ical shifts in regimes of power and workplace control, Wood recaps the history of the shift towards

more flexible forms of labour use over time. The central argument is that these large retail employers

have moved on from Atkinson’s (1985) flexible firm wit h its core internal labour market and periph-

ery subjected to forms of numerical flexibility, to a regime of extreme temporal flexibility.

The book argues that flexible scheduling is used as a control strategy. Now, this is nothing new, it

has been identified previously in debates about how flexible scheduling can provide benefits for both

employers and employees (see Price, 2016); however, employees only benefit if they can genuinely

exert free choice over their scheduling. Wood demonstrates how f lexibility at the employer's discretion

becomes precarious scheduling and digs below the surface to see how these scheduling practices are

deployed.

Precarious scheduling has flow on implications for workers. Flexible scheduling allows for flexible

discipline – ‘the arbitrary power to wreak havoc with worker's lives and incomes’ (p. 5) – by cancel-

ling shifts or allocating shifts at times that do not meet the worker's availability. This control of t he al-

location of shifts exerts a profound influence on the lives of individual workers and results in workers

© 2021 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

432 New Technology, Work and Employment. 2021;36:432–434. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ntwe432