Reconsidering digital labour: Bringing tech workers into the debate

• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Author: Robert Dorschel
• Date: 01 July 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12225

Received: 30 December 2020

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Accepted: 5 November 2021

DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.12225

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Reconsidering digital labour: Bringing tech

workers into the debate

Robert Dorschel

Department of Sociology, University of

Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Correspondence

Robert Dorschel, Department of

Sociology, University of Cambridge,

16 Mill Ln, Cambridge, CB2 1SB, UK.

Email: rcd49@cam.ac.uk

Funding information

University of Cambridge; Foundation of

the German Economy

Abstract

The digital labour debate has produced manifold in-

sights into new forms of work emerging within digital

capitalism. So far, though, most research has focused

on highly precarious labourers, neglecting the growing

ranks of affluent ‘tech workers’. I argue that this ana-

lytical oversight can be attributed to a narrow con-

ceptualisation of digital labour. Thus, this article first

proposes a broadening of the digital labour concept to

encompass all work entangled with the digital econo-

my. In a second step, I demonstrate the heuristic sur-

plus of this theoretical broadening through a

discussion of the empirical literature on tech workers.

By bringing tech workers into the debate, I point to the

cultural, technological and organisational relations

between high and low‐paid digital labourers. Pursuing

twin‐aims, the article combines a theoretical re-

consideration of digital labour with an analytical dis-

cussion of the literature on tech workers to provide a

more relational account of work and class in digital

capitalism.

KEYWORDS

class, crowd work, digital capitalism, digital labour, gig work,

knowledge work, platform capitalism, professions, tech work

New Technol Work Employ. 2022;37:288–307.288

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wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ntwe

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2022 The Authors. New Technology, Work and Employment published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

Under the banner of digital labour, social scientists across a range of disciplines have produced

insights into the new groups of workers that have arisen from within digital capitalism. Terms

like gig workers, crowd workers or prosumers are deployed to categorise these new groups who

sell or trade new forms of labour in segments of the economy created or genuinely transformed

through Internet‐based digital technologies and business models (Bergvall‐Kåreborn &

Howcroft, 2014; Fuchs, 2013a; Gerber & Krzywdzinski, 2019; Graham et al., 2017). Digitali-

sation thus impacts existing worker groups—for instance, by confronting many of them with

the possibility of automation (Frey & Osborne, 2017)—but it also leads to the creation of new

‘occupational classes’(Grusky & Sørensen, 1998).

Surprisingly, though, the concept of digital labour has been primarily used to analyse highly

precarious new forms of work. While the debate thus far has been very productive, it has

concentrated on the lower occupational classes: social scientists have primarily focused on the

new ‘cyber proletariat’(Dyer‐Witheford, 2015; Huws, 2001)or‘digital underclass’

(Dawson, 2002; Gray & Suri, 2019). This narrow take on labour within digital capitalism seems

out of date given the growing number of affluent digital labourers or so‐called tech workers,

who earn high salaries for programming, designing or managing digital technologies and

digitally mediated services (Dorschel, 2021; Tarnoff & Weigel, 2020, p. 4; Thaa, 2020). Since the

1990s, the Internet industry has produced new forms of work and corporate cultures

(Fuchs, 2013a; Neff, 2012). Within this context, usage of the term ‘tech worker’has shifted, with

the term now signalling the distinctive (self‐)classification of white‐collar employees such as

UX‐designers, software engineers or data scientists, who sell their labour‐power to Internet‐

based companies (Tarnoff, 2020).

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Hitherto, the social sciences have barely addressed this new generation of tech workers. The

sheer number of studies about food delivery couriers, one of the most visible occupational

classes of digital capitalism (see Anwar & Graham, 2019; Goods et al., 2019; Tassinari &

Maccarrone, 2020), might in itself surpass the amount of research that has been done on tech

workers. This solidarity towards highly precarious classes of workers within the digital en-

vironment has come at an analytical cost. It has produced a sociological blind spot concerning

the upper echelons of digital labourers.

This paper pursues two interconnected aims. First, I make the case for a broader con-

ceptualisation of digital labour. I address established authors across the digital labour debate

and recapitulate their central theoretical arguments. Building on Fuchs' definition of digital

labour as corresponding to an economic field (Fuchs, 2013a, p. 296), I then argue for termi-

nology that ties digital labour to its economic sector, the digital economy, understood as that

part of economic output that rests on the ICT‐sector and platform companies, including their

various supply chains (Bukht & Heeks, 2017). Thus, our understanding of digital labour should

include tech workers—as well as the often forgotten miners, hardware assembly workers or

digital waste workers—in addition to crowd workers, gig workers and the prosumer. This

means the supply chain or sector‐level definition of digital labour is not limited to the digital

media industry, as Fuchs argues. Instead, it covers all work activities entangled with the digital

economy as a whole.

In the second part of this paper, I will support this theoretical argument by discussing a

range of empirical studies on tech workers and relating their findings to the digital labour

debate. The paper does not intend to present a genealogy of the tech worker subject. Rather,

following contemporary debates, I limit my discussion to professional digital labourers at

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