Illusioned and Alienated: Can Gig Workers Organise Collectively?

By studying the fraudulent benefits of flexibility in the ride-hailing gig economy, this article explains alienation as a condition in which workers are excluded from the product, estranged, and disadvantaged. Material estrangement, an objective aspect of alienation exemplified by arbitrary distribution of income, capitalists’ exclusive access to data, and robotic communication between Uber and their drivers, has many physiological (subjective) manifestations. Dissatisfaction, powerlessness, and isolation as subjective expressions of alienation prominently shape the prospects of collective labour mobilisation by both sparking and hindering organisational potential. Additionally, the example of workers’ re-appropriation of Uber’s app against Uber explains how modern technologies serve not only as a medium to expand capitalist interests, but enhance possibilities for labour cooperation and liberation. The proposed argumentation uses the Autonomist Marxist concept of “social factory” as a meta-framework, drawing on original ethnographic and interview data on ride-hailing Uber drivers in the gig economy.

Theorizing Struggle in the Social Factory

This essay explores possibilities for expanding how critical organization scholars theorize and examine processes of struggle in the capital–labor relationship. Arguing for a more expansive conception of the typical sphere of struggle, I explore the intersections of branding, communicative capitalism, and the entrepreneurial self as a way to theorize struggle in the “social factory.” I suggest that the focus of critical scholars on the “indeterminacy of labor” at the point of production as the key to struggle in the capital–labor relationship should be expanded to encompass an exploration of the “politics of indeterminacy” within the broader cycle of value in motion in the capital accumulation process. A politics of indeterminacy attempts to capture the struggles (around meaning, value, affect, identity, etc.) that unfold throughout the sites and stages of the capital accumulation process. Moreover, conceiving of the capital accumulation process as a dialectical movement of the “unity in contradiction” between value and anti-value provides critical scholars with additional conceptual resources to explore struggle in the organizing process.

Solidarities In and Through Work in an Age of Extremes

This article introduces a special issue of Work, Employment and Society on solidarities in and through the experience of work in an age of austerity and political polarisation. It commences by discussing the renaissance of studies of solidarity in the workplace – and beyond. Debates on solidarity as a concept are reviewed in relation to moral economy, labour organising-mobilisation, emotional labour and public sociology. Each of the special issue articles assess the value of the solidarity concept under contemporary conditions. Between them they explore solidarity among gig economy delivery riders (Italy and UK), special needs teachers (England), volunteer lifeboat crews (UK and Ireland) and international ‘social factory’ activists. Two articles examine solidarity within organised labour: first, internationalism among dock workers and second, North American police unions’ construction of a divisive ‘blue solidarity’. The article concludes by calling for continued study of different forms of solidarity in and through work, especially among migrants and individualised workers.

Social factory as prosaic state space: Redefining labour in China’s mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship campaign

This study examines China’s mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship campaign, with particular attention to the community of maker-entrepreneurs in the new techno-political ordering of society and their social territories. This raises the question of the subject-making of maker-entrepreneurs on a massive scale through what we call the new education–incubatory assemblage. How does the new education–incubatory machine assemble a new participatory community, form a production–communications–consumption circuit to imagine the new economy and re-territorialise the techno-political ordering of society? Our study stresses two differences in the social factory. First, by forging a fragmented pattern of production and an individualised society, mass entrepreneurship emphasises social networking. The exploitation of social relations in production has been brought to the foreground. Second, a participatory mass is not only shaped by the new mentality, but also constitutive of the very formation of the new mentality. Such a mass is a collection of actors, from the government, cooperatives, start-ups and individuals. In addition, their agencies vary, from those with a more reified form of power, such as policy, to the mundane, unrehearsed actions of individuals. This process entails the reconfiguration of political apparatus and bio-political power.

Reconceptualising Solidarity in the Social Factory: Cultural Work between Economic Needs and Political Desires

This article reconceptualises work-based solidarity as political action that is distinct from, yet interlinked with, a socio-economic mode of activity. To extend existing relational approaches to work, this article reads a case study of a cultural initiative through Hannah Arendt’s notions of labour, work and (political) action. With the latter being a form of engagement marked by plurality – the co-presence of equality and difference – the analysis shows how work-based solidarity as political activity is a temporary and precarious phenomenon. It necessitates constant engagement of various material and discursive elements to create its conditions. This article also shows how work-based solidarity is enabled through particular arrangements of activities stretching over both the socio-economic and the political sphere in a way that maintains the political mode of work distinct from socio-economic reasoning without ignoring its economic necessities.

Dispossessing academics: The shift to ‘appropriation’ in the governing of academic life

This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the transformation of academic life that is currently taking place under the sign of ‘neoliberalization’. The main aim is to differentiate appropriation from exploitation as strategies of surplus labour dispossession, to identify the growth of appropriative techniques in academic life, and to situate the proliferation of such techniques in the broader transformations of global political economy. Alloyed with poststructuralist social theory, the historical materialist thrust of the article demonstrates how, in the technologically articulate ‘social factory’ of advanced capitalism, the spatial operations of these techniques of dispossession have a particularly ‘aesthetic’ character that is immanent to their appropriative operation, and which renders their workings both more discreet and effective. The article aims: (1) to problematize the neoliberal concepts of efficiency, transparency, and autonomy, in terms of practical outcomes; (2) to stimulate reflexive consideration of the ‘positioning’ of academics themselves in the reproduction of these techniques; and (3) to ask how these techniques might generate new ‘historical subjects’ of struggle and organization in academic life.