Trust, but verify.. Power relations and control practices in a smart working environment

The world of working is changing and the technological transformations are playing a relevant role in this change. In particular, new technologies are making the physical boundaries of traditional offices increasingly permeable, allowing the diffusion of New Ways of Working (Demerouti et al., 2014; Koops and Helms, 2014), such as smart working. This paper, based on a qualitative research and discursive interviews, intends to reflect on the introduction and top-down management of smart working within a banking institution. At the same time, it aims to grasp the role attributed to and played by technology in its implementation. Starting from the two reconstructed stories, I shall show if and how the innovations introduced whereby technologies enable us to work remotely, are changing existing power relations and what control dynamics emerge from the field.

Algorithmic management versus organising protest and co-determination? The case of Foodora/Lieferando in Germany

The so-called ‘platform economy' or ‘gig economy' and its ambivalent effects on the working environment is a focal point of social science research. The contribution analyses, based on a case study, algorithmic work in the platform economy, its working conditions, and the way gig workers organised and articulated their protest. The algorithmic management of Lieferando (formerly Foodora) governs its employees through algorithmic-driven and standardized work coordination. Therefore, different conflicts between the company and its workers arose, concerning working conditions, working relations, and co-determination. Organising, protest, and established co-determination mechanisms play a crucial role for the employees. As a result, there exists currently a few institutionalized relationships between the platform and its workforce in Germany.

Connectivity and human capacity in digital transformation: the exploratory hypotheses of hyper industrial

The present contribution interprets current digital transformations of work and related power dynamics through the lens of Alquati's concept of hyper-industrial society. The paper starts from a re-elaboration of Alquati's thought, mainly on the basis of the re-reading of some unpublished writings dating back to the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, it takes up the categories of (a) hyper-industrialisation, (b) enhancement versus impoverishment of human capacity, and (c) machinic subjectivity, and reconsiders them in light of current technological developments. These categories are then used as tools for analyzing three work contexts in which processes of digitization appear to be particularly intense: manufacturing, banking, and work in digital distribution platforms. This empirical exploration shows how current transformations of work can be interpreted as effects of a hyper-industrial mode, understood as an abstract organizational logic capable of dividing, standardizing and reassembling objects and knowledge.

Decision-making processes, conflict and coordination in Italian schools in the era of distance education

This article is aimed to disentangle how the emergency transition to online education was coped by Italian school during the first lockdown (March-May 2020) related to the Covid-19 outbreak. In particular, combining two bodies of literature - Sociological New Institutionalism and Science and Technology Studies - we focus on the organizational solutions schools adopted in emergency, and on the consequences of a sudden introduction of technology-mediated education. We maintain that organizational choices, school climate, coordination, conflict and work-related stress were influenced by pre-existing individual (digital skills and professional attitudes) and organizational (school governance and leadership) factors. To explore these issues, we used an original study - a web survey of over 2,000 Italian teachers in every stage of the Italian education system, that was administered between April and May 2020. Our findings show that individual level features (digital skills, age, education, career) count as much as some structural dimensions (e.g. the type of school). Nevertheless, such features are mediated by relevant organizational dimensions. In particular, stress and conflicts were limited where roles for digital transformation were already in place, and where school leaders were perceived to adopted less hierarchical and more coordinated leadership styles.

Re-framing community in the platform age: analyzing organization and power in BlaBlaCar

The concept of community remains crucial in social sciences and organizational analysis. In recent years, the concept of community has become a sort of buzzword, in particular, with the rise of the so-called sharing and platform economy. This contribution asks what kinds of communities are enabled by collaborative platforms and how power is practiced within these peculiar organizations, considering them as evaluative infrastructures. The article explores these issues through the empirical analysis of one of the best-known sharing platforms (BlaBlaCar) adopting a mixed method approach. The research concludes that the analyzed case presents the main characteristics of a brand community, although it has some specific and original features. Compared to other evaluation infrastructures, in BlaBlaCar the control is more centralized and the power more legitimated, as it is considered a guarantee of security and reliability of the service which increases the loyalty to company's brand.

Labor on tap: Putting the internet crowd to work

In the era of connectivity, companies find fundamentally new ways of accessing workforce: On the internet a standby labor force is at their disposal allowing to source labor on demand - just like electricity from the socket. It seems as if the masses of people willingly offering their skills, time and energy to crowdsourcing platforms can be considered a state-of-the-art manifestation of standing-reserve as Martin Heidegger described with regard to nature. His concept of standing-reserve denotes the fact that something exists just to be ready for use and functions merely as a source of profit. The fact that companies today have labor available on tap also results in new forms of working, which are determined by peculiarities and specific ways of how the platforms organize working processes and deal with the crowd. To ensure performance and to deliver a consistent service the platforms must incessantly exert force in order to turn a scattered pool of individuals into a purposeful whole. The standby labor force can be seen as an extreme instance of how algorithmically infused processes shape the contours of labor today.