Control from on High: Cloud-Computing, Skill, and Acute Frustration among Analytics Workers in the Digital Publishing Industry

Abstract

Abstract:This article addresses research on worker skill, technology, and control over the labor process by focusing on routine immaterial labor or knowledge work. Based on participant observation conducted among analytics workers at a digital publishing network, I find that analytics workers appear paradoxically autonomous and empowered by management while being bound by everevolving, calculative cloud-based information and communication technologies (ICTs). Workers appear free to "be creative," while ever-evolving ICTs exert unpredictable control over work. Based on this finding, I argue that sociology's tendency to take organizational boundaries and technological stability for granted hampers analyses of contemporary forms of work. Thus, sociologists of work must extend outward -beyond communities of practice, labor markets, and the state -to include ever-evolving, infrastructural socio-technical networks in which work and organizations are embedded. Additionally, research on the experience of immaterial labor suggests that ICTs afford pleasurably immersive experiences that bind workers to organizations and their fields. Complicating this emerging body of research, I find workers acutely frustrated by these unpredictable, ever-evolving, cloud-based ICTs.

Workers and Their Foes: Customer Scapegoats in the Service Triad

“…The point here is not to argue for a black and white conceptualization of the presence or absence of workers’ sense of autonomy. Indeed, such an understanding may misrepresent workers’ experiences: Siciliano (2016), for instance, showed how workers in the digital publishing industry worked with technology that both afforded and constrained their sense of creative autonomy. Given that frontline service workers do not always feel autonomous, however, we need explanations for why workers do not resist their own exploitation in workplaces in which the assumption of a sense of autonomy is not fully borne out.…”