Workers in many industrial settings remain in jobs that expose them to life-threatening harm, occupying a dual position as insiders within the firm and victims of its consequences. We examine how workers make sense of organizational wrongdoing from this dual position, through an inductive study of the ILVA steel plant in Taranto, Italy, where public scandal revealed chronic toxic emissions. We find that workers’ sensemaking cannot be explained by insider or victim status alone but, instead, emerges at their intersection. While external actors interpret as complicity workers’ continued participation in the firm following the exposure of wrongdoing, workers frame remaining as a survival-oriented response to life-threatening harm, condemning the organization as the source of injury while depending on it for survival. At the same time, as workers fail to secure recognition as victims beyond the firm, they come to view institutional inaction in the face of their suffering as evidence of systemic abandonment and injustice. We theorize that these processes—survival-based resignation to continue working and perceived institutional abandonment—reinforce each other, creating a double-failure trap in which workers endure life-threatening harm not because they fail to recognize its dangers but because they no longer believe protection or escape is possible.
Workers face a cold start when entering new work contexts in which their reputations do not precede them. Cold starts are a particularly challenging problem for late-career workers who leave decades-long careers in formal organizations to pursue freelancing through online labor platforms. Unlike early- and mid-career freelancers, who are typically motivated by long-term career advancement, late-career workers are motivated to make work less central to their lives, although many still want and need to engage in paid labor in retirement. However, the question of how late-career workers navigate the cold-start problem is not well understood. In our study, we examine how late-career workers (55+ years old, 30+ years of work experience) manage the transition to platform-based freelancing. We find that for these workers, the cold-start problem is especially challenging as it is underpinned by reputation system misalignment, a clash between fundamentally different regimes for evaluating, recognizing, and assigning workers’ value. Although late-career workers expected their credentials to confer credibility in platform work, overcoming the cold-start problem required recalibrating their motivations and sense of professional worth. Our findings advance theoretical conversations on algorithmic management and visibility, career transitions to platform work, and retirement.
Digitization has enabled modern firms to expand at unprecedented rates, but there are downsides to rapid expansion. Prior research has highlighted how digital platforms facilitate mass-market expansions by resolving frictions associated with market entry. Accordingly, various studies have emphasized the positive impact of market-friction reduction on aggregate market size and efficiency. In this article, we argue that the extreme resolution of frictions may also have a downside: It can nudge platform participants to overlook the heterogeneous nature of different markets and, consequently, to engage in large-scale, potentially myopic market expansions. These expansions, in turn, may engender lower customer satisfaction and firm performance. We test our arguments in the context of Apple’s App Store. We find that apps that undergo rapid, large-scale market expansions, relative to apps that do not expand or that expand more gradually, see a short-run increase in client base but longer-run declines in ratings, downloads, financial performance, and innovation. By addressing the underexplored negative side of resolving market frictions on platforms, the study advances knowledge of digital strategy and scaling.
