ABSTRACT This reflective article identifies three interconnected themes for advancing scholarship on new technology, work and employment. First, it calls for stronger theorisation of technology and deeper engagement with the political economy of Big Tech and AI. Attending to the material and political dimensions of technological systems is vital for challenging dominant narratives that present technologically driven change as inevitable. Second, the article argues for widening the empirical scope of research beyond the “new, new technologies,” while overlooking less visible sectors and the differing experiences of adopters and non‐adopters within the same industries. Broadening the empirical field and methodological repertoire would illuminate the uneven and variegated nature of digitalisation. Third, the article emphasises the importance of historical contextualisation. Situating contemporary developments within longer trajectories of workplace transformation is essential for understanding ongoing challenges and informing research on work futures.
ABSTRACT Flexible work promises control over where and when work is performed, yet organisations still need credible performance evidence at a distance. Drawing on 30 interviews with women lawyers in UK‐based international firms, we examine how billable hours mediate these demands. Records of billable hours allow fee‐earning output to be observed regardless of where the work is performed. This visibility can warrant flexible work, while the continuing availability of the same record preserves review and encourages self‐monitoring. We develop datafied trust to describe confidence in remote productivity warranted by recorded output and conditional on its continued measurability. The evidence speaks more strongly to control than to autonomy. Participants describe critical awareness, target pressure, and the possibility that flexibility will be questioned when figures decline. The study specifies how an established professional metric makes autonomy governable. It also shows how selective, self‐reported records can support oversight and self‐government without invasive automatic monitoring.
ABSTRACT The rise of gig work, enabled by algorithmic management, has reconfigured the traditional employer‐employee relationship, giving rise to new tensions in how Human Resource Management (HRM) is enacted and experienced. While existing scholarship acknowledges the relevance of HRM in this domain, little is known about how HRM intentions are operationalized through algorithmic management in gig work and how these efforts are perceived by gig workers. Therefore, using a case study approach, we aim to examine the disjuncture emerging of HRM implementation across intended, actual and perceived levels within gig work. Our findings demonstrate that these disjunctures' arise as structural outcomes of socio‐technical systems that mediate implementation. Building on this insight, the study makes three contributions. First, it advances the performance–control debate by demonstrating how algorithmic management redistributes and reconstitutes control across HRM levels. Second, it extends the rhetoric–reality debate by showing how algorithmic systems selectively translate and reshape HR rhetoric in practice. Third, it contributes to the literature on contemporary forms of bureaucratic control by illustrating how algorithmic infrastructures reconfigure the locus of HRM, embedding coordination and evaluation within platform architectures and situating HRM within pre‐structured systems of control.
This article examines the implementation of Spain's Rider Law, one of the most ambitious regulatory interventions in platform-mediated work, and analyses why its effects on employment relations have remained limited. Drawing on qualitative interviews with trade union and grassroots rider organisations, the study shows that enforcement has not transformed the labour process but has instead generated a new regulatory equilibrium. Platform firms responded to the law through organisational restructuring, algorithmic opacity, and performative compliance, preserving core features of algorithmic management while formally adapting to legal requirements. The findings conceptualise enforcement as a contested and relational process shaped by the interaction of digital technologies, corporate strategies, weak workplace organisation, and limited state capacity. By foregrounding the role of algorithmic management as both a labour control and regulatory technology, the article contributes to debates on platform work, labour regulation, and the governance of employment under digital capitalism.
Unions are increasingly adopting digital tools, yet research often portrays them as lagging in the digital age. This article challenges that view by examining union agency in the digitalisation of voting. Drawing on qualitative interviews with union officials, digital consultants collaborating on developing digital union voting and 12 years of voting and bargaining data from 6 Danish unions, we use affordance theory to show how union leaders' understanding of membership shapes which possibilities of digital voting systems they perceive and actualise, and which they leave dormant. We argue that digital voting is not merely a technical innovation but a political intervention that reshapes democratic practice, reconfigures union-member relations and redistributes power. Digitalisation enhances procedural democracy and creates openings for participation but also exposes tensions in how unions recognise membership diversity. We further argue that union members are not only participants in democratic procedures; their membership is constituted by these procedures.
