Remote and hybrid work have grown due to technological advances and the need for global talent, enabling cross-border collaboration and widespread adoption by organisations and employees. Thus, understanding how virtual socialisation shapes workplace relationships and commitment is crucial. This paper explores how newcomers experience commitment during virtual socialisation, through the lens of media richness. A qualitative study was conducted based on 38 interviews. The findings show that media richness shaped individuals' socialisation and commitment experiences. While effective communication may facilitate transactional relationships, team support can provide the socioemotional input needed to foster commitment. This contributes to commitment theory by investigating how multiple commitments develop through virtual socialisation, an area still underexplored. It contributes to media richness theory by highlighting the role of using diverse media combined with consistent communication in enhancing individual socialisation. Practical implications are offered for employers seeking to understand and strengthen employee commitment in remote/hybrid work settings.
Autonomous and AI-driven agricultural technology is often framed as a panacea for labour dependency. While proponents envision autonomous technologies seamlessly optimising farming, this rationalised model misunderstands the reality of on-farm integration. Based on an ethnographic and comparative study of 16 operations in the US West Coast Tree Fruit Industry (California and Washington), this article examines the 'last mile' of agricultural automation. The study reveals that integrating AI and robotics is a contested negotiation shaped by epistemological friction-the tension between the algorithmic logic of developers and the embodied, site-specific expertise of farmers and farm workers. Rather than resulting in seamless labour replacement, we find that agricultural automation reconfigures work, creating an invisible reliance on 'human middleware' to navigate the biological recalcitrance of the orchard. Demonstrating how regional contexts and participatory implementation shape technological trajectories, this study extends Labour Process Theory. We argue for the need for a relational approach recognising the essential cognitive labour of farmers and farm workers that is demanded by digital agriculture. Ultimately, this study shows the 'farm of the future' depends on reconciling rigid systems with the situated expertise of the farm workforce.
This article explores the diverse assumptions and priorities that managers and technology developers assign to workplace technologies in UK warehousing. Rooted in labour process theory (LPT), and its concern for worker agency and management control, it addresses a need for finer-grained theorisations of management and developer agency in shaping technological development and implementation. Synthesising LPT with literature on 'technological frames of reference,' it proposes a new theoretical framework for distinguishing contrasting perspectives on technology, identifying variation in terms of: (1) organisational priorities, (2) conceptions of workers' agency and (3) technological priorities. The article applies this theoretical framework to a qualitative study of warehousing, using it to generate a threefold taxonomy of frames found in the industry: 'human fallibility'; 'logistical puzzle-solving'; and 'workers as beneficiaries.' It argues that these analytical tools can expand sociological understanding of variation in industry actors' thinking about workplace technologies, and how they conceive of workers' agency in relation to technological deployment.
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.
