Browse

The digital factory takes very different forms – it might be a platform, a video game, or a distribution center – but digital technology produces labor regimes that often show surprising continuities with classical factories just as well as novel configurations. The guiding thread of the book is to think about these continuities, reconfigurations, and new forms of the factory. From this angle, the book investigates the transformation of labor in digital capitalism. Combining a number of empirical studies into a narrative and conceptual framework, the book offers a fresh theoretical perspective on labor in the algorithmic world of digital capitalism. These areas of work are often hidden behind the supposed magic of algorithms, thought to be automated but in fact still highly dependent on human labor. Workers in German Amazon warehouses in tandem with workers on global digital labor platforms training artificial intelligence, delivery drivers in the gig economy, Chinese gaming workers, Filipino content moderators for platforms like Facebook, Google’s book scanning workers in California: these are the workers of today’s digital factory. Rooted in sociology, labor geography, anthropology, and media and cultural studies, The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation is based on more than seven years of research in different sites. Using a range of qualitative methods including ethnographic approaches and interviews as well as software and infrastructure studies, the book offers profound insights into different workplaces, infrastructures, platforms, labor regimes, and struggles playing out across the digital factory.

This book argues that the social sciences and humanities have a canon of privileged research sites and objects in addition to a canon of texts. Based on a comparison to the use of model systems among biologists, it notes that when scholars discuss general categories of phenomena in the social sciences and humanities, they draw on some cases more than others and they privilege some sites with regard to the assumed capacity for generating relevant insights. Whereas biologists explicitly discuss the role of model systems, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have so far not reflected explicitly about their use of “model cases,” leaving them unable to exploit the advantages of this concentration of attention or to mitigate its disadvantages. The book asks about the concrete material research objects behind general conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions. It discusses factors that sponsor some material research objects over others, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas among communities of scholars. The book revisits debates about textual canons with a focus on underlying material research objects and paradigmatic examples. It discusses the specific, Western cases, which have served as model cases for what circulates as “international social science” and asks about the specific cases, which have informed the critique of eurocentrism more than others.

This book examines the characteristics of grassroots organizations that enable them to translate constituency action into political power. Extensive prior research shows that simply amassing the support of individuals—even large numbers of them—does not lead to durable change. Instead, the authors show that the strategic choices that organizational leaders make help explain how social movement actors are able to achieve their goals. Drawing on a multi-year, multi-method comparative case study of outlier cases where grassroots groups built power on issues ranging from immigrant rights to universal preschool, the book reveals the dynamism and uncertainty of political power shifts. In-depth case studies from Arizona, Kentucky, Nevada, Ohio, Minnesota, and Virginia show that the movement leaders whose organizations were able to shift power invested in building constituencies that shared several key characteristics: they were independent (not beholden to someone else’s assessment of their value in any given moment); committed (loyal to the organization); flexible (willing to shift as political circumstances changed); and populated by a distributed and relationally connected network of member-strategists. The book’s main contribution is to demonstrate how building constituency internally and exercising power externally operate in mutually reinforcing and transformative ways.

Underdogs traces the roots of queer theory in studies of social deviance conducted in the social sciences in the United States after World War II. Scholars in anthropology, sociology, and history have argued that the emergence of queer criticism in the humanities around 1990 built on a foundation of empirical research on sexual practices and sexual communities, as well as earlier claims for the constructed and contingent nature of social identity. This book extends these claims through a close examination of the afterlife of microanalytic, interactionist, and observational methods in the first wave of queer theory. With a focus on the work of Erving Goffman, and in particular his analysis of the operations of stigma in everyday life the book explores the influence of deviance studies on a queer vision of politics: coalitional, comparative, and based on a model of shared marginality. In borrowing its model of power from deviance studies while dropping its emphasis on empirical research in favor of attention to discourse, the book argues, queer studies failed to grapple adequately with its institutional entanglements or the ethics of studying social outsiders. By illuminating forgotten or suppressed lines of influence, Underdogs argues that acknowledging the inheritance of midcentury social science will help to address impasses regularly encountered in contemporary queer studies: false universalism, disconnection from political and lived praxis, and bad faith regarding its institutional and other forms of privilege.