This article examines the impact of algorithmic management on workplace social relations in conventional employment settings. Fifty-one semi-structured interviews with middle managers and shop-floor workers of three different dark stores in Spain were conducted to explore how algorithmic tools reshape managerial roles and worker dynamics. Building on Labor Process Theory, the findings reveal that while algorithmic management reduces the need for traditional managerial oversight, it simultaneously transforms managers into algorithmic brokers who interpret algorithmic output, thus facilitating control mechanisms rather than eliminating them. This shift underlines the persistence of power asymmetries in capitalist employment relationships, where managers continue to play a critical role in extracting surplus value from labor. Furthermore, the article argues that technology deployment in the workplace both shapes and is shaped by power relations. This highlights the need for a nuanced understanding of how algorithmic management influences social workplace relations. As empirically illustrated, different forms of handling the human-machine complementarities emerging from the deployment of algorithmic management lead to varied outcomes. Where technology is used to surveil and coerce, workers develop grievances against management and employers. Conversely, where technology is at the service of thoughtfully crafted forms of normative control, workers immerse themselves in the labor process. Ultimately, this research contributes to ongoing debates about the future of work, arguing that concerns about full automation are exaggerated, and that algorithmic management should be seen instead as an avenue for the expansion and sophistication of workers’ exploitation through enhanced control mechanisms.

This article builds upon the body of literature confirming that aesthetics matter for finding work by investigating how gatekeepers reflect on the relevance of appearances in their evaluations of job candidates. Starting from the notion that in hiring the relevance of appearance conflicts with ideals of meritocracy and fairness, we seek to understand how gatekeepers solve this dispute and how they morally legitimize the importance of aesthetics. The analyses are based on in-depth interviews with 40 employee gatekeepers from the cultural (n = 17) and corporate (n = 23) sector, and show that although the gatekeepers problematize the importance of beauty, they do acknowledge that it plays a role in their evaluations. Three cultural repertoires for solving this contradiction and for legitimizing appearances as a hiring criterion are discerned from the data: (1) beauty as a business case; (2) appearances express personality; (3) looking right is a matter of effort. What the gatekeepers try to do is to come to a hiring decision using evaluation criteria that can be considered contextually legitimate. Yet, this can lead to applying evaluation criteria and, more structurally, labor market outcomes that they find morally problematic. This study highlights the relevance of cultural repertoires in processes of legitimation for understanding reproductions of inequalities related to appearances.

Scholarship on occupational activism suggests that workers can promote social change through the creative or subversive performance of their occupational roles. While scholars have investigated occupational activism in various contexts, less is known about how workers become occupational activists, particularly in cases where their occupational activism contradicts the ideas, attitudes, and praxes they internalize through their professional socialization, thus requiring questioning, rethinking, and perhaps even “unlearning” the basic precepts of their profession. To address this, I analyze 85 in-depth interviews with weight-inclusive healthcare practitioners who subversively decenter weight in their delivery of healthcare to advance health, equity, and social justice. Drawing on social movement micromobilization theories and applying Deterding and Waters's flexible coding approach, I demonstrate that weight-inclusive healthcare practitioners are inspired to engage in occupational activism as a result of resocialization processes that occur largely through interpersonal interaction with weight-inclusive practitioners in their occupational network, independent engagement with weight-inclusive healthcare content, and participation in training programs and workshops designed to educate about weight-inclusivity. This research advances the work and occupations literature by demonstrating how one's enactment of their occupational role can change through resocialization processes that transform their understandings of the basic precepts of their field and facilitate identification with alternative practices. This study represents the largest analysis of weight-inclusive healthcare in the U.S. and holds practical implications for the adoption of weight-inclusive healthcare delivery.

This article examines the storytelling values, critiques, and practices of journalists of color in public radio, a historically white dominant industry. I draw on 83 interviews with people of color employed in public radio to analyze their stated values and how they use their position to disrupt the white racial frame that shapes the industry's genre in accordance with said values. Interviewees highlighted a commitment to make more stories that would resonate with their communities of origin; further, they expressed a commitment to exposing existing, majority-white public radio listeners to a more diverse set of news stories through their storytelling. Their “outsider within” status leads public radio employes of color to recognize the white racial frame of public radio storytelling and organizational resistance to change. Given the mismatch between their values and the organization's white racial frame, public radio employes of color engage in values-centered occupational activism. Specifically, they find newsroom allies, reframe stories to make it through the white racial frame, and in some cases, directly challenge authorities to ensure a more diverse set of news stories make it on air. This form of values-centered occupational activism promotes a more expansive and diverse news ecosystem, both in newsroom culture and in the broader public sphere.

Flexible capitalism fosters the organization of worker time around demand, with challenging consequences for precarious and low-wage workers. I examine how this paradigm of work time fared in a context of economic and social disruption, namely the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a qualitative study of restaurant work in the U.S., I argue that shifts in power over work time interacted with the moral and relational nature of time, resulting in both contestation and continuity of the flexible time paradigm. This paper has implications for understanding factors shaping change and stability in flexibly organized and precarious work.

Consistent with our calls for critical approaches to traditional Industrial Relations questions, we argue that it is important to consider whether the “major upsurge in union organizing” is more accurately framed as a continuation of long-running democracy fights against systemic inequity and injustice. Thus, we bring focus to “whole worker” organizing, as well as the structural limitations of our labor laws and institutions, to illuminate counter-narratives to the way we tell stories about contemporary worker organizing.

The gender gap in union membership rates has narrowed considerably in the last decades. How is this change related to women's attitudes toward unions? What is the profile of women who support union activism? Are there reasons to believe that women's support will continue to increase over time? Using data from the General Social Survey, I examine women's attitudes toward trade unions between 2002 and 2021. Data shows that support for unions is higher among non-white, less-educated, and younger women, as well as among women employed in female-dominated occupations. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for current and future labor activism.