Join our lively discussion of directions for sociological work on prescient topics like AI, work automation, surveillance,  digitization, algorithmic management, and platform work, as well as on the implications for inequality along lines of  class, race/ethnicity, and gender.  

DATE: Thursday, May 2, 2024 

TIME: 10am-11am EST 

Please contact the moderator for the Zoom link at argun@ku.edu. 

PANELISTS:  

Dr. Ya-Wen Lei, Harvard University. Her recent research focuses on work automation and augmentation, and on techno-state  capitalism. Dr. Lei’s scholarship spans across political sociology, sociology work and labor, economic sociology, and science and  technology studies. She is the lead of author of “Automation and Augmentation: AI, Robots, and Work,” Annual Review of Sociology (2024) and the author of “Delivering Solidarity: Platform Architecture and Collective Contention in China’s Platform Economy,”  American Sociological Review (2021), “Upgrading China through Automation: Manufacturers, Workers and the Techno Developmental State,” Work, Employment and Society (2022), and The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State  Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023).  

Dr. Karen Levy, Cornell University. She researches how law and technology interact to regulate social life, with particular focus on  social and organizational aspects of surveillance. Much of Dr. Levy’s research analyzes the uses of monitoring for social control in  various contexts, from long-haul trucking to intimate relationships. She is also interested in how data collection uniquely impacts,  and is contested by, marginalized populations. She is the author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace  

Surveillance (Princeton University Press, 2023) and “Privacy Threats in Intimate Relationships,” Journal of Cybersecurity (2020)  

Dr. Lindsey Cameron, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on how algorithmic management is changing the modern  workplace, with an emphasis on the gig economy. Professor Cameron has an on-going, seven-year ethnography of the largest  sector of the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, examining how algorithmic management changes managerial control. She is  the author of “The Making of the ‘Good Bad’ Job: How Algorithmic Management Repurposes Workplace Consent through Constant  and Confined Choice,” Administrative Science Quarterly (2024), and “’Making out’ While Driving: Relational and Efficiency Games  in the Gig Economy,” Organization Science (2022). 

Dr. Benjamin Shestakofsky, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers on the relationship between work, technology, organizations, and political economy. Some of his recent projects examine the hidden workers who support AI systems, the governance of digital platforms, and how venture capital affects organizational culture and change in the tech industry. He is the author of Behind the Startup How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (University of California Press, 2024), and co-author of “Making Platforms Work: Relationship Labor and the Management of Publics,” Theory and Society (2020). 

Moderated by Dr. Argun Saatcioglu, University of Kansas

The annual Northeastern University Qualitative Research Conference will be held virtually on April 3, 2024, from 10am to 1pm EST! The conference is free of charge. Register here.

The aim of the conference is to build a global community of qualitative scholars in order to advance qualitative methods and develop junior scholars. To do so, we have invited a group of amazing qualitative scholars to discuss the following topics: 
 
1) “The dos and don’ts of mixed methods”

Panelists: Kim Elsbach (UC Davis), Siobhan O’Mahony (Boston University), Michael Pratt (Boston College), Aruna Ranganathan (UC Berkeley)

2) “Sharing best practices in qualitative Research: Recommendations from the experts in the field.”

Panelists: Tima Bansal (Ivey), Christine Beckman (University of Southern California), Lindsey Cameron (Wharton), Matthew Grimes (University of Cambridge)

3) Plenary remarks: Kisha Lashley (University of Virgina)

This systematic analysis of everyday life inside a tech startup dissects the logic of venture capital and its consequences for entrepreneurs, workers, and societies.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520395039/behind-the-startup

In recent years, dreams about our technological future have soured as digital platforms have undermined privacy, eroded labor rights, and weakened democratic discourse. In light of the negative consequences of innovation, some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs. Behind the Startup focuses instead on the role of capital and the influence of financiers. Drawing on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it.

Investors push startups to scale as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. Benjamin Shestakofsky shows how these demands create organizational problems that managers solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by these companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky compellingly argues that we must focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.

Michel Anteby. 2024. The Interloper: Lessons from Resistance in the Field, Princeton University Press.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691255378/the-interloper

Resistance is the bane of all field researchers, who are often viewed as interlopers when they enter a community and start asking questions. People obstruct investigations and hide evidence. They shelve complaints, silence dissent, and even forget their own past and deny having done so. How can we learn about a community when its members resist so strongly? The answer is that the resistance itself is sometimes the key. In The Interloper, Michel Anteby explains how community members often disclose more than intended when they close ranks and create obstacles. He draws insights from diverse stories of resistance by uncooperative participants—from Nazi rocket scientists and Harvard professors to Disney union busters and people who secure cadavers for medical school dissection—to reveal how field resistance manifests itself and how researchers can learn from it. He argues that many forms of resistance are retrospectively telling, and that these forms are the routine products, not by-products, of the field. That means that resistance mechanisms are not only indicative of something else happening; instead, they often are the very data points that can shed light on how participants make sense of their worlds.

All OOW members are invited to participate in an informal, online discussion of Erin Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment on April 15nd, 12-1pm EST. The conversation will be “book club style”, with everyone welcome to share ideas. (If you’d like to participate but time is short, focus on the introduction & chapter 2.) The book may be available as an e-book from your library, or you can purchase it here.

We hope students and faculty alike come to discuss and meet with fellow OOW members. To register and receive a zoom link, click here.

Questions? Contact Laura Doering (laura.doering@utoronto.ca).

Featuring a conversation with SER authors Carly R. Knight (New York University), and Ann-Christine Schulz (Institute for Digital Transformation and Strategy) and Alexander Himme (Kuehne Logistics University)

Join us for a discussion of contemporary capitalism through institutional studies. Knight, in “Classifying the corporation: the role of naturalizing analogies in American corporate development, 1870–1930,” traces the history of the classification of the corporation and finds that the symbolic privatization of the corporation was the joint product of both liberal and progressive legal theorizing. The “naturalizing analogies” employed by theorists, Knight argues, are critical to understanding the symbolic structure of corporate capitalism. Schulz and Himme, in “Stock market reactions to downsizing announcements: an analysis through an institutional lens”, examine stock market reactions to corporate downsizing using a neo-institutional perspective and demonstrate the performance effects of corporate downsizing and investors’ role in legitimizing this prevalent business practice.

Come and join us to discuss how to understand the current state of capitalism and inequalities from the angle of institutions. The event will take place on Thursday, March 14^th, at 8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM CET. Register at this link!

As with all SER Cafe events, we will facilitate a dynamic conversation with the authors. No lengthy talks. Our authors look forward to your questions and comments.