Vertesi, Janet A., and Diana Enriquez. 2025. “The Ghost of Middle Management: Automation, Control, and Heterarchy in the Platform Firm.” Sociologica 19(1):13–35. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/16415.

Abstract: In an effort to attend to the distinct organizational form of algorithmic management, we interrogate the arrangement of platform labor through the lens of the post-bureaucratic organization instead of that of the industrialized factory. Prior studies of gig workers rely heavily on sociological accounts of factory labor, but we posit that gig economy platforms represent a heterarchical organizational form, marrying the logics of industrial control induced by computational systems with the logics of post-bureaucracy inherited from flattening firms and downsizing middle management. In a technique we describe as automation by omission, we show how middle-managerial roles and responsibilities are excised entirely from the platform firm, how the vestigial traces of such roles are only imperfectly replaced by technical systems, and how “situated” managerial tasks essential to post-bureaucratic organizations are picked up by the worker, uncompensated. This heterarchical arrangement benefits the firm in multiple ways, while its competing structural conditions of labor leave workers to navigate multiple valuation systems at once. Appreciating gig work’s embedded post-bureaucracy shifts our understanding of common worker experiences such as peer-to-peer organizing and just-in-time scheduling illuminates dissonant accounts of empowerment and algorithmic despotism, and exposes new avenues for worker disenfranchisement.

Janet A. Vertesi Department of Sociology, Princeton University
Janet A. Vertesi is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education at Princeton University (USA). A sociologist of science, technology, and organizations, her ethnographies of NASA missions include Shaping Science (Chicago University Press, 2015) and Seeing Like a Rover (Chicago University Press, 2020), and she is a leader in the digitalSTS (Princeton University Press, 2014) community.

Diana Enriquez  Department of Sociology, Princeton University
Diana Enriquez completed her PhD in Sociology at Princeton University (USA). Her dissertation research focused on high-skill freelancers as a subset of the alternative workforce facing new challenges before and during COVID-19. Other research projects examine the role of platforms in managing gig workers and automation in the workplace. Her research interests include economic sociology, labor, law, and technology.