Tag: Princeton University

New Publication: “The Ghost of Middle Management: Automation, Control, and Heterarchy in the Platform Firm” by Janet A. Vertesi & Diana Enriquez 

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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.

Special Issue Call for Papers OOW

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Special Issue: The Precarity of Work and Life: How Insecurity Equalizes and Stratifies People’s Experiences

Submission deadline: Tuesday, September 2, 2025

In 2023, an opinion piece in the New York Times posed a question: “why does everyone feel so insecure?” As the article delineates, “insecurity” is frequently described as the defining characteristic of our contemporary lives. However, despite the wide use of this concept in public debates as well as in the social sciences, socio-economic insecurity — and, to a lesser extent, its close cousin, “precarity” — have been subjected to very little theoretical conceptualization and/or dedicated research that seeks to systematize and concretize insecurity as a field of study. Our special issue aims to resolve this absence, with a particular focus on how socio-economic insecurity relates to the maintenance, reconfiguration, or legitimation of inequality.

Insecurity sets up an important puzzle for the social sciences: on the one hand, insecurity is felt by “everybody,” as Astra Taylor suggests in the New York Times, or at least a large and growing portion of the population. On the other, insecurity and precarity are the products of an economy that is increasingly unequal. In order to solve this puzzle, sociologists need to further investigate how experiences of insecurity vary and the ways in which economic and cultural factors shape different varieties of insecurity. We ask: Is everyone really experiencing insecurity? How is insecurity related to people’s structural conditions?

In order to address this puzzle, we welcome articles that address all aspects of socio-economic insecurity that go beyond orthodox economic framings and that can lead to empirical advancements, as well as theoretical developments, in how we understand insecurity vis-à-vis inequality. We invite submissions that use diverse methodological approaches, e.g. that explore subjective experiences of insecurity through in-depth qualitative or ethnographic research, that investigate generalizable or cross-national trends through quantitative data-based analyses, or that engage with mixed methodologies. We are particularly interested in sociological studies that address the following aspects of insecurity:

Topics for this call for papers include but are not restricted to:

·  Research on insecurity that moves beyond a limited conceptualization of insecurity and precarity as primarily related to employment to one that engages with the financial aspects of people’s instability, the relationship between employment and finances, as well as the unequal ways in how people negotiate socioeconomic uncertainty in their lives overall. What are the connections between work precarity and insecurity in livelihoods? How do the manifestations of insecurity differ nationally and globally in various spheres of individuals’ lives (e.g. housing, food consumption, debt and finance)? How is insecurity related to intersectional inequalities pertaining to class, gender, race/ethnicity and sexual identity?

·  Studies that employ an understanding of socio-economic insecurity that goes beyond a purely (macro)economic focus or the use of “objective” economic measures. We aim to deepen the focus on the subjective experiences of insecurity that are often linked to the decline in social status of previously secure social strata (e.g. the squeezed middle classes). What is the relationship between the objective and subjective insecurity experienced by individuals? What is the temporal construction of insecurity and how is present insecurity shaped by past experiences and projections/expectations of future conditions? How does insecurity contribute to redefining class positions and class boundaries? How do increases and decreases in insecurity influence social status threat or social status gains across the globe?

Guest Editors:
Dr. Lorenza Antonucci
University of Birmingham
United Kingdom

Dr. Elena Ayala-Hurtado
Princeton University
United States