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In a world increasingly run by algorithms and artificial intelligence, Hatim Rahman traces how organizations are using algorithms to control workers in an “invisible cage.” Inside the Invisible Cage uses unique longitudinal data to investigate how digital labor platforms use algorithms to dictate the actions of high-skilled workers by determining accepted behaviors, work opportunities, and even success. As Hatim Rahman explains, employers can use algorithms to shift rules and guidelines without notice, explanation, or recourse for workers. The invisible cage signals a profound shift in the way markets and organizations categorize and ultimately control people. Unlike previous forms of labor control, the invisible cage is ubiquitous, yet it is also opaque and shifting, which makes breaking free from it difficult for workers. This book traces how the invisible cage was developed over time and the implications it has for the spread of new technology, such as generative artificial intelligence. Inside the Invisible Cage also provides organizations, workers, and policymakers with insights on how to ensure the future of work has truly equitable, mutually beneficial outcomes.

The first major study of how the pandemic affected gig workers—a sociological exploration that reads like a novel. This is the story of what the most vulnerable wage earners—gig workers, restaurant staff, early-career creatives, and minimum-wage laborers—do when the economy suddenly collapses. In Side Hustle Safety Net, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle builds on interviews with nearly two hundred gig-based and precarious workers, conducted during the height of the pandemic, to uncover the unique challenges they faced in unprecedented times. This book looks at both the officially unemployed and the “forgotten jobless”—a digital-era demographic that turned to side hustles—and reveals how they fared. CARES Act assistance allowed some to change careers, start businesses, perhaps transform their lives. However, gig workers and those involved in “polyemployment” found themselves at the mercy of outdated unemployment systems, vulnerable to scams, and attempting dubious survival strategies. Ultimately, Side Hustle Safety Net argues that the rise of the gig economy, partnered with underemployment and economic instability, has increased worker precarity with disastrous consequences.

An examination of the ways that digital technologies play an increasingly important role in the lives of precarious workers, far beyond the gig economy apps like Uber and Lyft. Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar'digital hustles'they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.

This book presents and analyzes how restructuring processes due to technological change are reflected and processed in political and public discourses in the United States in the most recent past. More specifically, this work examines how the themes of automation, digitization, and the platform economy and their impact on the future of work are reflected in public discourse through the analysis of journalistic articles, and political discourse through the analysis of congressional hearings. Public and political discourses, as well as economic narratives, shape our understanding of certain developments such as technological change, our behavior more generally, and societal support of said developments. Therefore, it is vital to investigate and analyze these discourses in order to show how technological change is perceived and evaluated today. This work draws from concepts and methods of several different disciplines, most notably using a combination of corpus-linguistic methods and exemplary textual analysis. This way, this work stands as truly interdisciplinary, with a unique approach to the quantitative and qualitative examination of discourses.

The Uber-ization of the classroom and what it means for faculty.One of the most significant trends in American higher education over the last decade has been the shift in faculty employment from tenured to contingent. Now upwards of 75% of faculty jobs are non-tenure track; two decades ago that figure was 25%. One of the results of this shift—along with the related degradation of pay, benefits, and working conditions—has been a new push to unionize adjunct professors, spawning a national labor movement. Professors in the Gig Economy is the first book to address the causes, processes, and outcomes of these efforts.Kim Tolley brings together scholars of education, labor history, economics, religious studies, and law, all of whom have been involved with unionization at public and private colleges and universities. Their essays and case studies address the following questions: Why have colleges and universities come to rely so heavily on contingent faculty? How have federal and state laws influenced efforts to unionize? What happens after unionization—how has collective bargaining affected institutional policies, shared governance, and relations between part-time and full-time faculty? And finally, how have unionization efforts shaped the teaching and learning that happens on campus?Bringing substantial research and historical context to bear on the cost and benefit questions of contingent labor on campus, Professors in the Gig Economy will resonate with general readers, scholars, students, higher education professionals, and faculty interested in unionization. Contributors: A. J. Angulo, Timothy Reese Cain, Elizabeth K. Davenport, Marianne Delaporte, Tom DePaola, Kristen Edwards, Luke Elliott-Negri, Kim Geron, Lorenzo Giachetti, Shawn Gilmore, Adrianna Kezar, Joseph A. McCartin, Gretchen M. Reevy, Gregory M. Saltzman, Kim Tolley, Nicholas M. Wertsch