Pub Date : 2024-03-15DOI: 10.1177/00018392241236163
Lindsey D. Cameron
This research explores how a new relation of production—the shift from human managers to algorithmic managers on digital platforms—manufactures workplace consent. While most research has argued that the task standardization and surveillance that accompany algorithmic management will give rise to the quintessential “bad job” (Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson, 2000; Kalleberg, 2011), I find that, surprisingly, many workers report liking and finding choice while working under algorithmic management. Drawing on a seven-year qualitative study of the largest sector in the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, I describe how workers navigate being managed by an algorithm. I begin by showing how algorithms segment the work at multiple sites of human–algorithm interactions and how this configuration of the work process allows for more-frequent and narrow choice. I find that workers use two sets of tactics. In engagement tactics, individuals generally follow the algorithmic nudges and do not try to get around the system; in deviance tactics, individuals manipulate their input into the algorithmic management system. While the behaviors associated with these tactics are practical opposites, they both elicit consent, or active, enthusiastic participation by workers to align their efforts with managerial interests, and both contribute to workers seeing themselves as skillful agents. However, this choice-based consent can mask the more-structurally problematic elements of the work, contributing to the growing popularity of what I call the “good bad” job.
{"title":"The Making of the “Good Bad” Job: How Algorithmic Management Manufactures Consent Through Constant and Confined Choices","authors":"Lindsey D. Cameron","doi":"10.1177/00018392241236163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241236163","url":null,"abstract":"This research explores how a new relation of production—the shift from human managers to algorithmic managers on digital platforms—manufactures workplace consent. While most research has argued that the task standardization and surveillance that accompany algorithmic management will give rise to the quintessential “bad job” (Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson, 2000; Kalleberg, 2011), I find that, surprisingly, many workers report liking and finding choice while working under algorithmic management. Drawing on a seven-year qualitative study of the largest sector in the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, I describe how workers navigate being managed by an algorithm. I begin by showing how algorithms segment the work at multiple sites of human–algorithm interactions and how this configuration of the work process allows for more-frequent and narrow choice. I find that workers use two sets of tactics. In engagement tactics, individuals generally follow the algorithmic nudges and do not try to get around the system; in deviance tactics, individuals manipulate their input into the algorithmic management system. While the behaviors associated with these tactics are practical opposites, they both elicit consent, or active, enthusiastic participation by workers to align their efforts with managerial interests, and both contribute to workers seeing themselves as skillful agents. However, this choice-based consent can mask the more-structurally problematic elements of the work, contributing to the growing popularity of what I call the “good bad” job.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2024-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140155365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-11DOI: 10.1177/00018392241239340
Rodrigo Valadao
{"title":"Justin Grimmer, Margaret E. Roberts, and Brandon M. Stewart. Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences","authors":"Rodrigo Valadao","doi":"10.1177/00018392241239340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241239340","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":"128 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140107531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-26DOI: 10.1177/00018392241233257
Letian Zhang, Shinan Wang
This article argues that a society’s level of social trust influences employers’ hiring strategies. Employers can focus either on applicants’ potential and select on foundational skills (e.g., social skills, math skills) or on their readiness and select on more-advanced skills (e.g., pricing a derivative). The higher (lower) the social trust—people’s trust in their fellow members of society—the more (less) employers are willing to invest in employees and grant them role flexibility. Employers in higher-trust societies are therefore more attentive to applicants’ potential, focusing more on foundational skills than on advanced skills. We empirically test this theory by using a novel dataset of more than 50 million job postings from the 28 European Union countries. We find that the higher a country’s social trust, the more its employers require foundational skills instead of advanced skills. Our identification strategy takes advantage of multinational firms in our sample and uses measures of bilateral (country-to-country) trust to predict job requirements, while including an instrumental variable and fixed effects on country, year, employer, and occupation. These findings suggest a novel pathway by which social trust shapes employment practices and organizational strategies.
{"title":"Trusting Talent: Cross-Country Differences in Hiring","authors":"Letian Zhang, Shinan Wang","doi":"10.1177/00018392241233257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241233257","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that a society’s level of social trust influences employers’ hiring strategies. Employers can focus either on applicants’ potential and select on foundational skills (e.g., social skills, math skills) or on their readiness and select on more-advanced skills (e.g., pricing a derivative). The higher (lower) the social trust—people’s trust in their fellow members of society—the more (less) employers are willing to invest in employees and grant them role flexibility. Employers in higher-trust societies are therefore more attentive to applicants’ potential, focusing more on foundational skills than on advanced skills. We empirically test this theory by using a novel dataset of more than 50 million job postings from the 28 European Union countries. We find that the higher a country’s social trust, the more its employers require foundational skills instead of advanced skills. Our identification strategy takes advantage of multinational firms in our sample and uses measures of bilateral (country-to-country) trust to predict job requirements, while including an instrumental variable and fixed effects on country, year, employer, and occupation. These findings suggest a novel pathway by which social trust shapes employment practices and organizational strategies.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139979505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-24DOI: 10.1177/00018392241235909
Elizabeth Gorman
{"title":"Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev. Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t","authors":"Elizabeth Gorman","doi":"10.1177/00018392241235909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241235909","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139948072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-01-08DOI: 10.1177/00018392231224789
Sarah Harvey
{"title":"Michael L. Siciliano. Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Creative Industries","authors":"Sarah Harvey","doi":"10.1177/00018392231224789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392231224789","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":"58 22","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139447719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-11DOI: 10.1177/00018392231217403
Nan Jia
{"title":"Vili Lehdonvirta. Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control","authors":"Nan Jia","doi":"10.1177/00018392231217403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392231217403","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":"246 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138981246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-26DOI: 10.1177/00018392231212680
S. Balachandran, John Eklund
Interorganizational partnerships can spur innovation, but their value may be diminished by friction in knowledge flows between firms. We consider how a partner’s organizational structure may influence the knowledge that is accessible via partnerships. We focus on how a partner’s structure trades off localized autonomy for its managers, which facilitates timelier decision making, and unified control, which facilitates integration. By shaping this balance, centralization of decision rights within the partner organization shapes access to its knowledge. Centralized structures generate wide-ranging internal knowledge pathways that enable access to a broader array of a partner’s knowledge. However, the reduced managerial autonomy afforded by centralization makes decision making more cumbersome, which constricts the rate of access to a partner’s knowledge. We find evidence of this tradeoff in the context of corporate venture capital relationships between incumbents and startups in the pharmaceutical industry. An increase in the incumbent’s diversity of knowledge or in the knowledge required by the startup enhances the value of a greater breadth of access, whereas the degree to which the startup can leverage social ties (affinity) or hierarchical fiat (authority) alleviates the costs of a reduced access rate. Each of these features makes an incumbent organization’s centralization more valuable to the startup. By highlighting this tension related to centralization, our findings suggest that new firms striving to maximize their partnership benefits may need to carefully consider their partners’ internal structures.
{"title":"The Impact of Partner Organizational Structure on Innovation","authors":"S. Balachandran, John Eklund","doi":"10.1177/00018392231212680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392231212680","url":null,"abstract":"Interorganizational partnerships can spur innovation, but their value may be diminished by friction in knowledge flows between firms. We consider how a partner’s organizational structure may influence the knowledge that is accessible via partnerships. We focus on how a partner’s structure trades off localized autonomy for its managers, which facilitates timelier decision making, and unified control, which facilitates integration. By shaping this balance, centralization of decision rights within the partner organization shapes access to its knowledge. Centralized structures generate wide-ranging internal knowledge pathways that enable access to a broader array of a partner’s knowledge. However, the reduced managerial autonomy afforded by centralization makes decision making more cumbersome, which constricts the rate of access to a partner’s knowledge. We find evidence of this tradeoff in the context of corporate venture capital relationships between incumbents and startups in the pharmaceutical industry. An increase in the incumbent’s diversity of knowledge or in the knowledge required by the startup enhances the value of a greater breadth of access, whereas the degree to which the startup can leverage social ties (affinity) or hierarchical fiat (authority) alleviates the costs of a reduced access rate. Each of these features makes an incumbent organization’s centralization more valuable to the startup. By highlighting this tension related to centralization, our findings suggest that new firms striving to maximize their partnership benefits may need to carefully consider their partners’ internal structures.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":"124 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139236055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-24DOI: 10.1177/00018392231208190
H. Bruns, Elizabeth Long Lingo
Tedious work is pervasive in creative work, yet it has received little attention in the literature on creativity, including studies of science, innovation, and product development. Drawing from a comparative ethnography of two settings—systems biology and music production—we illuminate tedious work as an essential, previously under-investigated aspect of creative work that becomes increasingly prominent with digitization. Tedious work is repetitive, detail-oriented, and expertise-based, and we classify four types of it: fishing, administrating, polishing, and compiling. We develop a model of how tedious work emerges, why it becomes problematic, and what actors do to reduce its negative effects. Tedious work presents three risks to developing viable, novel outcomes—time drain, disengagement, and information overload—and we identify tactics that actors use to mitigate these risks and support individual creativity and the collective creative process. By unpacking the central notion of iteration and documenting the repercussions of creating novel outcomes with digitization, specifically the potential to amplify tedious work, we provide an important counterpoint to voices that hail digital technology’s low cost and unlimited potential for iteration and refinement.
{"title":"Tedious Work: Developing Novel Outcomes with Digitization in the Arts and Sciences","authors":"H. Bruns, Elizabeth Long Lingo","doi":"10.1177/00018392231208190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392231208190","url":null,"abstract":"Tedious work is pervasive in creative work, yet it has received little attention in the literature on creativity, including studies of science, innovation, and product development. Drawing from a comparative ethnography of two settings—systems biology and music production—we illuminate tedious work as an essential, previously under-investigated aspect of creative work that becomes increasingly prominent with digitization. Tedious work is repetitive, detail-oriented, and expertise-based, and we classify four types of it: fishing, administrating, polishing, and compiling. We develop a model of how tedious work emerges, why it becomes problematic, and what actors do to reduce its negative effects. Tedious work presents three risks to developing viable, novel outcomes—time drain, disengagement, and information overload—and we identify tactics that actors use to mitigate these risks and support individual creativity and the collective creative process. By unpacking the central notion of iteration and documenting the repercussions of creating novel outcomes with digitization, specifically the potential to amplify tedious work, we provide an important counterpoint to voices that hail digital technology’s low cost and unlimited potential for iteration and refinement.","PeriodicalId":7203,"journal":{"name":"Administrative Science Quarterly","volume":"2006 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139239417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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