Control from on High: Cloud-based Deskilling on the Immaterial Production Line

• In Event: 333 - Regular Session. Sociology of Work II: Culture and Control

Abstract

Drawing upon five months of participant observation conducted within an analytics team of a digital media corporation, this paper attempts to extend deskilling theory and research on information and communication technologies (ICTs) in two ways. First, I argue that deskilling no longer issues forth solely from managerial prerogatives. In order to explain the separation of planning and execution in post-bureaucratic organizations, research must extend outside organizations by way of ICTs - the technological microstructures of contemporary work. I argue that theories of work and organizations need to include the providers of these microstructures as actors that structure or control the content of work. While management affords analytics workers a great deal of autonomy, the planning of work processes remains upstream from both workers and management. Workers demonstrate creativity and improvisational virtuosity at work, yet they do so in the face of technologies that appear as inscrutable blackboxes. The interfaces by which workers engage with these “cloud-based” technologies frequently change with little to no explanation. Workers interpret these changes as emanating from actors outside the organization while suffering immediate consequences such as layoffs and managerial reprimands. While extant research suggests that ICTs enable workers to enter into pleasurably immersive “worlds” that bind workers to organizations and their fields, in this case workers tend to be acutely frustrated by cloud-based ICTs. I argue that the sort of immersive pleasure found elsewhere depends upon ICTs providing useful information that extends workers’ capacity for social or economic action.

Author

• Michael Louis Siciliano, University of California-Los Angeles