Melting Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Liquid Modernity

• In Event: 30606 - Exploring the Impacts of Platform Work

Abstract

Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent still stands as one of the most significant contributions to labor process theory, but its analysis is rooted to a particular moment: monopoly capitalism. Its transcendence to periods of neoliberalism has depended on theoretical reconstructions made by a number of sociologists, including Burawoy himself. This essay continues a tradition of reconstructing Manufacturing Consent and does so by drawing on an extended case study of platform-based food delivery work. Over the course of a year, our team observed and participated in gig labor on DoorDash and Instacart in greater Boston. We leverage our fieldwork to put Burawoy in conversation with a theorist rarely applied to his writing: Zygmunt Bauman. Where Burawoy’s study of the Allied Corporation machine shop helps clarify the labor process under a period of “solid modernity” marked by relative stability, our study of DoorDash and Instacart helps clarify the labor process under a period of “liquid modernity” marked by relative flexibility. We do not argue that hegemony has been replaced or hybridized with despotism, but instead that work-based consent has melted along with other key elements of solid modernity. Consent is still present and powerful, and it continues to be elicited at sites of production. It also still functions to obscure and secure exploitation. However, it is now more flexible and fleeting because it is generated through more fluid relations in production.

Authors

• Josh Seim, Boston College

• Alexa Damaska, Boston College

• Lan Huang, Boston College

• Lexi Blair, Boston College

• Eric Lik Ka Chan, Boston College

• Duygun Ruben, Boston College

• Yifeng Zhang, Boston College