New technology, work organization and workers: a power-centred framework informed by warehouse robotics
Stephen J. Frenkel & Tom Barnes
What the paper says
Research in political economy and the labour process has highlighted how management uses new technology to shape work and society. Scholarship in these traditions has viewed technology as a tool for increasing profitability. Organization Studies scholars, on the other hand, have largely ignored power, except when examining how new technology disrupts relations between occupational groups. Nevertheless, this tradition has contributed significantly to our understanding of socio-technical interaction and attendant changes in work practices, roles and work organization. We develop a more robust worker-oriented framework for theorizing the adoption and consequences of new technologies by foregrounding power as a key explanatory concept and selectively combining ideas about technology and work from these different traditions. This approach is applied to a case study of warehouse logistics featuring the introduction of AI robotic technology. Acknowledging the framework’s limitations, we consider how our framework might be improved to promote future research on new technology and work.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.