Steven Vallas – Work in Progress

Book review

Class, Power, and Digital Technology: A review of Fourcade and Healy, The Ordinal Society

Steven Vallas
March 4, 2025

Digital technologies have woven themselves into every facet of our lives, introducing shifts –sometimes subtle, sometimes quite profound— in the workings of virtually all social institutions. Arguably, the most important of these shifts concerns the link between digital technology, power and social inequality. How have digital capitalism and algorithmic management reshaped the mechanisms that stratify people, now reborn as “users,” into distinct classes and strata? What do these shifts mean for the theoretical frameworks we have inherited from the past? In their important 2017 paper, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argued that the use of digital systems to harvest almost unlimited data about individual users has rendered obsolete many of the core assumptions that have long informed sociological thinking about class, status distinctions and social inequality generally. Now, in their 2024 book, The Ordinal Society, Fourcade and Healy have contributed a more richly developed analysis of the many consequences that flow from the automation of class inequality (see Eubanks’s 2017). The result is a deeply researched, provocative but often frustrating book. It deserves a wide audience for reasons I spell out below.

Research Findings

Republic of Fear? Complexity and Coercion in Amazon Warehouses

Steven Vallas
January 20, 2025

Not long ago, labor scholars and activists fastened on Walmart’s labor practices as providing the most influential template for the “low road” approach toward employment generally. Since then, Amazon has in many ways surpassed Walmart, overtaking it in many retail markets, and bringing into play a whole new set of labor practices, many of which are equipped with powerful digital surveillance tools. This raises the question: What, precisely, do we know about the labor control mechanisms that workers encounter in Amazon’s warehouses? Despite journalistic forays and scattered but growing academic research, we have only a faint and tenuous outline of the company’s managerial regime, and of the workers’ responses to it.[1]

Research Findings

Adventitious collaboration: On the value of blended research

Angèle Christin and Steven Vallas
May 1, 2018

How do collective academic projects come into being? Behind the polished acknowledgment sections that one usually finds on the first pages of published books and articles, the dynamics of co-authored intellectual enterprises are often more convoluted – and possibly more interesting. The story behind our article “Work and Identity in an Era of Precarious Employment: How Workers Respond to “Personal Branding” Discourse,” recently published in Work and Occupations, is no exception.

First, the story itself. Our project began with a regular session at the ASA meetings in Chicago. One of us (Angèle) was presenting a paper called “Living in the Market: How Freelance Journalists Manage Careers and Reputations in the United States and France.” The paper used ethnographic methods to compare web journalists in Paris and New York. A key part of the paper concerned the meanings these web writers gave to their work, which required them to engage in a conscious effort to accumulate clicks and followers, a vital symbolic currency in the digital landscape. The American journalists tended to view their audience-promotion efforts through the prism of “personal branding,” a discourse that the Parisian journalists rejected, even though the actual work situations of the two groups were virtually identical. Angèle’s study thus showed how meanings and attitudes could vary sharply even as the very tasks, tools, and work situations of web journalists increasingly converged across national borders.

To explain her findings, Angèle alluded to the explanatory power of Michel Foucault’s work on neoliberalism and subjectivity. It was this thread, coupled with Angèle’s discussion of personal branding, that piqued the interest of Steven, an audience member listening to her talk. (Interestingly, Angèle recognized him from the picture featured on his webpage, which she had looked up beforehand to find out more about his research; not unlike the situation in web journalism, online visibility plays a role in academia as well).

Commentary

Studying precarious work

Arne Kalleberg and Steven Vallas
December 20, 2017

Image: Dave Pearce via Flickr

Profound changes in paid employment have unfolded in recent decades, with serious consequences for millions of workers whose jobs, careers, and family lives have are been exposed to rising levels of risk. Though much of the attention has focused on the advanced capitalist societies, precarious work has also grown through Asia and much of the global south.

Involved here is the spread of work that is uncertain or insecure, in which risks are shifted from employers and governments to workers, and in which workers lack the legal protections and benefits that the standard work arrangement once offered.

Familiar examples of precarious work include temporary and contract work, but growing rapidly now are jobs in the “gig” or on-demand economy, “bogus” self employment in which workers are independent in name only. Working under these conditions can over time have adversely affect individuals, shaping workers’ trajectories in ways that can inflict lasting harm.

Workers often suffer income insecurity. They cannot know when they will be working, if at all. They have little or no access to job training or sick days. And they often feel like outsiders while on the job. Societal effects can also accumulate, as when the weakening of economic attachments drives the social and political instability that has surfaced in recent years, at times seeming to threaten the foundations of liberal democracy itself.

What is known about these developments? One set of answers can be found in Precarious Work, our just-published collection of original papers on the topic.