5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The rapid development of new digital technologies, up to and including AI, has added both intellectual and policy urgency within sociological traditions of labor and employment relations studies. This panel will track the effects on labor of the implementation of new digital technologies in varied national, sectoral, and organizational contexts. Though platform-based organizations have attracted much attention, digital technology is transforming work far beyond such organizations, and this panel seeks to represent a range of cases, including “traditional” sectors and organizational forms. Papers will focus on how the adoption of new digital technologies is transforming the nature and quality of work, looking at a range of outcomes including work intensification, changes in workers’ autonomy and discretion, and workplace conflict. The goal is to explain how the design and implementation of a given technology is likely to shape the balance of power, coercion and legitimation used by management to govern labour in a way that reflects the social context (and the nature of the employment relationship) in which technologies are embedded. While employers currently have the upper hand in most settings, we also welcome analyses of actual and potential responses by workers and their collective bodies as well as government. We aim for both an update of recent empirical and theoretical work on these topics and an opportunity to engage in comparative analysis and theorization.