Past, Present, and Future of Labor Process Theory: From Industrial Despotism to Neoliberal Technofeudalism

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Modern Research in Social Sciences

Year: 2026

[PDF]

Past, Present, and Future of Labor Process Theory: From Industrial Despotism to Neoliberal Technofeudalism

Severin Hornung, Thomas Höge

ABSTRACT:

Elaborated are ramifications of labor process analysis for research on algorithmic management, gig economy, and platform work, focusing on power, control and social justice. A long-standing approach in the sociology of work, labor process theory represents the critical paradigm of radical pluralism, distinguished from moderate pluralist, unitarist, and egoist frameworks. Core postulates include the political significance of the work domain, dynamizing effects of profit and accumulation logics, indeterminacy of labor, resulting control imperative, and structural antagonism in employment. Developments in labor process analysis over 50 years reflect socio-historical transformations from Taylorism to normative organizational cultures, motivational work design, and the ongoing neoliberal polarization, precarization, and technologization of control. Intensive uptake in research on algorithmic management and platform work is no coincidence, but reflects unregulated, unfair, and exploitative structures of “technofeudalism”. New qualities of algorithmic management manifest in comprehensive, expansive, immediate, interactive, intransparent, anonymous, quasi-objective, and unchallengeable control, contradicting principles of procedural and distributive justice, paralleling traditional feudalist systems. Following an influential model, technological control incorporates direction, evaluation, and discipline, implemented through algorithmic recommendations and restrictions, recording and rating, as well as rewards and replacement. Corresponding worker experiences are manipulation and disempowerment, surveillance and discrimination, as well as stress and precarity. Approaches to empirically testing this model and implications for research on algorithmically controlled work are discussed. Labor process theory highlights the importance to distinguish applications of artificial intelligence as expert systems for decision support from the dehumanizing transfer of control functions to algorithmic enforcers, embedded in technofeudalist power structures.

Keywords: Algorithmic Management; Critical Management Studies; Platform Work; Socio-History of Labor Relations; Techno-Economic Despotism