This comment on Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory discusses how the book offers four interrelated theoretical contributions to the study of labour in the digital economy – redefining the factory, specifying digital Taylorism, materializing its infrastructure, and mapping class relations – through four sites of investigation. The piece discusses the implications of the resulting multiplication of labour and labour relations for reconfigured class relations and resistance and argues that the differentiated social relations across spatial and material contexts ask for a theorization of the conjunctural nature of these relations.

Narratives about indigenous labour in the pearl fisheries of the Caribbean, widely disseminated across the Atlantic world since the sixteenth century by Castilian chroniclers, have significantly shaped historiography. These accounts have reinforced a singular narrative about labour within pearl fisheries that overlooks this work's spatial and temporal changes in sea depths. This article examines and reconstructs the labour practices of workers in the pearl fisheries on the islands of Cubagua, Margarita, and Coche, as well as the coast of Cabo de la Vela and Riohacha, highlighting their temporal and spatial transformations. Additionally, it analyses the coexistence of various forms of coerced labour within this context.

Power at Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance. Edited by Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja. Work in Global and Historical Perspective, volume 16. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023, xi, 342 pp.

The cry of “Get married women out of the factories!” echoed across the Spanish industrial landscape at the turn of the twentieth century, driven by two intertwined factors. From a societal perspective, women's place was at home, not in factories. On an economic note, concerns arose over women's lower wages displacing men from jobs. This research delves into a case study of a workers’ claim aimed against women. It aims to illuminate the interplay of social demands and gender dynamics in labour history and business operations. Using as a case study a strike among male workers at the Amatller chocolate factory in May 1890, it seeks insights into gender complexities and women's challenges when joining the workforce. Male factory workers sought better conditions but directed their frustrations at women, influenced by prevailing social discourse. Women joined the factory, but portraying them as victors would be an oversimplification. Their presence was restricted, confined to manual tasks, with few opportunities for advancement.

In 1975, the National Coal Board (NCB) produced a short film, “People Will Always Need Coal”, to encourage recruitment into mining. It was extraordinarily attention-grabbing, presenting miners as cosmopolitan playboys. It defined the industry in hyper-masculine terms, encouraging would-be recruits to “be a miner”. This article uses the film as a starting point for a discussion of the complex interactions between the material realities of masculinity, class, and culture within Britain's coalfields in the period 1975–1983. A critical reading of the film is complemented by archival research and oral testimony drawn from interviews with 96 former miners and their families. At a time when the industry was positioning itself as an employer with a long-term future, mining was presented on screen as a modern masculine occupation that was far removed from the dominant imagery of coal for much of the twentieth century. The National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) victories in the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the drafting of a Government Plan for Coal, and rising living standards, created a short period of optimism before the cataclysmic closures of the 1980s and 1990s. This was a time when masculinity in the coalfields was being reproduced, modified, contested, and subverted. The years 1975–1983 offer valuable insight into such masculinity and the ways it was mediated and challenged through work, the domestic sphere, leisure, and popular culture.

Rapid technological development means that the ground on which recent academic studies and public debates about the future of work organisation are based is shifting too rapidly for predictions to be credible. Organisational studies scholars have provided a counterpoint to this futuristic, speculative debate about the world of tomorrow with studies that contextualise seemingly new trends within a longer history of industrial capitalism. In this article, using Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) as a starting point, I further explore the historical contextualisation of two aspects of platform capitalism: its de-spatialisation and its use of “autonomy”.

Theories about the impact of digital technology on society and the development of capitalism and debates about the influence of digital information technologies on the future of work have been abundant since the end of the twentieth century. Most of the academic debate has taken place outside labour history, leaving the actual effects of digital technologies on human work and labour relations often overlooked. Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation focuses precisely on these effects, and as such provides a good opportunity to engage with these debates from a labour history perspective. This Review Dossier includes four comments on Altenried's book, by Bridget Kenny, Nico Pizzolato, Görkem Akgöz, and Greg Downey, to which the author responds. The contributors focus on different aspects of The Digital Factory depending on their own perspective on recent developments in the digital economy in the larger context of global capitalism.

This response to the comments on The Digital Factory discusses why and how the concepts of the digital factory and digital Taylorism have been applied in the book, as well as the question of the relationship between digital control and workers' resistance to algorithmic management technologies. While agreeing with the comments that point to the limitations of the concepts used, this response argues that these can be productive precisely by drawing our attention to aspects that are otherwise difficult to bring to light. In terms of the potential for workers' resistance, many collective and individual forms of such resistance remain possible in labour regimes under algorithmic management, as well as in other coexisting labour regimes.

Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) accomplishes in just under two hundred pages what many other books twice that length have struggled with: assembling a concise yet readable introductory map to the global, fragmented, and too-often hidden landscape of digitally-mediated capitalism. But the digital factory itself is an incomplete concept, almost always requiring us to look for the external and contingent labor support hidden just outside of its supposedly totalizing network of logistics, robotics and algorithms.

A growing body of literature is challenging techno-fetishistic perspectives on digital capitalism, as well as claims of the start of a new era characterized by total automation. This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the implications of digital technology for the future of labour by reading Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) through the lens of labour history. The use of digital factory and digital Taylorism as integrative tools significantly improves empirical evaluations of different digital labour environments. However, because of their high degree of abstraction, there are a number of limitations when applying these concepts to describe wildly disparate work environments. To illustrate these limits, I use examples from twentieth-century debates on technology and work autonomy, and (1) argue that a labour history perspective warns us against overgeneralizing the effects of technology on labour control and worker autonomy, and (2) broaden the discussion to larger issues of labour control before and during digitalization, incorporating new theoretical questions such as our understanding of classical Taylorism and, by extension, capitalism.

On 17 December 2010, the self-immolation of a young street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, a town in inland Tunisia, instigated the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring or the Arab Revolutions – a wording that I will use here as a translation from the Arabic al-thawrât al-`arabiyya. Observers were shocked at the radical protests arising in these regions, where authoritarian regimes had crushed all serious opposition over the decades. Conflicts governed by geopolitics, in particular the ongoing Israeli–Arab and Israeli–Palestinian hostilities, and the focus on political Islam and jihadism as the only globalized locus of political protest, have arrogated any attention for societies, their transformation, and their mobilization.

It has long been recognized that, in order to understand economies in the past, we need better information about women's work and tertiary sector work. It is also well known that, while valuable in many ways, nineteenth-century censuses give incomplete information about women's contributions to the economy. Consequently, censuses are a poor basis for estimating the occupational structure. This article offers a solution to these problems by triangulating census data with qualitative information extracted from court records. The result is a more reasonable estimate of the first-level occupational structure in a Swedish local society (Västerås and its surroundings) around 1880. This estimate suggests that just before the onset of industrialization, around eighty per cent of the adult population, women and men, were active in primary and tertiary sector work. Compared to the census, the analysis sets women's share in the primary and the tertiary sectors at higher levels. The article has a strong methodological focus and describes in detail how the court records were analysed and adjusted to be comparable with the census.