Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewRecoding Power combines sustained theoretical analysis with rigorous empirical research, providing valuable insights and an optimistic vitality to understanding how tech workers can oppose layoffs and build worker power. Accordingly, I strongly recommend this book to all scholars and graduate students interested in reducing power inequality in the workplace and in society. * Stephen J. Frenkel, ILR Review *
Tech workers are often seen as the winners in the transition to a digital economy. But they can also be among the most precarious. In Recoding Power, Sidney Rothstein shows that the key is recoding management discourse. This innovative book draws on intensive fieldwork at US (IBM) and German (Siemens, Infineon) case study firms to explain why workers succeeded or failed to challenge layoffs in two very different institutional settings. It makes a major contribution to theorizing the changing sources of worker power in increasingly liberalized 'varieties of capitalism', while holding important lessons for labor unions seeking to organize and represent the expanding high tech workforce. * Virginia Doellgast, Cornell University *
Rothstein offers an original and compelling account of how workers can successfully exercise power. Building a theory of worker power that rests upon discursive creativity rather than institutional resources, and using comparative case studies of the tech industry, this book will reshape how we think about the future of labor organizing. * Chris Howell, Oberlin College *
This is a very timely and elegantly written book on the capacity of contemporary tech workers to exercise collective agency with their employers, defend their jobs and, at least potentially, rebuild a labor movement in our time. By weaving innovative theoretical argument together with lucid and granular empirical reconstructions of labor struggles in Germany and the United States, Recoding Power develops an astonishingly hopeful account of contemporary labor possibilities in the modern digital economy. * Gary Herrigel, University of Chicago *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Figures List of Tables List of Abbreviations Chapter 1. Actually Existing Digital Transformation Chapter 2. Worker Power in Twenty-First-Century Capitalism PART I. MASS LAYOFFS IN THE UNITED STATES Worker Power and the Discourse of Market Fundamentalism Chapter 3. Economic Transition in the Workplace: Resistance at IBM Burlington Chapter 4. Market Power is not Enough: Acquiescence at IBM San Jose PART II. MASS LAYOFFS IN GERMANY Digital Transformation in a Robust Institutional Environment Chapter 5. Institutions by the Wayside: Acquiescence at Infineon Chapter 6. Counterhegemonic Tactics: Resistance at Siemens Chapter 7. The Power of Recoding Appendix I. List of Interviews Appendix II. A Note on Methods: Workplace Discourse References Index
