ILPC 2027

The theoretical approach known as Labour Process Analysis (LPA), together with its core proposition, Labour Process Theory (LPT), emerged across the late 1970s and early 1980s following the publication of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) as an important resource to study the evolution of work in a variety of contexts, through a transformative notion of labour firmly located in the Marxist tradition (Smith 2015a, 2015b; Brook, 2013; Thompson and Smith, 2010). Today, is here argued, LPA/LPT is called to address more strongly and explicitly that it has done so far the meeting between work and digital technologies, particularly social media and platforms, in order to maintain its unique positioning as a key theoretical and analytical resource for the interpretation of labour as a transformative process.

The article discusses how labour process analysis and labour process theory (LPA/LPT) should approach ‘digital labour’ (Fuchs, 2014; Scholz, 2012). Recent empirical work on the digital evolution of knowledge work is exemplary of how some of the pillars of LPA/LPT are challenged much further and deeper than what outlined by O’Doherty and Willmott (2009) in the analysis of work in the ‘new economy’. Particularly, is here argued, digital labour practices put under question the precise location of a 'point of production', the ‘degradation’ of skills, and the logics of managerial control, in new and concerning ways. Reflecting on relevant issues, the article suggests it is now time for LPA/LPT to address more strongly and explicitly the digital evolution of work in order to maintain its relevance in the interpretation of labour as a transformative process.