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Robert Dorschel, "The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism" (MIT Press, 2025)
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A
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B
Welcome to New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Robert Dorshall about the social codes of tech workers class identity in digital capitalism. So welcome to the podcast.
- [02:06]
C
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the invitation, Dave. Very happy to be here.
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B
I'm delighted to have you on. This is a brilliant sociology book, but I think it's also a book that as you know, we. I was going to say open the newspapers, but as we probably click on news Sites across the world. We're seeing tech increasingly as a kind of dominant sector in social, cultural, political, economic life. And crucially, kind of understanding who the people are in, in tech. I think it's a really kind of important intervention. But at the same time the book has a lot to say about fairly kind of classic sociology issues, things like social class politics, the kind of experience lived reality of labor positions and relationships in labor markets, and things like taste as well. So there's a lot going on and we'll probably only touch on some of it. The place to start probably is the title. And I guess when people hear tech workers, they probably think of like Musk or Bezos, maybe like Bill Gates. But actually one of the things you're doing in the book is to try and interrogate who tech workers actually are and what they're actually like. So who and I guess maybe like what is a tech worker?
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C
Yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, so in the book I define tech workers as the professionals for programming, managing, designing. We might also say imagining the digital technologies that we increasingly rely on that permeate society. So we're talking software programmers, data scientists, UX designers, increasingly AI engineers and machine learning engineers, but also product managers and other occupational groups. And what these groups have in common, I would say, is that they have managed to secure a task jurisdiction in the tech industry that grants them middle class or upper middle class wages and relative control over their work process. And by this definition I would, yeah, I distinguish tech workers from tech entrepreneurs and kind of managerial class of the tech industry on the one hand, and then on the other hand I distinguish them from highly precarious digital workers. We can think of gig workers or crowd workers. So in digital studies, but also in sociology, there has been a lot of attention on these highly precarious digital workers. And then in the media, I think when we talk about tech, the emphasis, the focus is on the entrepreneurial class. And with this book I try to direct our attention to the middle layers of the tech industry and these professional cadres, these professional actors, or we could also say knowledge workers who are kind of operating the backstage of digital capitalism.
- [05:28]
B
I mean, they are probably the kind of ideal type, sort of avatars for this idea of there being a kind of new middle class, one that isn't bound to maybe the kind of classic bureaucratic office status, but also doesn't have that kind of same professional kind of position as like a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, something like this. And one of the things the book does is kind of unpacks how these people have particular kind of social orientations but also have a, have a kind of like particular sort of consciousness towards work. And you introduce this idea of the post entrepreneurial self, partially I think to intervene in some academic debates about people's experience of self and work, but also to kind of give structure to the social codes that you talk about. And I'm intrigued by that theory, partially to know a bit about how you developed it, why it kind of matters, but also if there's a sort of straightforward or kind of like sound bite way of capturing what it means.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I guess where my interest comes from for these codes and for these types of subjectivity is that as I outlined, tech workers have this kind of contradictory class position in between the working class or the proletariat, if you like Marxist terms, and the upper class. And then I think, yeah, it's crucial to understand what kind of subjectivity do they cultivate, where do they lean towards? And yeah, I guess in the literature on white collar knowledge workers, in the literature on their subjectivity, I would argue we can identify these two ideal types. So there is this notion of the organizational self which kind of delineates the subjectivity of white collar knowledge workers in Fordism. So in the period in Western nation states from roughly maybe the 1920s to 1960s. And this was a self that, this organizational self was a self that was, that often worked for their whole career at just one firm or maybe two firms. And it was a self that traded their loyalty and disciplined labor power in exchange for secure employment conditions and regular wage increases. This was a self that longed for collectivity in the workplace. Often they were, often these white men were also members of unions and culturally they tended to consume standardized cultural goods. It's kind of very much an ideal type now. But I do think it is informative because sociologists do analyze that there's a shift, some would even say a break in the late 1960s and then especially in the 1970s and 80s, a shift away from this organizational self in the sense that an increasingly an entrepreneurial self takes center stage. So this is the ideal type and maybe also the idealized subjectivity of white collar workers in post Fordism. And it's a self that's kind of, yeah, it's a self that relates, that is an employee, but basically behaves like an entrepreneur. It's a self that takes a increasingly holistic market orientation to work in life. It's a self that longs for autonomy, creativity, flexibility. It's a self that's more oriented towards networks than a lifelong, lifelong career in one firm. It's a self that increasingly where life and work increasingly blur, where de differentiation between those two spheres take place. I would say what a literature says. It's also a self that is less attracted to unions. And it's a self that kind of is willing to enter a Faustian pact, to put it in German terms, a Faustian pact in the sense that it's a self that accepts the increasingly precarious conditions of work in post Fordism under or in exchange for the promise of more self fulfillment at work, of finding meaning at work, finding creativity. Yeah. So it's a self that kind of combines this homo economicus with this idea of expressive individualism. And so that kind of constitutes this entrepreneurial self. And basically my interest in the book is, so if we take this ideal type and we contrast the subjectivity of tech workers with it, what do we find? Do we find heightened forms of entrepreneurialism? Do we find a kind of new breed of a neoliberal actor, or do we find something else? That was my basic kind of broader theoretical interest with this empirical study of tech workers.
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B
I mean, not to give a spoiler for people who are going to read the book, but it's very much in that kind of actually something else camp. And one of the things that flows from it is the real kind of reflexivity and I guess, kind of knowingness that a lot of these workers have of the context in which they work. They're not, you know, unaware of both the kind of problems of their industry, the problems of contemporary capitalism in which they find themselves. And, you know, they have kind of ways of negotiating with that and through that, and they do it in lots of different ways. And one of the ways which I was particularly kind of interested in happens quite early in the book, where you talk about the way they kind of deal with, on the one hand, real frustrations with the industry, that the industry isn't particularly diverse. It has real kind of problems with some of its economic inequalities. And at the same time, they are kind of grounded in the idea that the work they do, particularly associated with things like data and bringing data to bear on kind of questions of how things can get better, is something they should do, are attached to, has a kind of almost like moral purpose. And in some ways, I guess that's the first social code that you're unpacking. And I'm interested to hear a bit about, I suppose, that kind of orientation. They have, that kind of sense of there are Loads of problems they're aware of, but also they kind of think they might be the solution to some of those problems too.
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C
Yeah, no, I think that that's very, very, very well put. Yeah, I think that that's basically what I was trying to show is that there are a number of surprising ways in which tech workers deviate from this ideal of the entrepreneurial self. So yeah, when I'm being honest, I kind of wanted to write a book about heightened forms of neoliberal cultures at the outset of my project. And I thought I would find highly neoliberal subjects or kind of subjects that are taking market logics to a new extreme. And I mean, there are certainly tendencies of kind of increasing entrepreneurialism among this tech workforce. But, but I think that's kind of almost a side story. I think. Yeah, the major story is that there are these prevalent social critiques among tech workers that really surprised me and that really, I think differentiate tech workers from the ideal of the entrepreneurial and creative self. So yeah, when we consider basically the biggest critique or the kind of the normative concern of tech workers is not that they're experiencing a lack of creativity in their work, but it's rather that there are a number of social problems with tech and society more broadly that they kind of problematize and that they are engaging or at least discursively engaging with. So yeah, one of, one of these is, I would say we could argue it's a return of economic critique. So tech workers are, are concerned with the state of economy and moreover, they have a class based worldview, I would say. And this class based worldview manifests in the sense that they see society as conflictive. They see workers as not getting their fair share. So they might not use, they might not say we are social class, they might not be explicitly kind of in this repertoire, but they see society as increasingly polarized economically and they see themselves as parts of workers. They don't classify them or rarely classify themselves as professionals or entrepreneurs. Instead, the preferred classification is oh, I'm a tech worker. So I think this kind of links back to your first question about the title. So I think that's already something interesting that these professionals who are earning in the US $160,000 on average in my sample in Germany, €80,000, roughly that people with these upper middle class incomes are classifying themselves as workers. And then also the social critique extends to issues of, or problematizations of a lack of diversity. So a lot of tech workers critiqued that there's a lack of Women, lack of people of color in tech. They also critiqued the techno solutionist promises of the industry. So there were surprising boundary making, symbolic boundary makings vis a vis the entrepreneurial class in the sense that a lot of tech workers told me that yeah, these promises are overblown and that they don't believe that technology can be a solution for all kinds of social problems. So while they are, I wouldn't say they're techno pessimists, they definitely believe that technology can have a positive impact on society, but they believe that, they don't believe that they are skeptical of these large scale kind of promises that the tech industry leaders are sometimes propelling. And on the other hand, they emphasize the need for reflective data work that is necessary for technology to be a force of innovation and improvement. So they really stress that yeah, you need to know your data, you need to have a contextual understanding of the area you are working in. You need to reflect on what that data means for different groups and different contexts. So they were very keen to emphasize these practices of good data work and also having good data kind of creating a data set that actually or that is carefully crafted. And so I thought these kind of practices, they signal, yeah, a boundary making vis a vis tech leaders, but also, yeah, a break or they demonstrate that tech workers are not these techno solutionists. And they're also not. I would, I would also say we would misunderstand them as these tech bros who are unconcerned with discrimination, unconcerned with social inequalities. But yeah, I think they are, they are a different class or a different class fraction. But at the same time, now I do want to emphasize that my book is no naive celebration of tech workers codes either. I do think there are a lot of things we have to interrogate critically about this social critique and I think one, just to name one thing now, is that it rarely translates into practices. Now it does translate into some practices. So I'm sure there is some, some, some levels of, of reflective data work in practice going on. There's also the finding that tech workers, when I ask them about who they vote for, they predominantly vote for left, liberal, green or social democratic parties. That kind of corresponds to their worldviews, I suppose. But they for instance, are very rarely members of a union. Only two or 52 of my interviewees are members of a union. And then there's also certain latent forms of discrimination that are going on in the tech industry. So for instance, there's a differentiation between more and less technical jobs and less technical jobs are often those jobs that are more within which more women can be found. So there's a flip side to tech worker social critique. Nonetheless, I do want to emphasize in the book there's something new going on. There's a new character, social character emerging that is distinct from this entrepreneurial self that we have kind of become maybe too comfortable in sociology with to just classify knowledge workers quite bluntly, the world.
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B
Moves fast, your workday even faster.
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C
Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data.
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B
Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365Copilot yeah, I'm going to come back to the what's new and what's different as we move towards the end of the podcast, but one thing that struck me is as you were talking, you talk quite a lot about kind of their work, but you've also gestured towards their, I guess, kind of like habits and lifestyle. So things like, you know, who do they vote for? And in some ways one aspect of their social codes where they're kind of quite close to other elites and maybe a sort of new and different from older elites, but are very much not new and different from current new elites, is in their kind of like lifestyles, their tastes. I was interested in this partially because it's always interesting to talk about people's tastes and what it tells us about them and their social position, but also because this was a moment where there maybe is quite a strong alignment with both, I guess the kind of bosses that they had kind of seeking to critique, but then also maybe some of the older kind of professions, at least people who are younger working in those older professions. So yeah, what are the kind of lifestyles and tastes of your tech workers?
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C
Yeah, I think you're spot on, Dave. Yeah, I agree. There's definitely less differences going on when we turn to the lifestyles than when we're talking about, yeah, worldviews or professional roles. So yeah, I think one, the most striking one where this manifests is this lifestyle of ordinariness which increasingly has also been a topic in the sociology of elites as a kind of new or as like a part of this cultural omnivoreness that elites are cultivating. Not just highbrow but also more down to earth ordinary, ordinary tastes and ways of life and I do find that among tech workers it's quite striking. I would even say among tech workers there's a foregrounding of ordinariness going on when I talk with them about their lifestyles. So for instance, I asked tech workers, what do you like to do on a weekend? And overwhelmingly people, when they started talking about their lifestyles, they foregrounded quite down to earth activities, I would say. So they told me, yeah, on the weekend I like to, you know, go to a cafe, walk my dog, I like to do a barbecue with my friends, I like to spend time with my family. So they did not foreground kind of more exclusive activities like, I don't know, going, going to a theater or they also didn't foreground. Yeah, I was, I don't know, coding something in my spare time. But they wanted to. Yeah, I would argue they wanted to foreground that they are kind of. Yeah, that they're down to earth, that despite their upper middle class incomes and maybe even though they are kind of pulling away economically from a generally declining middle class, they have this sense of ordinariness. So I think that could be interpreted as a process where a certain form of cultural authenticity is being generated or is being tried to generate. And apart from ordinaries, I also find a code of mindfulness. I suppose you will also find this among tech elites. Tech workers are concerned with, with experiencing burnout, are concerned with losing touch with nature. They told me. So there is kind of a very reflective process of trying to reconnect with other or trying to reconnect with nature, but also their true self or their bodily needs. So yeah, tech workers told me it's not just about yoga. I mean, that also was stereotypically present yoga meditation. But also tech workers talked to me about trying to have boundaries between work and life. So maybe this part at least differentiates them from tech elites in the sense that they told me, yeah, I try to actually just work 9 to 5 or 9 to 6 and I try when I go home not to open my laptop. So there were these kind of technologies of the self to have a redifferentiation between work and life. So yeah, I suppose with their lifestyles there is definitely an overlap to more elite cultures going on. But yeah, again, there is maybe some kind of both in ordinariness and mindfulness. Maybe there's. There's also something going on there that signals that tech workers want to not live the lifestyle of somebody within the elite.
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B
You mentioned this. Are they a class question? And there's a full chapter on that. But also later on in the book, you talk about how tech workers might kind of destabilize kind of understandings of class more generally. And you use this term, which is a kind of tech term, this idea of kind of glitching the class system. And I'm sort of hopeful that I might bring those two sort of themes together, not just say, are they a class? And how can they glitch it? But I guess, why were you interested in talking about them as a class? What I suppose kind of is the need to bring class analysis to tech workers, both because there might be some emancipation there, but also I guess because it's a way of understanding class more generally in contemporary capitalism.
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C
Yeah, I think that's a great question. Yeah, so I think, Well, I mean, I think tech workers, maybe this points to the issue of the societal relevance. I think talking about tech workers as a class, or maybe more specifically as a class fraction is important or is illuminating because they are one of the few class fractions in the last 20 years within the middle class that has experienced an upward trajectory that has kind of grown in size and, and maybe also managed to have their wages increase significantly. Now there's some kind of stagnation now going on with AI and we'll see how that pans out, plays out. But I think, yeah, tech workers are interesting because within the middle layers they have this quite unique trajectory and they also have a lot of inscription power. In the book, I call it inscription power, meaning that tech workers, they control a very influential jurisdiction in society in the sense that they program and design the digital tools and devices that increasingly shape our societies. So I guess talking about them through the notion of class, I, yeah, I wanted to emphasize also their distinctive resources that tech workers possess, their distinctive position in terms of their, their combination and volumes of different forms of capital. So we're talking economic capital, but also I would say informational capital. That tech workers have a unique combination of these two and that given their unique combination of these forms of capital, yeah, they have a crucial position in social space. And I think if we are politically, if we want to politically pursue or if actors in society want to pursue different visions, different kind of forms of organizing tech, of maybe regulating the tech industry. My book would make the case that, well, yeah, we have to understand on the one hand the objective class positions of these actors, but on the other hand also their subjective class positionings, their forms of class distinction, their forms of boundary making, but also their bridge makings. Who do they bridge with, what kind of Cultural alliances, sociocultural alliances could be established in social space. Yeah, I think that's probably why I thought the CLAS concept works well for the study of tech workers by trying to provide a twofold understanding not of their objective, but also the subjective positionings and also of the complex interplay of these two dimensions.
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B
So far, we talked about the workers, which is unsurprising given it's a book about tech workers. But throughout the book you sort of keep flagging, and I think this is really important, that these are not isolated individuals. They tend to work in firms. There are organizational and institutional settings. And in some ways these organizational and institutional settings are part of what allows them to have these kind of critical or emancipatory moments. You know, they kind of say, I wish my firm was doing better. I want my firm to be more diverse. You know, I'd like my firm to be more, you know, kind of socially orientated, stuff like this. And at the same time, the firms do kind of bear down on them. It's not like the firms, you know, are entirely kind of benevolent or entirely sort of malign. And I'm interested in the role of firms really, both in terms of firms as kind of the bad guys, firms of asking them to do more work, claiming that they're becoming more diverse, claiming to be kind of good corporate social actors. What was the Google thing? Don't be evil or whatever. But then at the same time, firms as providing a backdrop where they're paying these individuals lots of money comparatively. They give them high social status, a good lifestyle, and in some ways kind of allow them not to realize their potential. Emancipatory critique?
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C
Yeah, no, I think it's a super interesting and complex relationship these actors have to their firms. So, yeah, I mean, one thing I did find in the book also is that tech workers are often more critical of the industry, the broader tech industry, than of their specific firm. That's, I guess, one. One way tech workers manage to align their critical worldviews, their return of social critique, with their organizational embeddedness in this industry. And. Yeah, but on the other hand, I also found, apart from that mechanism, I found that tech firms are quite tempted to say, skilled at appropriating some of the social critiques that tech workers articulate and kind of cultivate. So apart from doing interviews with tech workers, I also looked at job ads of tech firms across the US and Germany. And what I found is that a number of certain social codes are being at least superficially taken up by firms. So for instance, there is A superficial appreciation of diversity going on. And yeah, this takes an interesting form in the sense that critical concerns around discrimination and bias by tech workers are often taken up in the sense that by tech firms that there's, that these are. There is an appreciation of diversity, but it's grounded in the potential to fuel innovation and increased productivity. So there's kind of like a capitalist commodification, if we like going on here. And then also other codes that tech workers cultivate are also kind of, yeah, you could say commodified. So for instance, mindfulness is usually rewired into, yeah, into laying out, sketching out work context that allows for heightened work performance. So yeah, in a lot of job ads we still see then actually an entrepreneurial framing of tech workers that kind of, yeah, come comes out at the end. So there's an appropriation going on. If we kind of want to go back to the classics of sociology, we could say that there are these contours of a new spirit of capitalism going on. So there's this kind of, there's a, there's a kind of a new culture of capitalism being configurated in the tech industry that yeah, takes, that kind of, takes a different spin that, that evolves more around or that partly also now evolves around moral issues increasingly. So I mean capitalism, spirit of capitalism has always been about certain moral issues, but I would say now it's more about these moral issues linked to improving society or tackling social problems, problematizing or at least addressing discrimination and bias superficially. So I would say the spirit of capitalism has gone away a bit from what Boltansky and Chiapello diagnosed in the 1990s and 2000s. This, this kind of focus on creativity and instead now focuses more on world improvement and social issues. And yeah, I'm kind of intrigued. I mean currently I think it's interesting if that will continue in the US at least. But yeah, I did find this tension here between tech workers aspiration to distance themselves also morally from their firms, but also firms catching up to their codes and trying to integrate them into their discursive operations.
- [35:16]
B
I mean, it sounds like there's rich potential for a sequel to this book. I mean, I'm a big fan of anything sort of longitudinal, particularly given the kind of potential in this class fraction. And then at the same time the coming transformations of their kind of working context and obviously the social, political and to an extent cultural context, that's transforming too. But at the same time, academic research often is about concluding a project and then thinking actually there's something kind of new or interesting or slightly different I'd like to do. Writing a book is a big, you know, kind of long process. It's a lot of effort and often people are a bit like never again. Which is understandable. And I'm sort of empathetic with too. So what are you doing kind of now next? Are you going to do more stuff in this kind of tech worker space in this, you know, kind of contemporary class space or are you moving in to something are kind of different and unrelated?
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C
Yeah, so I'll definitely keep an eye on tech workers. I don't know if I'll write another book on them, but I'll definitely write further articles on them, I would say. So that's something I definitely want to do. I mean there's so much going on and it's moving so fast. So yeah, in the US just now, in the last two years there have been rapid technological but also political changes obviously. And so yeah, I think here it would be fascinating to see how tech workers manage to now align their subjectivities with these new contexts, with these possibly also new organizational orientations, new kind of orientations on the side of the tech leadership. Yeah, so I think it would be super interesting to see what is happening right now kind of as we speak in terms of their subjectivities and their participation. But yeah, I do also want to move on. I do have this ideal of kind of definitely broadening my analysis beyond having focused studies beyond tech workers. So I'm currently playing with tech idea of doing a study of the effects and the relationship workers cultivate vis a vis gen AI, specifically different groups of knowledge workers. So maybe tech workers but also other groups of the middle class and maybe also blue collar workers. I have to think about it if I can also integrate that dimension. But yeah, I guess one of my overarching interests is also where is the middle class heading? I would say that's something that, I mean it doesn't keep me up at night, but it's definitely something I do think about on a regular basis. Yeah. Where is the middle class in western post industrial nation states? Where is it heading in terms of its political orientations, its relationships to firms, to employers, its lifestyles, its forms of distinction? So questions that also you are very concerned with its cultural repertoires, its tastes? I'm kind of very intrigued by what are the new forms of distinction. Who do you have to be nowadays to make it into the middle or maybe more specifically into the upper middle class and what you have to do to get ahead. And I think with my book on tech workers, I did try to, I think, yeah, I tried to show some of the ways in which you can, in today's society, secure a ticket, an increasingly rare ticket into this upper middle class. But I guess tech is not the only avenue to be able to still buy a house in London. There are other avenues you can take and yeah, I'm kind of just intrigued to further study, I guess. Yeah. Middle class production and middle class reproduction beyond tech, but still including tech.