The article is devoted to the study of the impact of digital neo-Taylorism on the socio-labor sphere. The relevance of digital neo-Taylorism is due to firms’ (companies’) desire to achieve maximum productivity through total digital control over employees’ work. The main idea of the undertaken research is to identify the key parameters of an abstract invariant model of digital neo-Taylorism that operates across different countries. The aim of the research is to analyze the impact of digital technologies on changes in socio-labor relations, reinterpret the historical transformation of the meanings and significance of work (labor), and identify new forms of inequality, signs of alienation, creativity, and other important aspects of labor activity in the era of digitalization. The novelty of the conducted research lies in the identification of transformations in labor management methods: from classical Taylorism to algorithmic control, digital supervision, and worker autonomy under the pressure of coercion. Contemporary sociology of labor reinterprets these phenomena through the prism of new practices of algorithmic labor management, when the pragmatic focus shifts from physical control to the digital evaluation of work efficiency, automated algorithmic routing with invisible surveillance of workers’ actions, and the distribution of their tasks through artificial intelligence; employers use digital programs to analyze all communications, thereby erasing the boundaries between personal time and working time itself; the precarization and atomization of workers are significant, as workers acquire new functions as self-employed agents of the utilized algorithm; labor motivation is built on ratings, points, and KPIs dictated by these algorithms rather than by direct management. Based on literature review on the proposed topic, the basic components of digital neo-Taylorism were identified: algorithmic labor management; digital control and monitoring; automation of routine tasks; methods of labor intensification; “meta-work”; platform paradoxes identified as ambivalences of personalization, boundary blurring, and the complexity of work teams. The main research results demonstrate that, despite the sharp and rapid growth in productivity, digital neo-Taylorism generates risks and challenges related to technological dependence and the dehumanization of labor; the “meta-work” necessary for maintaining digital systems leads to additional, often invisible and unpaid labor; alienation takes on new forms, transferring the classical Marxist concept into the age of algorithms (digital technologies make it possible to monitor employees even outside the office); neo-Taylorism is especially relevant for platform workers, whose status as “independent contractors” is combined with strict algorithmic control over the quality and speed of task performance. Altogether, in our opinion, this allows the relatively new concept of “digital neo-Taylorism” to be introduced into academic discourse as a new conceptual framework for explaining many contemporary phenomena in the socio-labor sphere
Keywords
Digital neo-Taylorism, meta work, human capital management, datafication, platform paradox, sociology of labor