For many years, the core of critical management studies was labour process theory (LPT), building on Braverman's (1976) reading of Marx. Recently, LPT has been losing momentum in favour of post-structuralist approaches. This paper takes one step back with the hope of taking critical management studies two steps forward. Whereas post-structuralists have largely discarded the Marxist foundations of LPT, this paper argues that LPT has been hobbled by its insufficiently Marxist foundations. I argue that LPT ignores the fundamental contradiction Marx saw between the progressive `socialization' of the labour process and the persistence of capitalist `valorization' constraints. Understood in Marx's terms, socialization is the movement away from local isolation towards `universal interdependence', and it is a key trend both in the objective structure of industry and in subjective self-construals. I use this framework to develop a modified conception of skill, one that reveals how capitalist development drives a process of long-term skill upgrading. On this platform, I sketch a reinterpretation of two well-known cases of work reorganization — Taylorism and lean production. In both cases, useful insight is garnered by showing how the socialization of the labour process represented by these new management principles and the associated skill upgrading was simultaneously stimulated, retarded and distorted by valorization pressures.

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.

In contrast to recent sociological emphases on the social shaping of technology, this article proposes and illustrates a way of analysing the technological shaping of sociality. Drawing on the concept of affordances (Gibson 1979), the article argues for a recognition of the constraining, as well as enabling, materiality of artefacts. The argument is set in the theoretical context of one of the most recent and comprehensive statements of anti-essentialism (Grint and Woolgar 1997). The position is illustrated through a reinterpretation of some case studies used by proponents of the radical constructivist position.

This paper is based on an empirical study of users of an internet café in South east England. It picks out some of the key distinctions between internet use within domestic spaces and as a technology accessed in a public economy of consumption. The research findings are contextualized and tested against existing work on public internet access. The material derived from interviews with customers is used to explore the ways in which the internet is differently perceived, used and gendered in the public spaces of an internet café. The paper argues that public use of the internet is not just a transitional phenomenon which precedes home internet adoption. The research revealed that the internet café provided a distinct and dedicated use space which was intimately bound up in the domestic and work routines of its users.

Data centers and undersea cables allow information to be transmitted, stored, and processed. Yet, more than passively housing knowledge, information infrastructures actively shape knowledge. Infrastructures facilitate a certain use case, privileging some forms of knowledge while ignoring others. And infrastructures are material investments by states or corporations at a particular site, solidifying their knowledge-production, while marginalizing alternatives. These conditions are exemplified by two sites in Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong. The TKO Express is a private undersea cable that offers its clients high-speed connectivity between financial centers, supporting the “fast knowledge” of finance and trading, while ignoring slower or more social forms of intelligence. The TKOIE industrial estate allocated land to a data center rather than a community center, prioritizing the production of corporate, proprietary knowledge over local and communal knowledge. The article reworks the concept of epistemic infrastructures to stress how such facilities influence what can be known and what remains unknown.

Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies.