This introduction looks at the state of the field in the sociology of work and attempts to offer a general summary of the papers presented in this Special Issue. "New Studies of Labor" (NSL) make virtually no use of the theoretical resources of the 20th century's industrial sociology and try to sustain the focus on the labor process and the forms of its organization. They also differ from the contemporary literature on work and occupations which focuses on career mobility, labor markets, and income determination. Conceptually, the NSL rely on theoretical traditions that originate beyond sociology's disciplinary boundaries: Marxist value theory, Italian Autonomist thought, and Foucauldian studies of organizations. As different from the vast anthropological and sociological literature devoted to detailed empirical analyses of 'work' and its different sites, the NSL start from the question about how a specific 'work' is being inscribed into the processes of value production and capital accumulation, thus also becoming abstract labor. Such an approach assumes that the boundary that divides 'labor' from 'nonlabor' is a structural feature of the capitalist mode of production, being at the same time negotiated in the social struggles for recognition and articulated in the objective processes of value production. Thus, labor is seen as a fundamental category of capitalist production, even though its empirical content is historically variable. The first part of this introduction offers an outline of the theoretical traditions most relevant for making sense of the NSL. It then proceeds with a brief overview of industrial sociology/ sociology of work and its shortcomings. The introduction concludes with an overview of the papers collected in this Special Issue.

The sociology of work paid close attention to the factory and office as the physical and social space where the labor process was directly carried out and where workers faced managerial supervision, control, and power. The article discusses new decentralized forms of labor organization based on digital platforms which connect self-employed workers with clients and customers. The rapid spread of platforms in many spheres of the economy (from the IT sector and creative industries to consumer services, taxi services, and delivery) puts the task of rethinking the concepts of labor sociology, labor legislation and social policy models on the agenda. Generally, organizational decentralization was discussed in the context of increasing the autonomy of workers. However, information and communication technologies made possible not only the effective coordination of dispersed workers, but also tight algorithmic control. Workers who are outside the enterprise, both physically and legally, nevertheless experience a strong influence of digital platforms on the key conditions of their work and employment. The article discusses the nature and types of digital work platforms, sources of platform power, forms of algorithmic management, the role of user ratings, as well as the possible regulation of platform employment. The author conceptualizes the problems of labor autonomy and control within the typology of platforms: marketplace vs. shadow corporation.

The article analyzes ways to organize the so-called immaterial labor in the framework of the theory of cognitive capitalism (TCC). The author proceeds from the theory of immanent contradictions of cognitive capitalism formulated by Yann Moulier Boutang, Carlo Vercellone, Andre Gorz and developed in the works of other representatives of TCC: this is the contradiction between the autonomy of labor and its valorization, and the contradiction between the non-commodity nature of knowledge and strategies for its commodification. The following analysis is based on the assumption that labor organization regimes and organizational models are designed, firstly, to prevent the development of these contradictions, and secondly, to adapt to external socio-economic conditions (uncertainty, the precarization of hiring, the volatility of prices for intangible assets, crises). Due to the weak theoretical development of the problem of labor organization within the framework of the TCC, the article offers a reconstruction of the views of these authors on the problem. The paper offers two versions of the answer to the question about the organization of immaterial labor within the TCC: the version suggested by Moulier Boutang originates from the hypothesis of network coordination developed in the works of Yochai Benkler and Walter Powell, while the second version derives from the assumption of a weak structural determinacy of the actions of autonomous agents that are integrated into the value chain through the process of subjectivation. The author criticizes the given assumptions of the TCC and puts forward a number of theoretical propositions that justify the hypothesis of the transition to a Neo-Taylorist model of management of immaterial labor.

The article provides an attempt to analyze management practices in market companies based on a Foucauldian approach and the theory of cognitive capitalism. The analysis answers three research questions: what kinds of labor management regimes can be distinguished in the production sector based on "immaterial" labor? What is the relationship between the type of management regime in a company and the degree of creativity of its employees? What are the limits to the effectiveness of these different regimes? Based on the theoretical apparatus of Foucault and existing empirical studies within the Foucauldian framework, the author identifies the signs of the two main modes of labor management (disciplinary and biopolitical) in the aspects of space and time regulation, hierarchical relations, rules of conduct in the office, employee identity and encouragement practices. Similarly, relying on the resources of post-operaismo and the theory of cognitive capitalism, a list of strategies for resisting these regulations is formulated: opportunism, ignoring, fixing contradictions in identity, cynicism, idle talk and exit. During the empirical analysis of selected cases of Russian companies engaged in the production of intangible assets, the author identifies five key management practices: panoptic control, normalization, employee management through the expansion of the area of responsibility (implemented through the practice of building task-oriented labor), encouragement practices and the construction of employee identity through the values of involvement, development and effectiveness. At the conceptual level, it is demonstrated that less standardized and more creative labor combines better with biopolitical management; more standardized and less creative labor, in turn, combines with the disciplinary mode; the distribution of empirical cases, in general, confirms this conclusion. The limits of effectiveness of each of the control modes are demonstrated through an analysis of how their functioning provokes opposing resistance practices. The final paragraph of the paper outlines ways to build a more complex classification of four labor management regimes.

What are the changes that the development of AI brings to the character of labor status in organizations? Are there new momenta for cooperation between staff in organizations? Does AI initiate transformations in the division of labor? The paper addresses these questions on the basis of field research organized and conducted in Russia and Belarus. Employees of 16 Russian and Belorussian IT companies were interviewed. The foci of the paper are the new structures of labor occupation and the new types of expertise that have appeared on the scene with AI entering into the everyday life of society. The author discusses three basic trends. First, the appearance of new categories of activities and new types of expertise in the frame of cooperation between employees. Second, the emergence of "invisible" varieties of labor. Third, the replacement of local knowledge with the knowledge that stems from 'big data'. The main result of the study is the following. The division of labor in organizations influenced by the development of artificial intelligence / machine learning is characterized by a complex and specific type of cooperation which has a structure comparable to a "Russian doll". In order to portray this structure the author applies the concept of interactional expertise proposed by Harry Collins. The paper also formulates several research problems and hypotheses connected with current transformations in the division of labor, as well as with new experiences of employees who interact with AI technologies.

This paper attempts to describe the foundations of the temporal orders of labor multiplicity of the Russian Post workers, as well as to consider some ways of relating these orders with each other. The research materials were collected through an organizational ethnography (from June 2013 to September 2014), as well as interviews (2014-2017) and an analysis of documents and open sources. The article is based upon three field stories. The Russian Post has three organizational peculiarities: geographical dispersion, the loose coupling of structural elements, and the locality of units. As a result, the work of employees is complicated by the spatial and temporal distance, the distance between different positions within the hierarchy, and the need for "interpretative work" to contextualize the universal directives. The temporal orders within such an organization can be set by the features of the intraorganizational structure and factors of the institutional constellations, but also by employees' individual temporalities and the environment. Some possible ways to relate these multiple orders are presented in three empirical sketches - the story of the "labour participation coefficient", the "cake story" and the story of the "long-haul transport arrangement". These stories show that the coexistence of various temporal regimes requires temporal work, interaction in the logic of ambitemporality, and a common goal, which allows various actors involved in the postal service operation to relate the macro-level of various time structures with their subjectively experienced time. These mechanisms set conditions for temporal structuring and confirm various practices as familiar and understandable ways of coping with time.

This paper focuses on the labor practices of Soviet engineers in the period between the 1960s through the 1980s, with an emphasis on problems, challenges, and tensions arising in their everyday work. The analysis is based on a range of oral history sources, including published memoirs of Soviet engineers, journal articles, social media posts, and interviews. The first part of the paper gives an overview of existing research on late Soviet engineering in sociology, history, and anthropology. The paper then proceeds with a brief overview of late Soviet science and technology policy, and the system of R&D management, looking at the forms of bureaucratic mobilization and attempts at decentralization of the governance of science and technology. A special emphasis is put on the difficulties of creative self-realization of late Soviet engineers. On the one hand, inventive activity was actively encouraged and facilitated through a network of institutions for expert and informational support for new technical inventions. On the other hand, a high degree of bureaucratization, low speed of implementation of technical innovations, and the overall orientation towards imitating Western technology in several industries undermined the motivation for technical creativity. Soviet engineers' labor was organized through a system of centralized planning and managerial techniques such as network planning and PERT systems. At the same time, it was accompanied by a mobilizational rhetoric that appealed to the imperatives of plan over-fulfillment and increased the pressure on the engineering labor. To analyze this contradiction, the paper draws on the theory of Boltanski and Thevenot. Overall, the paper contributes to the social history of late Soviet engineering intelligentsia, offering a synoptic view on the various aspects of its everyday life, from the culture of technical invention to the organization of the labor process.