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Cited by 2Digital Economy and Work TransformationPolitical Economy and MarxismInformation Systems Theories and Implementation

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 245 of the 246 references it cites were found in a registry or an index, and 1 are not checked yet; none of the 101 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Labor, Capital, and Machine: Toward a Labor Process Theory for HCI

Open access
Qin, Yigang, Cheon, EunJeong·2026·Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
DOI 10.1145/3772318.3791147

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Abstract

The HCI community has called for renewed attention to labor issues and the political economy of computing. Yet much work remains in engaging with labor theory to better understand modern work and workers. This article traces the development of Labor Process Theory (LPT)—from Karl Marx and Harry Braverman to Michael Burawoy and beyond—and introduces it as an essential yet underutilized resource for structural analysis of work under capitalism and the design of computing systems. We examine HCI literature on labor, investigating focal themes and conceptual, empirical, and design approaches. Drawing from LPT, we offer directions for HCI research and practice: distinguish labor from work, link work practice to value production, study up the management, analyze consent and legitimacy, move beyond the point of production, design alternative institutions, and unnaturalize bourgeois designs. These directions can deepen analyses of tech-mediated workplace regimes, inform critical and normative designs, and strengthen the field’s connection to broader political economic critique.

Checked 2026-11-14 · 1 reference not checked yet

Overview

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TL;DR

The paper argues that HCI should adopt Labor Process Theory (LPT) to analyze work as a political-economic relation between labor and capital, not merely as work practice. It traces LPT from Marx through Braverman, Friedman, Edwards, and Burawoy, reviews HCI labor scholarship, and proposes seven directions for research and design.

Key findings

  • LPT offers HCI a structural lens on the “vertical” dimension of labor-capital relations: surplus-value extraction, deskilling, conception-execution separation, managerial control, consent, and alienation, which the paper says HCI has often sidelined in favor of horizontal work-practice accounts.
  • The semi-systematic review searched CHI, CSCW, PACMHCI, TOCHI, DIS, CHIWork, PDC, ECSCW, and JCSCW: the primary search returned 483 papers and filtered to 223 relevant papers; an additional search added 90 papers, expanding the corpus to 313.
  • HCI labor studies cluster around control and management, worker resistance and collective action, and emotional and body labor; common approaches are surfacing invisible labor/work, documenting worker experiences, and designing interventions.
  • The paper proposes seven directions: distinguish labor from work, link work practice to value production, study up the management, analyze consent and legitimacy, move beyond the point of production, design alternative institutions, and unnaturalize bourgeois designs.

Methods

  • Conceptual/theoretical article combined with a semi-systematic literature review. Searches covered ACM CHI, CSCW, PACMHCI, TOCHI, DIS, CHIWork, PDC, ECSCW, and JCSCW for “labor” or “labour” in titles/abstracts, then additional terms such as worker, manager, employee, employer, working class, workplace, capital*, and Marx*; searches covered publications through November 2025.
  • The primary search returned 483 papers, manually screened to 223 relevant papers; the additional search added 90 papers, for a total corpus of 313.
  • The first author read selected papers, kept notes and analytical memos, open-coded and categorized by occupation, labor issue, and methodology, and discussed emerging interpretations iteratively with the second author; the review is described as illustrative rather than exhaustive.

Limitations

  • Stated: the review is illustrative rather than exhaustive; searches cover publications only through November 2025; not all reviewed papers are cited, with selections reflecting thematic representativeness and saturation; ECSCW and JCSCW digital libraries did not support abstract filtering, so full-text searches and manual screening were used.
  • Stated: LPT has a recognized limitation in focusing on labor transformation at the expense of the social reproduction of labor power, with feminist scholars offering critiques.
  • Evident from the text: the review relies on selective reading and open coding by the first author rather than line-by-line coding, and its semi-systematic design does not claim comprehensive coverage of all HCI labor scholarship.

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Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3772318.3791147

Cites

245 of 246 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Figures

Figure 1 Value production and appropriation in the capitalist labor process. A and C represent the beginning and end of a working day, respectively. B is the hypothetical time point where the worker has produced value equal to their wage and begins producing surplus for the capitalist(s). In practice, B cannot be located on the timeline because wages are paid only when the working day ends.
Figure 1 Value production and appropriation in the capitalist labor process. A and C represent the beginning and end of a working day, respectively. B is the hypothetical time point where the worker has produced value equal to their wage and begins producing surplus for the capitalist(s). In practice, B cannot be located on the timeline because wages are paid only when the working day ends.CC-BY · From the PDF
Figure 2 Analytical distinction between labor and work. Both refer to human effort in production, but emphasize different facets. In Marxist terms, labor captures the abstract, value -producing aspect of human effort, while work refers to its concrete, use-value -producing aspect. The transformation process (Labor Power → Labor) foregrounds managerial control and worker resistance-the domain of LPT. The substantiation process (Work → Commodities) foregrounds task specification and worker improvisation-the domain of conventional work practice studies. The dashed arrow indicates how efficient commodity production reduces the cost of reproducing labor power, intensifying exploitation (see §2.1).
Figure 2 Analytical distinction between labor and work. Both refer to human effort in production, but emphasize different facets. In Marxist terms, labor captures the abstract, value -producing aspect of human effort, while work refers to its concrete, use-value -producing aspect. The transformation process (Labor Power → Labor) foregrounds managerial control and worker resistance-the domain of LPT. The substantiation process (Work → Commodities) foregrounds task specification and worker improvisation-the domain of conventional work practice studies. The dashed arrow indicates how efficient commodity production reduces the cost of reproducing labor power, intensifying exploitation (see §2.1).CC-BY · From the PDF

Verification

Claims the paper makes

0 Valid · 14 Not valid · 69 Not checked · 58 Own results and interpretations

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  • Probably not a substantial claim. 69
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 43

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Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 35

  1. Joan Acker. 2006. Class questions: Feminist answers. Rowman & Littlefield.
  2. Harry Braverman. 1998 [1974]. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Monthly Review Press, New York.
  3. Michael Burawoy. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
  4. Michael Burawoy. 1990. The politics of production. Verso, London.
  5. Long Chen. 2024. Digital Gallop: Food Delivery Riders and the Labor Order of the Platform Economy (Shuzi jichi: Waimai qishou yu pingtai jingji de laodong zhixu). Shanghai People’s Publishing House.
  6. Cynthia Cockburn. 1983. Brothers: male dominance and technological change. Pluto, London.
  7. Cynthia Cockburn. 1985. Machinery of dominance: Women, men, and technical know-how. Pluto press London.
  8. Paul K. Edwards. 1986. Conflict at work : a materialist analysis of workplace relations. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
  9. Richard Edwards. 1979. Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. Basic Books, Inc, New York.
  10. Pelle Ehn. 1993. Scandinavian design: On participation and skill. In Participatory design, Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka (Eds.). CRC press, Boca Raton, 41–77.
  11. 10.5555/3158920 · doi:10.5555/3158920
  12. John E. T. Eldridge, Peter Cressey, and John MacInnes. 1991. Industrial sociology and economic crisis. St. Martin’s Press, New York.
  13. Laurie Graham. 1995. On the line at Subaru-Isuzu: The Japanese model and the American worker. Cornell University Press.
  14. Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri. 2019. Ghost work: How to stop Silicon Valley from building a new global underclass. Harper Business.
  15. David Knights and Torkild Thanem. 2005. Embodying emotional labour. In Gender, bodies and work, Berit Brandth (Ed.). Routledge, London, 31–43.
  16. Xander Koo Lucy Scott and Amy Bruckman. 2025. Metrics and Macchiatos: Challenges for Service-Industry Wdustry Workers and the Need for Worker-Driven ICTs. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (2025).
  17. Karl Marx. 1969. Theories of Surplus Value Part 1. Lawrence and Wishart, London.
  18. Karl Marx. 1978 [1891]. Wage Labour and Capital. In The Marx-Engels Reader (2 ed.), Robert C. Tucker (Ed.). Norton, New York, 203–217.
  19. Karl Marx. 1978 [1973]. The Grundrisse. In The Marx-Engels Reader (2 ed.), Robert C. Tucker (Ed.). Norton, New York, 221–293.
  20. Karl Marx. 1990 [1976]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Penguin, London.
  21. John Pencavel. 2002. Worker participation: Lessons from worker co-ops of the pacific northwest. Russell Sage Foundation.
  22. Winifred R Poster, Marion Crain, and Miriam A Cherry. 2016. Introduction: Conceptualizing invisible labor. In Invisible labor: Hidden work in the contemporary world. University of California Press, 3–27.
  23. Valeriano Ramos Jr. 1982. The concepts of ideology hegemony and organic intellectuals in Gramsci’s Marxism. Theoretical Review 27 3-8 (1982) 34.
  24. Jason Resnikoff. 2022. Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work. University of Illinois Press.
  25. Runar Sæther and Babak A Farshchian. 2023. The workers strike back-A literature survey of digital circumvention tools used by online gig workers. In Proceedings of 21st European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET).
  26. Kjeld Schmidt and Edgar G Daylight. 2023. Conceptual Foundations of CSCW: From Marx to Wittgenstein. International Reports on Socio-Informatics (IRSI) 20 2 (2023) 1–18.
  27. Nick Srnicek. 2017. Platform capitalism. John Wiley & Sons.
  28. Frederick Winslow Taylor. 1919. The principles of scientific management. Harper & brothers.
  29. Paul Thompson and Kirsty Newsome. 2004. Labor process theory, work, and the employment relation. In Theoretical perspectives on work and the employment relationship, Bruch E Kaufman (Ed.). Industrial Relations Research Association, Champaign, 133–162.
  30. Loïc Wacquant. 2008. Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Polity.
  31. Stephen Wood (Ed.). 1982. The Degradation of Work?: Skill, De-Skilling and the Labour Process. Hutchinson, London.
  32. 10.5555/1855065 · doi:10.5555/1855065
  33. Tongyu Wu. 2024. Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm. Temple University Press.
  34. 10.5555/3265382 · doi:10.5555/3265382
  35. Ben Zefeng Zhang Dipto Das and Bryan Semaan. 2025. Identity Alignment and the Sociotechnical Reconfigurations of Emotional Labor in Transnational Gig-education Platforms. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (2025) 1–46.

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Metadata

Authors
Qin, Y., & Cheon, E.
Affiliations
Syracuse University (US)
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher
ACM
Published
2026-04-13
Pages
1-20
DOI
10.1145/3772318.3791147
OpenAlex
W7128677328
Cited by
2
References
245
Citations by year
2026: 2
FWCI
14.99
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Economy and Marxism
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management Information Systems › Information Systems Theories and Implementation
Keywords
labour process theory, human-computer interaction, labor theory, Karl Marx, Harry Braverman, Michael Burawoy, value production, workplace management, critical design, normative design, capitalism, computer system design

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