Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 73

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Prime Suspect: Mechanisms of Labor Control at Amazon's Warehouses

Vallas, Steven P., Johnston, Hannah, Mommadova, Yana·2022·Work and Occupations
DOI 10.1177/07308884221106922
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

What mechanisms has Amazon deployed in its effort to control the labor of its warehouse employees? This question holds both practical and theoretical interest, given Amazon's prominent position in the economy and the wider importance of the logistics sector for consumer capitalism. This paper, part of a broader mixed-methods study of Amazon's workplace regime, uses a small national sample of interviews with Amazon warehouse workers (N = 46) to identify the mechanisms of labor control the company invokes. In keeping with accounts propounded by activists and journalists, we find evidence of highly coercive labor controls, chiefly in the form of what we call techno-economic despotism (which applies algorithmic technology to a precariously employed workforce). Yet many workers also experience forms of labor control that rely not on coercion but on the generation of consent. We identify three such mechanisms of hegemonic labor control - normative, relational, and governmental – that Amazon uses to foster workers’ consent. The efficacy of Amazon's workplace regime stems largely from its ability to deploy a multiplicity of labor controls that resonate with different groups holding distinct positions in the labor process. Given shifts in the social and economic conditions that bear on the company's regime, cracks have begun to appear in Amazon's armor, potentially reducing the traction its labor control mechanisms have gained with segments of its employees.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/07308884221106922

Cites

2 of 2 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 2 references

Research works printed but not linked: 85

  1. Ackroyd S., 1999, Organizational misbehavior
  2. 10.2307/j.ctv16zjhcj.11 · DOI
  3. 10.2307/j.ctv16zjhcj.7 · DOI
  4. 10.1111/wusa.12366 · DOI
  5. Althusser L., 1971, Lenin and philosophy and other essays, 121
  6. 10.1017/S0147547906000184 · DOI
  7. 10.1108/S0277-283320200000034013 · DOI
  8. Berg J., 2016, Comparative Labor Law Policy Journal, 37, 543
  9. Bonacich E., 2008, Getting the goods: Ports, labor, and the logistics revolution
  10. Burawoy M., 1979, Manufacturing consent: Changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism
  11. Burawoy M., 1985, The politics of production: Factory regimes under capitalism and socialism
  12. 10.1177/0143831X01221002 · DOI · Paper page
  13. 10.1007/978-1-4615-1225-7_9 · DOI
  14. Chun J., 2001, The critical study of work: Labor, technology, and global production, 127
  15. Cockburn C., 1983, Brothers
  16. 10.1177/1461444819891613 · DOI
  17. 10.1177/0730888420941556 · DOI
  18. Dzieza J., 2020, The Verge
  19. Edwards P. K., 1986, Conflict at work: A materialist analysis of workplace relations
  20. Edwards R., 1979, Contested terrain
  21. Fantasia R., 1988, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers
  22. Fleming P., 2014, Resisting work: The corporatization of life and its discontents
  23. Foucault M (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France (pp. 1978–1979). New York: Palgrave.
  24. 10.1007/978-1-349-15845-4 · DOI · Paper page
  25. 10.1177/23780231221082414 · DOI
  26. 10.1111/j.1743-4580.2011.00359.x · DOI
  27. Green J., 2021, WashingtonPost
  28. 10.1177/2378023119870041 · DOI · Paper page
  29. Gutelius B. (2016). Global Production Networks from Below. Geographies of Labor in Logistics . Doctoral dissertation, Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois Chicago.
  30. Hamper B., 1991, Rivethead
  31. Hatton E., 2011, The temp economy: From kelly girls to permatemps in postwar America
  32. Hatton E., 2020, Coerced: work under threat of punishment
  33. Hill David W., 2020, The injuries of platform logistics. Media, 42, 521
  34. Hussain S., 2021, The Los Angeles Times
  35. Kalleberg A., 2018, Precarious lives: Job insecurity and well-being in rich democracies
  36. Kantor J., 2015, The New York Times
  37. Kantor J., The New York Times
  38. Kantor J., The New York Times
  39. Kenney M., 2021, Socio-Economic Review, 1
  40. 10.1177/S0038038500000274 · DOI
  41. Korczynski M., 2009, Service work: Critical perspectives, 73
  42. 10.1177/0003122413481351 · DOI
  43. 10.1177/0730888419859927 · DOI
  44. 10.1177/0730888420941031 · DOI
  45. Kunda G., 1992, Engineering culture
  46. 10.7208/chicago/9780226922591.001.0001 · DOI · Paper page
  47. Lecher C., 2019, The Verge
  48. LeDuff C., 2000, The New York Times
  49. Lichtenstein N., 2009, The retail revolution: How Wal-Mart created a brave new world of business
  50. Long K. A., 2021, Seattle Times
  51. Lorey I., 2015, State of Insecurity
  52. 10.1177/048661347400600206 · DOI · Paper page
  53. 10.1177/0003122415609730 · DOI
  54. Menegus B., 2018, Gizmodo
  55. Meyer S., 1991, The five dollar day: Labor management and social control in the ford motor company, 1908-1921
  56. 10.1525/9780520918344 · DOI
  57. 10.1111/soc4.12926 · DOI
  58. Noble D., 1984, Forces of production
  59. Petrovic M., 2006, Wal-Mart: The face of twenty-first-century capitalism, 102
  60. Pugh A., 2015, The tumbleweed society
  61. 10.2307/j.ctv16zjhcj.13 · DOI
  62. 10.7312/reic18842 · DOI
  63. Roethlisberger F. J., 1939, Management and the worker
  64. Roosevelt M., 2021, The Los Angeles Times
  65. Ross A., 2004, No collar: The humane workplace and its hidden costs
  66. 10.1086/221011 · DOI · Paper page
  67. 10.1177/0730888414551207 · DOI
  68. 10.1177/0003122418823184 · DOI · Paper page
  69. Sharone O., 2014, Flawed system/flawed self: job searching and unemployment experiences
  70. 10.1177/0038038585019002004 · DOI · Paper page
  71. 10.1111/1468-2338.00113 · DOI · Paper page
  72. Thomas R., 1994, What machines can’t do, 10.1525/9780520915077 · DOI
  73. Thompson P., 2011, The Oxford handbook of critical management studies
  74. Vallas S. P., 2012, Work: A critique
  75. 10.1177/0730888403256454 · DOI
  76. 10.2307/1519767 · DOI
  77. Weeks K., 2011, The problem with work: Feminism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries
  78. Weise K., 2020, The New York Times
  79. Weise K., 2022, The New York Times
  80. 10.1007/978-1-349-20466-3_8 · DOI
  81. 10.1007/978-1-349-20466-3_11 · DOI
  82. 10.7591/9781501748905 · DOI
  83. Wood A., Algorithmic management: Consequences for work organisation and working conditions
  84. 10.1332/273241721X16286069087710 · DOI
  85. 10.1177/0730888420922581 · DOI

Cited by

See all 73

Metadata

Authors
Vallas, S. P., Johnston, H., & Mommadova, Y.
Affiliations
  • Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
  • School of Human Resources Management, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ORCID
Vallas, Steven P.
Venue
Work and Occupations
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2022-06-19
Volume
49
Issue
4
Pages
421-456
ISSN
  • 0730-8884
  • 1552-8464
DOI
10.1177/07308884221106922
Cited by
73
References
2
Language
en
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Prime Suspect: Mechanisms of Labor Control at Amazon's Warehouses. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/07308884221106922
The paper
Vallas, S. P., Johnston, H., & Mommadova, Y. (2022). Prime Suspect: Mechanisms of Labor Control at Amazon's Warehouses. Work and Occupations. https://doi.org/10.1177/07308884221106922

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.