ABSTRACT
The classical sociology of work has had some interest in the spaces of work, and less interest in technology as an actor in such workspaces. Marx and Engels, certainly, emphasize the factory as a particular milieu for the development of capitalism (see the famous chapter on ‘The Factory’ in Marx 1972). One can also discern a similar emphasis in Simmel’s (2002) account of how the space of the industrialized city gave rise to a series of psychological comportments crucial to the development of modern life, particularly the blasé attitude and the acceptance of exchange rather than use as the main principle of the economy. It is fair to say that the sociology of work after Marx and Simmel was especially concerned with questions of class relations rather than spatio-cultural or technological questions (although the cultural could often be understood as flowing directly from the economic); so, for example, John Goldthorpe (1963), who did some important work on critiques of embourgeoisement, and Harry Braverman (1974), who developed the theme of the alienating powers of modern scientific work organization, are quite typical of the major concerns of the subdiscipline. It is not so much that technology is absent from these accounts, or that the spaces of work are not acknowledged; it is rather that, as Bruno Latour (1993) puts it, most sociologists are intent on ‘purifying’ human and non-human actors; human actors are what really matter to sociologists (especially, in the sociology of work, in the form of class or gender relations), and even as non-human actors are introduced into the story, the most that they can hope for is a supporting role.
