Autonomy in and Outside the Employment Relationship: An Organizational Perspective

This chapter focuses on the interpretative challenges that digitalization and its possible implications on the regulation of work pose to organizational and labor law scholars. It firstly considers the current organizational debate and points to the mainstream organizational scholarship’s inability to clarify if organizational changes associated with digitalization might indeed enhance workers’ autonomy. Then, it turns its attention to the labor law debate on the autonomy versus subordination traditional legal categories and the proposals advanced to address the regulatory problems that dichotomy engenders in the light of the empirical trends associated with the digitalization of work. Against this background, the essay draws attention toward concepts and analytic distinctions drawn from non-mainstream organizational theories which reflect a processual conception of organization, highlights how they may inform the empirical analysis of the organizational regulation of work and summarizes the insights they offer into the issue of autonomy in and outside the employment relationship.