Workplace politics in the knowledge economy

Thesis

Workplaces have historically been important sites of political preference formation and political action. Over the past two decades, influential work has emphasized the political consequences of socio-structural transformations in the labour market, from declining unionization to dualization and automation. However, existing work has overlooked how politics permeates modern workplaces in ways that are significantly different from the union-led labour politics of industrial societies. This dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework to understand workplace politics in knowledge-based societies, focusing on the United Kingdom and United States. I argue that contemporary workplace structures and skills requirements, coupled with the growing importance of nonpecuniary dimensions of work, make political identities relevant to understanding workers' and firms' behaviour in the knowledge economy, while politicized workplace networks become consequential for political engagement beyond the workplace. This argument unfolds across the three main empirical chapters of this dissertation. Using an original survey of 2,000 UK workers, Chapter 3 demonstrates that working in a collaborative setting and belonging to a younger cohort are associated with informal political talk, which, in turn, influences political engagement outside work and demands for corporate political speech. Building on these findings, Chapter 4 introduces a conjoint experiment showing that political identities shape workers' willingness to collaborate and socialize with colleagues under certain conditions. Lastly, Chapter 5 examines the conditions under which firms in the US engage with corporate progressive speech to align politically with their progressive workforce. Combining text data from Twitter and from companies’ financial reporting with different firm-level measures of employee ideology and labour market data, I find that publicly traded firms relying on a Democratic-leaning workforce tend to engage publicly more frequently with progressive causes, particularly when facing employee retention and recruitment pressures. More broadly, this dissertation speaks to the importance of keeping workplaces, firms, and the social interactions unfolding within them at the forefront of research into the politics of advanced democracies.

Authors: Cornago Bonal, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-be99bvd7d
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: political participation; corporate political speech; political behaviour; workplace; political economy; knowledge economy
• Subjects: Political economy; Political sociology; Political science