The Social Codes of Tech Workers

ENDORSEMENTS

“In this beautifully crafted book, Robert Dorschel makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the perils of tech professions at a time when they are only gaining in importance. This book will surely be widely read and discussed.”
—Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University; author of Money, Morals, and Manners


“Robert Dorschel achieves the rare feat of making visible the transformation of society through the study of a single group. The Social Codes of Tech Workers is to the digital society of the twenty-first century what C. Wright Mills’s White Collar was to the late industrial society of the twentieth century.”
—Philipp Staab, Professor of Sociology, Humboldt University of Berlin; author of Markets and Power in Digital Capitalism

Datafication is perhaps the most consequential social transformation of our time, and whatever we think of the oligarchs who extract most from it, it is essential to understand its ordinary workers too. Robert Dorschel’s book opens up the experiences and complex positioning of ordinary coders in an enlightening and theoretically rich way. In so doing, he opens a key route to glimpsing what resistance to Big Tech’s dominance might eventually look like.
—Nick Couldry, Professor Of Media, Communications and Social Theory Emeritus, London School Of Economics and Political Science

“Robert Dorschel’s The Social Codes of Tech Workers is a sociological study of class identity among mid-level digital laborers. Drawing on interviews with American and German data scientists and UX designers and grounded in Foucauldian and Bourdieusian analysis, this is an illuminating insight into an important but understudied class within digital capitalism.”
—LSE Review of Books

Robert Dorschel is Assistant Professor in Digital Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His work has been recognized with awards from the Association of Internet Researchers and the German Sociological Association.

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