Managers on balancing employment protection and what’s good for the company: Intended and unintended consequences of a semi-coercive institution

Most sociologists lean left. In surveys and voter-registration studies, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in American sociology ranges between 59 to 1 and 19.5 to 1 (Klein and Stern 2009; see also Klein and Stern 2006; Duarte et al. 2014). One survey reports more self-identified Marxists (25.5 percent) than self-identified Republicans (5.5 percent) in sociology (Gross and Simmons 2007), and another finds that more sociologists are comfortable with the prospect of working with a Communist colleague than a Republican or a hard-core Christian (Yancey 2011).

More disputed is whether the near monopoly of the left is problematic. Most people would agree that ideological monopoly is a problem if the one-sidedness 1) creates a culture where ideological beliefs are treated as self-evidently true, 2) stunts theorizing and understanding by shunting research into certain ideas or topics, or 3) leads researchers to ignore inconvenient knowledge or plausible alternative explanations.

In this chapter, I argue that all three problems surface in the sociological study of gender differences in the labor market (henceforth sometimes referred to as gender sociology). I also argue that the problems emanate from the particular definition of equality embraced by the left, and thus that the two are causally related to one another and greatly overlap.

The motivation for Sociology and Classical Liberalism in Dialogue: Freedom is Something We Do Together is based on two observations: first, sociology as a field is populated with scholars on the left and second, (few but still) classical liberals and libertarian scholars are found in neighboring social science fields, such as economics, political science, and political philosophy. Can scholarship benefit if sociology and classical liberal ideas are in dialogue? To answer the question, the book gathers sociologists, criminologists, demographers, and political scientists that care about classical liberal ideas, or are willing to engage their sociological thinking with classical liberal ideas. Not all authors would identify themselves as classical liberals. These contributors discuss sociological topics through the lens of classical liberalism, asking how issues such as class, gender, or race relations can be viewed with a different perspective. Chapters also delve into the intersection of sociology and classical liberalism, exploring where viewpoints conflict and where they align.

In this paper, we identify when and why migrant gig workers experience liminality in the socio-spatial context of food delivery in the Swedish gig economy. We analyse qualitative interviews and informal conversations with food delivery workers in Stockholm through the lens of the territory-place-scale-network (TPSN) framework as developed by Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner and Martin Jones. We find that workers are challenged to deal with triple liminality regarding their work identities, workplaces and work organisation through platforms. Focusing on liminality as a central aspect of gig work, we further find that despite having little worker agency, some of the study participants engage in what we call liminal agency, that is actively pursuing possibilities for progress in uncertain states of in-betweenness. By unpacking the liminal dynamics that especially migrant food delivery riders are confronted with in their daily working lives, this study contributes to the debate on the migrant gig economy, the spatial turn in organisation studies and efforts from human geography to understand agency in precarious gig work.