How do digital technologies complicate relationships between workers and employers, and among workers themselves? What do they do to gendered expectations of work and to workers’ social lives?
In this stream of research, I build on Joan Acker’s (1990) foundational theory of the ideal worker to understand work in the digital era. I examine how platform labour, artificial intelligence and remote work arrangements reshape gender relations and people’s working lives — and how workers contest those changes.
Lee, Youngrong, and Erin Reid (2026), “The digital ideal worker image: How digital technology is shifting work’s temporal and spatial boundaries”, Research in Organizational Behaviour. (equal-authorship)
Acker’s theory that organizations and the jobs within them are designed around a masculine image of an ideal worker (1990) has had an outsized impact for scholarly understanding of work, organizations and inequality. Yet, digital technologies have altered the work world that Acker explained by disrupting work’s longstanding time and space boundaries. We bring extant scholarship on the classic ideal worker image together with research on the rising use of digital technology at work to theorize the emergence of a digital ideal worker image. We
argue that this image is shaped by assumptions about time and space associated with the classic ideal worker image, but that digital technologies also create new expectations about when and where people should work. Our analysis points to a multidimensional expansion of temporal expectations and a loosened, reconfigured set of spatial expectations. We unpack how digital technologies control adherence to the digital ideal worker image, the sophisticated digital and relational skills that digital ideal workers must develop and examine the image’s distinctive implications for inequality. We root our theorizing in examples from three widespread applications of digital technologies at work—remote work, platform work, and generative AI. We conclude by proposing novel research directions for scholarship on digital ideal workers and the work world that they inhabit.
Working paper: Unmaking the Organisational Lives of the Worker, Making the non-worker
In this working paper, “Unmaking the Organisational Lives of the Worker: Making Non-workers” (data analysis ongoing), I develop the concept of the “non-worker” to theorise how gig work falls outside the conventional —and historically masculine— categories of employment that Acker (1990) identified in her foundational work on gendered organisations. Through empirical and conceptual comparison, I ask what this means for workers’ organisational, economic and social lives. Drawing on fieldwork in Toronto, I compare gig workers —defined by piecemeal tenure and organisational and legal unboundedness— with Acker’s ideal worker, illuminating how established categories of employment and worker identity are being unsettled.
