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Recent years have seen enormous attention paid to automation and its potential implications for the future of work. This study rejects unhelpful speculation and, instead, poses the question 'what is shaping automation and its predicted effects?' In contrast to the technological determinism framing much of the current debate, this study utilises the social shaping of technology (SST) approach, a theoretically informed body of research largely overlooked by sociology of work scholars. Compared with mainstream commentary, which treats technology as separate from the social world, SST facilitates examination of how the development and use of technology are shaped by broader socioeconomic concerns and politics. The analysis presented is based on an understanding of how technology is shaped by existing technology, economics, social relations, gender and the state.

This article explores the inter-relationship of gender, sexuality, race and class among cabin crew, members of trade union BASSA, in the British Airways dispute of 2009–2011. It evaluates the utility of intersectional analysis in the context of industrial action, investigating the ways crew mobilised intersectional identities and class interests. In their narratives, crew evoked the 1984–1985 miners' strike, but rejected a version of class and militancy based on a perceived historical legacy of class as white, heterosexual and male. Engaging with debates in Sociology on class, the article restores work as the key site of class formation and identifies BASSA as providing the organisational and ideological resources to legitimate an inclusive worker interest that transcended sectional identities and generated a reimagined and reconfigured class identity.

Although the call centre is much researched, the literature on gender remains surprisingly undeveloped given the importance of this setting for women's employment. This study of role segmentation in four call centres demonstrates women's disproportionate representation in more routinized mass production roles, as opposed to higher status or managerial grades. It also analyses three explanations – human capital, domestic status and supervisor career support. The evidence shows that women face a 'glass ceiling', first, on entry to the call centre in terms of human capital disadvantage and levels of domestic constraint and, second, within the call centre in their ability to secure supervisor support for career opportunities. We argue that even for women with similar career aspiration and human capital to men, domestic responsibilities create obstacles before they reach the glass ceiling, especially for managerial roles, and contribute thereafter to reinforcing their concentration in more intensive, lower status work.

As part of a broader current of critique of the economic and political dynamics of prison privatisation — a critique that initially emanated from the USA — this paper focuses on Scotland and on research carried out at its then only private penal institution, HMP Kilmarnock. The authors dismantle the government's case for extending prison privatisation by drilling deep into the experience of Kilmarnock and demonstrating the deleterious effects of marketisation for prison officers and prisoners alike. Degraded pay and conditions and systemic understaffing corroded morale, exposed staff and inmates to risk, and contributed to massive officer turnover. Compelling evidence comes from sources ordinarily unavailable to critical researchers, such as internal company and government documentation.

The Scottish Parliament recently considered proposals, which, if implemented, would lead to a considerable expansion of prison privatization. Both the Scottish Prison Service and the Scottish Executive used what they claimed to be an independently verified cost saving of £700 million as the major justification for these proposals. The way this figure was constructed and used provides an example of the increasing tendency on the part of government to quantify what cannot be quantified, to 'make the invisible visible'. This article uses several methods to interrogate this figure of £700 million, particularly the role played by 'net present value' in its construction. Its fuller significance emerges from an understanding of the contexts of the Private Finance Initiative and Public Private Partnership, the experience of prison privatization and the foreclosure of alternatives to privatization. This article is based upon an analysis of government documentation, interview evidence with key players and testimony given by them to a cross-party committee charged with investigating these proposals.

This article examines two commonly adopted trade union strategies to increase the representation of under-represented groups – first, reserved seats on union decision-making bodies and second, self-organisation, involving separate structures. It does so through the case of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), whose equality reforms were considered remarkable within the union movement and fire service due to the union's small size and highly male-dominated, white membership. However, reserved seats at senior levels were later removed following objection on the grounds of democratic legitimacy. The article examines this decision using original data comparing UK union rules for additional representation. It exposes the tensions for small, male-dominated unions of reconciling Young's theoretical principles of 'group-differentiated democracy' with the realities of perceived democratic legitimacy, and argues that progress on union equality is contingent on both the particular forms of democratic representation and the political and industrial context.

This article examines two commonly adopted trade union strategies to increase the representation of under-represented groups – first, reserved seats on union decision-making bodies and second, self-organisation, involving separate structures. It does so through the case of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), whose equality reforms were considered remarkable within the union movement and fire service due to the union's small size and highly male-dominated, white membership. However, reserved seats at senior levels were later removed following objection on the grounds of democratic legitimacy. The article examines this decision using original data comparing UK union rules for additional representation. It exposes the tensions for small, male-dominated unions of reconciling Young's theoretical principles of 'group-differentiated democracy' with the realities of perceived democratic legitimacy, and argues that progress on union equality is contingent on both the particular forms of democratic representation and the political and industrial context.