Fulfillment of the Work Games: Warehouse Workers' Experiences with Algorithmic Management

2025-08-12

AI Summary

Existing scholarship on algorithmic management disproportionately focuses on platform gig work, neglecting traditional manufacturing and logistics contexts—particularly the lived experiences and resistance practices of workers subjected to real-time labor tracking and mandatory productivity metrics in Amazon fulfillment centers. Method: Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study—including sustained participant observation and in-depth interviews—the authors develop the original concept of “work-as-game” to analyze how workers strategically reassert autonomy amid pervasive quantification. Contribution/Results: The study advances algorithmic management theory by reframing consent and resistance as dialectically intertwined, embedding micro-level worker practices within broader critiques of algorithmic governance. It provides foundational empirical evidence and conceptual innovation from a core warehousing setting, thereby enriching scholarly understanding of technologically mediated labor control.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Jobs/Labor

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content

Abstract

The introduction of algorithms into a large number of industries has already restructured the landscape of work and threatens to continue. While a growing body of CSCW research centered on the future of work has begun to document these shifts, relatively little is known about workers' experiences beyond those of platform-mediated gig workers. In this paper, we turn to a traditional work sector, Amazon fulfillment centers (FC), to deepen our field's empirical examination of algorithmic management. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, we show how FC workers react to managers' interventions, imposed productivity rates, and quantified objectification when subjected to labor-tracking systems in their physical work environments. Situating FC workers' resistance to algorithmic systems and metrics within the current CSCW literature allows us to explicate and link the nuanced practices of FC workers to the larger discourse of algorithmic control mechanisms. In addition, we show how FC workers' resistance practices are emblematic of 'work games'--a long-studied means by which workers agentically configure ("trick") their engagement within work systems. We argue that gaining a more nuanced understanding of workers' resistance and consent in relation to algorithmic management expands our ability to critique and potentially disassemble the economic and political forces at the root of these sociotechnical labor systems.

Problem

• Workers' experiences with algorithmic management in warehouses
• Impact of labor-tracking systems on physical work environments
• Workers' resistance and consent to algorithmic control mechanisms

Innovation

• Ethnographic study on Amazon fulfillment center workers
• Analyzing resistance to algorithmic management systems
• Exploring work games as worker resistance tactics