Dr Alex Wood

College positions: Senior Research Fellow, Director of Studies in Sociology

University position: Assistant Professor

Subject: History; Sociology

Group membership: Governing Body, Tutorial and Pastoral Team, Chapel Affairs Committee, Libraries Committee, Cripps Gallery Management Group

Dr Alex Wood is Director of Studies in Sociology at Magdalene.

Dr Alex Wood is an Assistant Professor of Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology. His research focuses on the future of work and the transformation of capitalism. His PhD, supervised by Professor Brendan Burchell, examined the consequences of flexibility and insecure schedules for working conditions and power relations in retail. This research has been published in numerous academic journals and in 2020 as the book Despotism on Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace. In this book, he argues that a regime of flexible despotism has emerged from employers’ drive for temporal flexibility, a form of flexibility that workers experience as a new dimension of insecurity and discipline.

Together with Professor Burchell, Dr Wood has investigated the prevalence and consequences of so-called ‘useless jobs’. With colleagues at the University of Oxford, he also conducted pioneering research into working conditions, collective organisation, and resistance among platform workers in the global gig economy. This project, spanning four continents, has been published across eight journal articles. The research demonstrates how digital labour platforms control workers outside of formal employment relationships and how, as a result, workers frequently suffer low pay, work intensity, insecurity, risk and anxiety, physical isolation, and a lack of voice. At the same time, workers often come together to form online communities in order to counter their precarity and the power of platforms. The research also finds widespread support among gig workers for trade unions and workplace democracy. Dr Wood is currently bringing together his past ten years of research on platform work in a forthcoming book titled Labour and Platform Capitalism.

Dr Wood is a graduate of the Cambridge Sociology MPhil and PhD programme. He has previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as a Lecturer in the Sociology of Work at the University of Birmingham, and as a Senior Lecturer in HRM and the Future of Work at the University of Bristol, before returning to Cambridge in 2024.

Research Interests

  • AI
  • Capitalism
  • Labour
  • Platforms

Qualifications

  • PhD Sociology, University of Cambridge
  • MPhil Sociology, University of Cambridge
  • BSc (Hons) Politics and Sociology, University of Aston

Career/Research Highlights

  • 2020: Shortlisted for SAGE Prizes for Innovation and Excellence for Sociology article: ‘Networked but Commodified: The (Dis)Embeddedness of Digital Labour in the Gig Economy.’
  • 2020: Shortlisted for SAGE Prizes for Innovation and Excellence for Work, Employment and Society article: ‘Good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy.’
  • 2013: Best PhD paper at Work, Employment and Society 2013 Conference.

Professional Affiliations

  • British Sociological Association
  • Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics
  • British Universities Industrial Relations Association

KEY PUBLICATIONS

Contesting Algorithmic Workplace Regimes in an era of Flexible Despotism, Wood AJ (in press), Sociology, accepted.

Beyond the ‘Gig Economy’: Towards Variable Experiences of Job Quality in Platform Work, Wood AJ, Martindale N, Burchell BJ (2025), Work, Employment and Society.

Platforms disrupting reputation: precarity and recognition struggles in the remote gig economy, Wood AJ and Lehdonvirta V (2023), Sociology.

Antagonism beyond employment: how the ‘subordinated agency’ of labour platforms generates conflict in the remote gig economy, Wood AJ and Lehdonvirta V (2021), Socio-Economic Review.

Despotism on Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace, Wood AJ (2020), Cornell University Press.

Networked but Commodified: The (Dis)Embeddedness of Digital Labour in the Gig Economy, Wood AJ et al. (2019), Sociology.

Good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy, Wood AJ et al. (2019), Work, Employment and Society.

Email
ajw250@cam.ac.uk