Technological Change,Work and Power: A Framework for Analyzing how Actors and Institutions Distribute Power in the AI-Driven Technological Change Process

Abstract

Artificial intelligence and other digital technologies are rapidly transforming work, reviving longstanding questions about technology, labor, and power. While much attention has focused on AI's capabilities, its effects on work are neither uniform nor technologically determined. Rather, they depend on how digital technologies are embedded in practices and institutional power relations structuring authority, control, and autonomy. This editorial introduces a special issue on AI-driven technological change, work, and power, and develops a framework for understanding these transformations. Drawing on endogeneity-contingency perspectives, we construct ideal-type configurations of production regimes and production logics. Building on the six empirical studies in the issue, we conceptualize technological change as the outcome of negotiated processes involving managers, workers, unions, technology providers, and regulators, whose relative power shapes the design and deployment of digital systems. Our framework distinguishes production regimes, understood as the institutional balance of power between labor and management, potentially alongside other actors, from production logics embedded in technologies, managerial strategies, and practices orienting work toward control or autonomy. We show that AI and digital tools generate divergent outcomes depending on whether they are deployed in management-dominated or more balanced production regimes, and how they interact with control- or autonomy-oriented production logics. We thus contribute an integrated framework linking workplace dynamics to broader institutional structures, highlighting how technological change both reflects and reproduces differences in authority and control while remaining subject to contestation. We illustrate this framework through the six studies and conclude by outlining implications for future research on AI, work, and power.