2026 Theses Doctoral

The Social Distance: Outsourcing, Industrialization, and Surplus Populations in the Post Lockdown 2020’s

Habr, Katy

The COVID-19 pandemic reconfigured the American political economy. Whether through technologically mediated transformations in supply chains exacerbated by the growth of online ordering, or the eruption of mass protest both against and for racial justice, the ground beneath precarious populations’ feet continues to shift. My dissertation aims to connect changes both inside and outside the workplace to the changing political economy of the US, which is manifested in the increase of insecurity as a state, whether experienced as a worker or a citizen.

The first, “A Platform for Change: Deskilling, Reclassification, and the Reorganization of California's Grocery Industry,” published in The Sociological Quarterly, examines how the proximity of traditional grocery stores in Southern California to platform firms is impacting job security and working conditions for employees. Using interviews with workers, union representatives, and industry experts alongside analysis of company filings and industry publications, I show how employers are using platforms to reorganize work first, through the creation of positions that organize work in the same way as platforms; second, through the gradual replacement of workers with platform workers; and third, through informal scheduling pressure that combines with platform technologies to push grocery workers to become platform workers. The result of this platformization is a form of hybrid firm that blurs the lines between platform workers and employees.

The second paper, “’The Amazon Warehouse Within my Store’: E-commerce Adoption and Conflicted Industrialization in Southern California’s Grocery Industry,” draws on the data collected above, and explores how e-commerce is shaping working conditions. I first find that grocery store employees are experiencing the industrialization of work, where work can be rationalized, routinized, and high labor costs reduced accordingly. Second, this industrialization creates conflict in the use of space, time and the meaning of work. Third, contradictory factors, including high costs, competition, and stalled automation shape the adoption of e-commerce. I reflect on how organizational context and imagined futures impact technological adoption and working conditions.

Beyond the workplace, individuals are embedded in a broader economic and political landscape, where racial and economic justices and injustices are linked. My third paper, “A Convergence of Crises: Sudden Employment Loss and Black Lives Matter Protest Attendance During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” jointly authored with Hannah Pullen-Blasnik and published in Socius, combines employment loss data with crowdsourced protest data to understand the impact of COVID-19 related job loss on attendance at the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. Combining social movements literature with the theory of racial capitalism, we emphasize how economic and state violence intertwine to reproduce inequality, while BLM link racial justice to broader struggles for global equality and democracy. We find that at the CBSA level, elevated rates of job loss during the early months of the pandemic were correlated with increased protest attendance at local BLM protests. This effect is not present for anti-lockdown protests, underscoring the robustness of our results and contributing theoretically to the idea of a “triple crisis” of police brutality, economic precarity, and mass death leading to a rejection of the status quo.