This chapter addresses research on worker skill, technology, and control over the labor process by focusing on routine immaterial labor or knowledge work. Based on participant observation conducted among analytics workers at a digital publishing network, I find that analytics workers appear paradoxically autonomous and empowered by management while being bound by ever-evolving, calculative cloud-based information and communication technologies (ICTs). Workers appear free to “be creative,” while ever-evolving ICTs exert unpredictable control over work. Based on this finding, I argue that sociology’s tendency to take organizational boundaries and technological stability for granted hampers analyses of contemporary forms of work. Thus, sociologists of work must extend outward – beyond communities of practice, labor markets, and the state – to include the ever-evolving, infrastructural, socio-technical networks in which work and organizations are embedded. Additionally, research on the experience of immaterial labor suggests that ICTs afford pleasurably immersive experiences that bind workers to organizations and their fields. Complicating this emerging body of research, I find workers acutely frustrated by these unpredictable, ever-evolving, cloud-based ICTs.

Taking a labor process approach to organizations in cultural industries, this article compares expressive and routine workers (audio engineers and studio attendants) within a US music-recording organization. I describe a practical control strategy that aims to reproduce the pleasurable feel of expressive work among routine cultural workers. Because this strategy depends upon workers’ aesthetic experiences of technological objects, I term this strategy aesthetic enrollment. Drawing upon theories of aesthetic experience and Callon and Law’s enrollment processes, I theorize this strategy as a form of control. Engineers come to love their ability to express creativity at work and appear captivated by the organization’s aesthetically compelling technical artifacts (music equipment or “gear”). Among rehearsal hall attendants, management provides similar aesthetically appealing, expressive technologies. These objects afford experiences among routine staff that resemble those found in more expressive occupations, providing opportunities for creativity in the context of routine, task-oriented work. This strategy manages the “feel” of work and thus incorporates employees by way of their relationship with technical artifacts – part of the organization’s aesthetic landscape.