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The nexus between technology and workplace inequality has been a long-standing topic of scholarly interest, now heightened by the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI). Our review moves beyond dystopian or utopian views of AI by identifying four perspectives—normative, cognitive, structural, and relational—espoused by scholars examining the impact of AI on workplace inequality specifically, and the structure and organization of work more broadly. We discuss the respective strengths, limitations, and underlying assumptions of these perspectives and highlight how each perspective speaks to a particular facet of workplace inequality: either encoded, evaluative, wage, or relational inequality. Integrating these perspectives enables a deeper understanding of the mechanisms, processes, and trajectories through which AI influences workplace inequality, as well as the role that organizational managers, workers, and policymakers could play in the process. Toward this end, we introduce a framework on the “inequality cascades” of AI that traces how and when inequality emerges and amplifies cumulatively as AI systems progress through the phases of development, implementation, and use in organizations. In turn, we articulate a research agenda for management and organizational scholars to better understand AI and its multifaceted impact on workplace inequality, and we examine potential mechanisms to mitigate its adverse consequences. 

Research on multisided platforms has emphasized how platform owners accumulate significant power over other platform actors, such as producers and customers, arguing for the need to balance such power with accountability. We review two perspectives on platform accountability: (a) a bottom-up, emergent perspective that focuses on the collective action taken by lower-powered platform actors such as producers (e.g., gig workers, app developers) to enhance rule adequacy and push back against platform owners’ power; and (b) a top-down, institutional perspective that emphasizes preventing extractive opportunism and maintaining a level playing field among different platform actors by enabling legal, regulatory, and governance changes. The bottom-up perspective’s overarching focus is on procedural (rule-focused) fairness, while the top-down perspective’s focus is largely on distributive (outcome-focused) fairness. While both perspectives are important, they have limitations regarding platform accountability, especially given the power and informational asymmetries inherent among platformactors. Therefore, synthesizing across literatures, we provide a framework for platform accountability that accounts for both procedural and distributive fairness, and is based on a fundamental premise: multisided platforms require multisided accountability systems. Thus, our review proposes an approach for enforcing platform accountability that has the potential to rebalance the power between high-powered and low-powered platform actors. 

This paper develops a new understanding about how “client managers”—those using platform labor markets to hire and manage workers—attempt to maintain control when managing skilled contractors. We conducted an inductive field study analyzing interactions between client managers and contractors in software development “gigs” mediated by a platform labor market. The platform provided multiple tools client managers could use for control, including in response to unexpected events. We found that, when managers used the tools to exert coercive control over contractors acting unexpectedly, it backfired and contributed to uncompleted project outcomes. In contrast, when they refrained from using the tools for coercive control in such circumstances and instead engaged in what we call collaborative repair, their actions contributed to completed project outcomes. Collaborative repair refers to interactions that surface misaligned interpretations of a situation and help parties negotiate new, reciprocal expectations that restore trust and willingness to continue an exchange. Client managers’ attempts at collaborative repair yielded fuller understanding of project-related breakdowns and shared investment in new expectations, facilitating effective control and completed projects. This study extends prior theories of control by characterizing the new client manager role created by platforms and demonstrating how initiating repair is integral for managers’ capacity to accomplish control in these comparatively brittle work relationships.