This article explains variation in the extent to which high skill, high wage workers are able to defend their job security in services-based production regimes. It compares two cases of downsizing at German multinational technology firms in the early 2000s, and shows how workers can protect their jobs against employer threats by building power in the workplace. I find that tech workers mobilize against downsizing when they creatively redeploy management’s discourse to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of collective action in a discourse that resonates with their occupational identity as technical experts. Highlighting the significance of discursive strategies to worker power in the information technology sector advances research on the comparative political economy of liberalization, which tends to view weak labor as a structural characteristic of the knowledge economy. While the transition from manufacturing- to services-led growth has weakened labor, with union density declining and national institutions becoming less effective, successful resistance to downsizing demonstrates that these historical developments relocate and recast workers’ power resources, rather than destroy them outright. This article focuses on political struggle in the workplace to offer empirical evidence that workers can develop considerable power even when they lack access to labor’s traditional resources.

The growth models perspective analyzes the role of social blocs in crafting countries' economic policies, but its treatment of business power as purely structural prevents it from addressing an important question in the politics of digital transformation: How have new sectors with miniscule economic footprints been able to influence economic policy? This paper explores how tech and venture capital successfully lobbied for financial deregulation at the beginning of digital transformation in the United States. The paper argues that explaining the role of social blocs in digital transformation requires incorporating discourse analysis and develops a conceptual framework around three discursive components in the dynamics of social blocs: coordination, persuasion, and performativity. This framework contributes to theory development in the growth models perspective and illustrates how the concept of social blocs can help make sense of the politics of digital transformation.

Firms’ increasing focus on financial markets has undermined employment conditions, as well as workers’ ability to mobilize. Taking a discursive approach to employment relations under financialization, this article develops a theory of discursive opportunism (DO) to explain how organizers can adopt management's discursive techniques for control and transform them into resources for collective action. The article makes two contributions. First, it illustrates that management's turn to market discourse under financialization varies across individual workplaces, even within a single firm. Second, it offers a theory of DO to explain how organizers can mobilize workers in financializing firms when they develop tactics appropriate to a workplace's distinctive discursive context. A comparative case study of tech workers responding to mass layoffs provides empirical support for this theory, showing that organizers’ tactics are critical to shaping the path of financialization at the workplace level.

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