The rapid growth of the platform economy has provoked scholarly discussion of its consequences for the nature of work and employment. We identify four major themes in the literature on platform work and the underlying metaphors associated with each. Platforms are seen as entrepreneurial incubators, digital cages, accelerants of precarity, and chameleons adapting to their environments. Each of these devices has limitations, which leads us to introduce an alternative image of platforms: as permissive potentates that externalize responsibility and control over economic transactions while still exercising concentrated power. As a consequence, platforms represent a distinct type of governance mechanism, different from markets, hierarchies, or networks, and therefore pose a unique set of problems for regulators, workers, and their competitors in the conventional economy. Reflecting the instability of the platform structure, struggles over regulatory regimes are dynamic and difficult to predict, but they are sure to gain in prominence as the platform economy grows. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 46 is July 30, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Social scientists increasingly claim that work structures based on the mass production or "Fordist" paradigm have grown obsolete, giving way to a more flexible, "postFordist" structure of work. These claims have been much disputed, however, giving rise to a sharply polarized debate over the outcome of workplace restructuring. I seek to reorient the debate by subjecting the post-Fordist approach to theoretical and empirical critique. Several theoretical weaknesses internal to the post-Fordist approach are identified, including its uncertain handling of "power" and "efficiency" as factors that shape work organizations; its failure to acknowledge multiple responses to the crisis of Fordism, several of which seem at odds with the post-Fordist paradigm; and its tendency to neglect the resurgence of economic dualism and disparity within organizations and industries. Review of the empirical literature suggests that, despite scattered support for the post-Fordist approach, important anomalies exist (such as the growing authority of "mental" over manual labor) that post-Fordism seems powerless to explain. In spite of its ample contributions, post-Fordist theory provides a seriously distorted guide to the nature of workplace change in the United States. Two alternative perspectives toward the restructuring of work organizations are sketchedneoinstitutionalist and "flexible accumulation" models-which seem likely to inspire more fruitful lines of research on the disparate patterns currently unfolding within American work organizations.

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Efforts to understand the structure of the emerging knowledge economy have paid particular attention to the shifting boundary between academic and commercial (for-profit) research, especially in life sciences. Yet, empirical studies have tended to adopt a segmented approach, focusing on either industry or the academy, thus obscuring the increasingly interwoven nature of these two domains. In this paper, we explore the changing organizational logics that govern both academic and corporate science, using interview data gathered from two important clusters of the biotechnology industry: Route 128 in Massachusetts and the San Francisco Bay area. These data, while provisional, lead us to suggest that cultural traffic between university and commercial science has increased, blurring the boundary between them and generating a new and often contradictory knowledge regime, the product of a growing confluence of organizational logics that had previously been distinct. The emergence of this regime, which conforms to Stark's (2001) notion of 'heterarchy', holds important implications for prevailing theories of university-industry relations and of organizational change as well.