Over the past two decades, vendors have moved the development, operation and maintenance of enterprise software into cloud infrastructures managed by a handful of cloud companies. Critical scholars have recognized this capacity to produce and deliver software at scale–now often referred to as software-as-a-service, or SaaS–as part of cloud companies’ growing infrastructural power. However, while prior scholarship has examined the political economic ramifications of this entanglement, it often treats scalability and infrastructural power as accomplished facts, rather than contested concepts. This article complicates these concepts by examining the emergence of SaaS at a time when neither the scalability nor the infrastructural power of cloud companies was yet stabilized. Drawing on diverse sources, it analyzes Salesforce as a case that provides insight into how incremental discursive and material efforts at consolidating its infrastructural power over software production shaped the conditions under which the deployment of scalable software services to a vast number of client organizations became possible. By foregrounding software production, this article treats scalability as a sociotechnical achievement forged alongside ongoing attempts by cloud companies to establish and defend their infrastructural power, rather than an inherent attribute of contemporary cloud infrastructures. In doing so, it contributes to critical scholarship on cloud computing by underlining the co-constitutive nature of infrastructural power and scalability while situating them as fragile–rather than firmly established and uncontested–outcomes of historical contingencies. ... Read more

Precarious workers often receive relatively lower wages than those in formal employment. Determining the difference between wages that promote a decent life and the current income received by workers can orient ways of tackling precarious work conditions. In this chapter, we present both the process and results from a study conducted in the Philippines on one of the first weighted psychometric approaches that can be utilized in enriching our understanding of fair income in the context of precarity. Our aims are two-fold. First, we propose a psycho-economic gauge of precarity, which links individual assessments of what constitutes a decent life and the wage level that may enable the attainment of such life. We argue that this alternative approach is important in refocusing the attention to a more worker-centric perspective on the issue of precarity. Second, we make a case for the feasibility of how Human Resource Management practitioners and employers or organizations can greatly contribute to minimizing precarity by ensuring provision of decent work through living wages. We consequently gave suggestions on how organizations can provide fair income to workers through a myriad of strategies that can be considered based on what may work in specific contexts. ... Read more