Special Issue Proposal_Platforms in the City: spaces and alliances for the renewal of social movements in the platform economy (original) (raw)
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The social and economic impacts of the emerging platform economy are most obvious in urban settings, where platforms are giving rise to unfamiliar dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, cooperation and division, as well as social and political integration and fragmentation. Platform urbanisation has created a new and unprecedented kind of politics. It has given rise to new political spaces and new subjectivities, resulting in a permanent reorganisation of 'historical' assemblages of territory, authority and rights. Drawing on the results of the European-based PLUS Project (Platform Labour in Urban Spaces: Fairness, Welfare, Development), this themed collection offers a fresh perspective on the platform economy by analysing it in terms of the relationship between urban contexts and the ongoing platformisation process, with an emphasis on how this relationship is reshaping (platform) labour and reconfiguring (or even reinvigorating) social action. Along the way, the articles in this issue consider whether platforms are useful for the development of urban environments and labour markets, or whether urban environments and labour markets are useful for the development of platforms. Likewise, they seek to identify the conditions under which relevant actors can mobilise and build alliances to ensure that such forms of development can be made to benefit not only workers but also (urban) citizens and the (urban) environment in general.
Digital Geography and Society, 2024
This paper explores the landscape of labour in the platform economy and, more specifically, the ways local economic activities and actors are exposed to pressures of platformisation, building on the case of the Airbnb platform and the digitally-mediated short-term rental (STR) market in Athens. Conceptualising STR networks as infrastructural assemblages and through a qualitative study building on 27 semi-structured interviews with relevant actors, I focus on: tracing the wide range of workers who undertake essential tasks, the employment statuses, compensations and modes of engagement of workers, restrictions and gender-dimensions, as well as the content and attributes of STR-related work. My main argument is built around the notion of ‘platform worker’ and the need to expand it beyond workers that are directly related to the platforms, in order to include the on-site labour force upon which the creation and everyday operation of broader platform ecosystems and related infrastructure are depended.
South Atlantic Quarterly , 2021
Platform capitalism has enabled digital platforms to bring producers, consumers, and workers in a multisided marketplace with the purpose of collecting data. The resulting commodification of materiality and sociality in the digital sphere and the proprietary control of data open opportunities for value creation and realization, quite distinct from the value propositions of industrial manufacturing. As the relationship between value generation and human labor becomes tenuous or invisible, management strategies to appropriate value extends beyond labor control to direct appropriation. This article explores how labor responds to such devices of control and appropriation by digital platforms. Using the typological approach, the study argues that labor resistance emerges as a direct response to the management strategies of platforms in the form of granular resistance, data activism, trade unions and workers’ organization, and collective ownership.
Mobilizing against the odds. Solidarity in action in the platform economy
Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 2022
The relationship between working conditions and the development of collective solidarity has been much debated in sociology over the past century. The article contributes to this debate by exploring two recent cases of worker mobilization in the context of the Italian platform economy, concerning Amazon delivery drivers and food delivery couriers. Both groups developed specific identity frames in the course of their mobilizations in four Italian cities between 2018 and 2019, which differed significantly. The article explains those differences through a theoretical framework that bridges social movement and labor studies. While Amazon delivery drivers adopted a mobilizing strategy aimed narrowly at improving their conditions as Amazon workers, food delivery couriers elaborated a broader identity framing as precarious platform workers. The difference can be connected to specific features of labor organization, in particular regarding the diverse conditions met by digital innovation in the two sectors: While Amazon drivers belong to a technologically advanced segment (e-commerce) of a traditional sector (logistics), food delivery couriers are part of a new, platform-based sector. The article shows how such sectoral variation affected ways of collectively organizing, forms of solidarity and identity framing.
Platform Work: From Digital Promises to Labor Challenges
Partecipazione e Conflitto, 2019
The pervasiveness of the digital ecosystem reconfigures the organization of work. The new industrial revolution is increasingly based on the platform as a new productive paradigm. Platforms are more than a technical device and they produce huge effects in the labour market: lowering access credentials and empowering casualization of work, dis/re-intermediation labour demand and supply, affecting motivations and rewarding systems, reconfiguring process of control and risks transfer, renewing regulative standards, or re-organize representativeness and welfare protection. Fragmentation, precariousness, flexibility and instability become permanent traits of the workforce fostering the emergence of the cybertariat. Moreover, connectivity, evaluation and surveillance determine new working conditions tested on workers outside any bargaining process or institutional work arrangement. Platform workers (both high skilled and low skilled) are still largely unorganized and isolated. Similarly t...
To exploit and dispossess: The twofold logic of platform capitalism
Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 2021
This paper addresses the relation between capital and digital labour in the context of so-called platform capitalism. Based on the taxonomy proposed by A. Casillion-demand labour, crowdwork or microwork, and social media labour-I argue that the concept of exploitation is not sufficient to fully account for the logic of platform capitalism, as it only makes up one of its dimensions. The other central dimension is that which targets data capture, which I call, using Harvey's term, 'dispossession'. Far from proposing a fixed delimitation of the concept of labour, I argue that the two dimensions operate together and, in many cases, it is difficult to isolate them, but they do demand the invention of different political strategies.
Power Struggles in the Digital Economy: Platforms, Workers, and Markets
This workshop addresses the changing nature of work and the important role of exchange platforms as both intermediaries and managers. It aims to bring together interdisciplinary and critical scholars working on the power dynamics of digitally mediated labor. By doing so, the workshop provides a forum for discussing current and future research opportunities on the digital economy, including the sharing economy, the platform economy, the gig economy, and other adjacent framings. Of particular interest to this workshop is the intersection between worker and provider subjectivities and the roles platforms take in managing work through algorithms and software. Our one-day workshop accommodates up to 20 participants.
Platforms and Shared Economy: Precarity of Work or Building Agency?
The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 2023
The emergence of platforms and the associated idea of the shared economy have fostered a lot of research relating to the future of work. The question that arises is: does the advent of platform work enhance precarity of work as contracts become increasingly informal or does it build agency as the barriers to work participation decline? It is critical to understand the nuances of the ongoing processes and recognize the heterogeneity among platforms as precarity of work or agency may be a function of the nature of the platform and the type of work that it offers. This paper presents a tentative heuristic framework that can be used to understand precarity and agency in the context of the platform economy. This framework and some empirical evidence is used to compare two types of platforms in the food sector to understand the nuances of the processes at work.
Towards a political economy of platform-mediated work
Studies in Political Economy, 2020
Platform-mediated work, characterized as digital intermediation between workers and buyers of labour service, most famously exemplified by Uber, reveals how the transformation of the forces of production is reshaping relations of production. Using a political economy approach, this article takes us behind market exchanges between workers, platform operators, and clients to examine who extracts surplus value from workers, and how. It identifies two distinct models based on whether labour is performed locally on the ground or through the cloud.
Delivery on the Promise of the platform economy - A research report
IT for Change, 2020
This paper examines the influence of digital platforms on Chinese workers across two booming on-demand service industries: ride-hailing and food-delivery. Between December 2017 and December 2018, we conducted over 100 semi-structured interviews with participant workers on both kinds of platforms, and over 20 interviews with other stakeholders, including company managers, managers from third-party labor agencies, engineers at the R&D department of the platform firm, and grassroots work organizers in China. In addition, we conducted a nationwide survey study of drivers (N=1,889) on ride-hailing platforms and a survey study of riders on online takeaway platforms in Beijing (N-1,399). We systematically reviewed local and national government policies and regulations concerning digital development in general and digital platforms in particular in order to make our study historically informed and culturally sensitive. Though digital platforms have attracted considerable scholarly and legal attention in the past few years, this project is among one of the first to center on worker’s experience, and through their lens, to understand the impact of platformization of work in China. Our empirical findings are three-fold. First, young, migrant, and informal workers dominate the platform-mediated on-demand service industries in China, which is consistent with the dominance of informal work in China’s service economy. Second, platform workers face intersectional labor control from algorithms designed and used by the digital platforms – the so-called “invisible boss”, as well as traditional human managers. There is a rapid expansion of third-party labor agency for platform-mediated markets for both ride-hailing and food delivery services, which exert no less significant influence on worker’s welfare and livelihood than algorithmic control of the work process. Worker’s informal status and the multiplication of third-party labor agency exacerbate algorithmic control and the segmentation of the existing informal labor market. Third, workers engage in an array of formal and informal organizations to survive and thrive in the platform economy, ranging from forming social media support groups to exchange mundane tactics, to organizing collective actions like protests and strikes. Local factors, which include but are not limited to the policies made by local regulatory authority and the robustness of local trade unions and grassroots worker-community cause local disparity in workers’ livelihood across geography. Nonetheless, we find some promising efforts made by grassroots worker organizations and local branches of the official trade union to support platform workers. Overall, policies and regulations lag behind in addressing, in a clear and viable manner, the issues associated with “double bosses” facing platform workers and the respective responsibilities of platform companies and third-party labor agencies for workers’ welfare. Our analysis leads to the conclusion that policy for the good practice of platform work is incomplete without addressing broad challenges of regulating private platform companies and their business model. Therefore, we put forward recommendations in the areas of labor protection, platform governance, and value redistribution, of which some areas require cross-departmental collaborations among policymakers.