Search Results
Search Results
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Algorithmic Management in the Food Delivery Sector – a Contested Terrain?
Forms of algorithmic management (AM) play an essential role in organizing food-delivery work by deploying artificial intelligence-based systems to coordinate driver routes. Given the risks of precarity and threats posed by AM, which are typically related to (migrant) platform work, the question arises to what extent structures of co-determination can positively shape this type of work and the technologies involved. Based on an in-depth case study within a large food-delivery company, this article is guided by two questions: (1) How do companies use algorithm-based management and performance control, and how do the couriers perceive them? (2) What priorities, strategies, resources, and achievements do works councils and trade unions have with regard to co-determination practices? Our analyses indicate that algorithmic management poses problems of non-transparency and information asymmetry, which in turn call for new forms of and procedures for co-determination. Our study does not find evidence that AM practices aim to individually profile and discipline couriers. The main challenges for the works council and trade unions arise from the couriers’ generally precarious working and employment conditions; data- and AM-related issues do not represent the central area of conflict. However, our study identifies new demands regarding the co-determination of AM and underlines the importance of institutional regulation at the legal and sectoral level.
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Algorithmic Management: From Technology to Politics and Theory
This article provides an overview of the concept of ‘algorithmic management’. This concept has played an important role as an organizing frame for empirical research seeking to demystify the role of labor platforms in intermediating paid work. More recently, this concept has helped shed light on the increasing use of computer algorithms to automate managerial tasks in conventional work settings. However, beyond platform work, most research is confined to warehousing, with only a few notable studies in manufacturing and retail. Moreover, most empirical investigations highlight the conditional nature of algorithmic management, with human managers retaining important functions. Only recently have studies begun to go beyond technical functions and consider how human elements (worker, manager, and technologist) shape such systems. Relatedly, the contingencies, moderations, and variations in algorithmic management have received insufficient consideration. These weaknesses result from a tendency to generalize from single case studies without adequately extending out from the case to theory, history, and geography, and not situating empirical research within a broader theoretically motivated research program. Workplace regime theory, with its focus on technology, power, and embeddedness, is presented as a remedy that enables algorithmic management research to account for variations while explaining regularities.
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Trapped in the Matrix: Algorithmic Control and Worker Dispossession in the African Platform Economy
Digital labor platforms are reshaping the work landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa, promising enhanced productivity and empowerment. Yet, this study reveals a more complex reality, particularly in Rwanda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Based on 41 in-depth interviews, it exposes how algorithmic management systems deeply erode worker autonomy, highlighting significant financial, task, and behavioral dispossession. This research, grounded in neo-Marxist and postcolonial theories, scrutinizes the nuanced limitations of autonomy and the pervasive control exerted by algorithmic management, reflecting the lived experiences of workers. The findings illuminate enduring patterns of accumulation that echo historical exploitation, maintaining asymmetric power dynamics and dependence. Despite this, the study captures the agency of workers as they navigate and resist these systemic constraints, challenging the dominant techno-optimistic narrative. It underscores the critical need for contextually informed empirical research to shape policies that champion equity and elevate marginalized voices during transformative economic shifts.
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Commodification and Disruption: Theorizing Digital Capitalism
There is little disagreement that digital technologies are transforming contemporary economies and societies. However, scholars have only begun to systematically think about how digitalization – the process whereby more and more of what we say, think, and do becomes mediated by digital technologies – is both driven by and transformative of capitalism. This paper argues that when one speaks about digitalization, one cannot be silent about capitalism. It reconstructs commodification and disruption as key features of capitalist development. It then shows how three digital revolutions – the platform, (big) data, and artificial intelligence revolutions – have ushered in a new wave of commodification and disruption, giving rise to digital capitalism. Finally, it discusses the challenges commodification and disruption pose in the form of redistribution of resources, rebalancing of power, rule adaption, and market re-embedding. The paper brings together a wide range of scholarship to offer a historically and theoretically grounded framework for how to think about and study the rise of digital capitalism.
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Labor-atories of Digital Economies: Latin America as a Site of Struggles and Experimentation
This article argues that the digital labor developments and struggles are labor-atories of digital economies, with special focus in Latin America. This means that, on the one hand, capital is experimenting and updating forms of control and exploitation - through the long trajectory of informality and dependency and, on the other hand, workers are trying and experimenting forms of organizing and collectivities, also updating Latin American rich histories of organizing, solidarity economies and community technologies. The emphasis on “labor” means that these laboratories are products of class struggles and capital-labor relationships. The paper unpacks the argument with four short insights from ongoing research: 1) Latin America as not only of research site; 2) The updating of informality in the Latin American AI context; 3) Global implications of data work, AI value chains, and the cultural sector; 4) Digital solidarity economies as a Latin American response to the current digital labor scenario, including digital sovereignty and autonomy.
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International Regulation of Platform Labor: A Proposal for Action
Platform-mediated work is a source of livelihood for millions of workers worldwide. However, because platforms typically classify workers as ‘independent contractors’, those workers are generally excluded from the scope of labor rights. This has a corrosive effect on working standards of platform workers, creating the need for an international regulatory framework to prevent a race to the bottom. To address this situation, the article proposes an outline for an International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention for the regulation of platform work going beyond the employee/independent contractor dichotomy. It identifies five core issues in the platform economy – low pay, poor working conditions, inaccessible and unreasonable contracts, unfair management, and a lack of representation – and demonstrates how existing ILO standards could be adapted to address these issues. The proposals are informed by the evidence collected by the Fairwork project through its participatory and multidisciplinary research.
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Counter-Hegemonic Neoliberalism: Making Sense of EU Platform Regulation
The platforms that hold the power in the digital economy, and the politics that surround them, are a central topic in contemporary political economy. The EU is widely perceived as a digital laggard, as it is home to very few leading digital corporations, and it is exposed to the market hegemony of the Big Tech platforms. Moreover, the EU is often considered the pioneer of digital regulation, and its platform politics have gained momentum as the EU Commission has unleashed a swathe of new regulatory initiatives, ranging from competition policies to governance of digital content, data flows and platform work. In this essay, we treat platform control and regulation as a matter of contested market design. We offer an analysis of the recent stream of EU platform regulation, questioning how it relates to the historical trajectory of the platform economy and established path dependencies within the EU. We argue that it is characterized by a critical approach to the power of digital platforms and a continuation of negative integration in the EU, and we suggest that it should be understood as a manifestation of counter-hegemonic neoliberalism, as it essentially enforces market-based governance of society through political market design.
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The Emergence of Platform Regulation in the UK: An Empirical-Legal Study
Online platforms have emerged as a new kind of regulatory object. In this article, we empirically map the emergence of the field of platform regulation in one country: the United Kingdom (UK). We focus on the 18-month period between September 2018 and February 2020 when an upsurge of regulatory activism reflected increasing sensitivity to national sovereignty in the context of Brexit. Through an empirical–legal content analysis of eight official reports issued by the UK government, parliamentary committees, and regulatory agencies, we code the online harms to which regulation is being asked to respond; identify relevant subject domains of law (such as data protection and privacy, competition, education, media and broadcasting, consumer protection, tax law and financial regulation, intellectual property law, security law); and analyze the agencies referred in the reports for their centrality in the regulatory network and their regulatory powers. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of “field,” we observe the emergence of regulators with investigatory and enforcement powers that stand in mutually unstable power relations to each other as well as vis-à-vis shifting executive and legislative interventions. Online platforms appear to acquire authority to exercise state powers.
