Suchergebnisse

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: When digital became platform -- Chapter 3: City reverberations -- Chapter 4: The Uberisation of Everything -- Chapter 5: Making sense of platform intermediation -- Chapter 6: Platform intermediation as recombinatory urban governance -- Chapter 7: Intimate entanglements -- Chapter 8: City bricolage: Imagining the city as a platform -- Chapter 9: Conclusion: Rethinking public value in an era of platform scale.

A political-cultural perspective on the sociology of digital intermediation platforms interrogates what a particular set of social arrangements implies about relations of production and asks: How do digital intermediation platforms contribute to legitimising contemporary capitalism, and potentially to redesigning processes of domination and exploitation of (digital) labor? How are these platforms used as a justification register, i.e. the use of digital commons for ideological purposes, in the sense of Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) economies of worth? Is a specific model, for example platform cooperativism, an antidote to those "evil" platforms or yet another iteration? ; Peer-reviewed ; Post-print

This article presents a methodological reflection on the challenges of researching domestic and care work mediated by digital labour platforms. While knowledge production on gig work in the logistics sector has soared, research on care platforms is slow to catch up, especially in very relational forms of home-based work, such as eldercare. We take this uneven development in the literature as a starting point to unpack the empirical conundrums in this field. Drawing on our own experience with trying to recruit care platform workers in Germany between 2019 and 2024, we shed light on the ethical dilemmas we encountered and offer some lessons learnt. The article calls for long-term commitments, multi-sited ethnographies, longitudinal perspectives and mixed-methods designs to study care platforms in the future. Finally, we advocate for researching platform labour beyond the gig.

The paper engages the problematic of platform capitalism in the company of Fernand Braudel. Platform capitalism is accordingly located in the opaque zone of the so-called antimarket, "where the great predators roam," with its characteristic conditions of monopolization, concentrated economic and political power, and cultures of systematic regulatory evasion. The Braudelian schema requires that platform capitalism is situated, both historically and geographically, in this case both as a distinctive conjunctural moment and as an epiphenomenon of variegated and globalizing processes of financialization and neoliberalization. The paper offers an antidote to the mainstream treatment of platforms, with its technological exuberance, its preoccupation with internally generated dynamics, and its exaggerated claims to novelty and indeed revolutionary significance. Thinking conjuncturally about platform capitalism qua Braudelian capitalism does not just counter these problems, it represents a constructive supplement to extant political-economy accounts. It accentuates and problematizes non-repeating historical continuities (against presumptions of a radical technological-organizational break). And it points to constitutive conditions of coexistence (against the imaginary of a separate, self-propelling, and distinct innovation economy). To pose the platform question along with Braudel is to begin with problematics of monopoly power and antimarket behavior, rather than with technological affordances, network capacities, or the market.

How do alternative conceptions of exchange emerge and proliferate within platform capitalism? Drawing on research at the intersection of organizational theory and social movement studies and a data set of 18 interviews, this paper examines the strategies that founders of cooperatively-structured platforms employ to gain legitimacy for their novel organizational form. Three key findings are presented: First, to facilitate network extension, activists strategically encroach upon adjacent fields. Second, to ensure economic survival, activists either create sustainable 'subcultures' within existing fields or attempt to mobilize entirely new consumer audiences. Third, to compensate for a lack of resources, activists strategically cultivate 'community.'

Reviving the somewhat forgotten notion of 'secondary orality', this paper conceptualizes online conspiracism as a creative, if monstrous, response to the attention economy of social media. Combining classic literature on oral cultures and current research on online subcultures, this paper takes conspiratorial folklore seriously and develops a program of research into its features and into its surprising adaptation to the attention regime of digital media.

With worker shortages and the need for care workers projected to grow, personal care work through digital labour platforms (DLPs) is important to understand. This paper considers DLPs used by gig care workers providing personal care in Ontario, Canada. We recruited 20 women gig care workers for interviews. We examined socio-technical processes such as signing up on platforms, creating profiles, and searching for jobs. We draw on Institutional Ethnography to study the actual work on the following two DLP models: marketplace and on-demand. Marcusean theory provides a lens for the critical examination of DLP care work. We found job inequity between DLPs operating in the homecare sector, compared to DPs used in institutional settings. Jobs had disparate quality between the two platform types. Workers on both DLP types remained vulnerable to fluctuations in demand and had limited social security protections, and both models of DLP institutionalised precarity.

PurposeThe paper brings Foucauldian analysis of neoliberal governmentality in the discussion on the new forms of labour control within digital labour platforms. The aim of the paper is to reveal the effect of control mechanisms employed by platforms on "entrepreneurial self" within the context of work relations.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on in-depth interviews, conducted with workers under different service categories, the author undertook an extended case study of Armut.com, a digital labour platform operating in Turkey.FindingsThe study finds that competitive mechanisms employed by the platform have a considerable effect on worker self-commercialisation and self-rationalisation. This is dependent on different control mechanisms employed by the platform, based on different platform working models.Originality/valueThe research brings the worker subjectivities to the discussion of control within the scope of digital labour platforms. By undertaking a rare empirical study on this issue, it contributes to the theory of entrepreneurial self within the scope of work relations.

Today's internet is shaped largely by privately operated platforms of various kinds. This paper asks how the various commercially operated communication, market, consumption and service platforms can be grasped as a distinct organizational form of enterprise. To this end, we make a basic distinction between (1) the platform-operating companies as organizing and structuring cores whose goal is to run a profitable business, and (2) the platforms belonging to these companies as more or less extensive, rule-based and strongly technically mediated social action spaces. While platform companies are essentially organizations in an almost archetypical sense, the internet platforms they operate constitute socio-technically structured social, market, consumption or service spaces in which social actors interact on the basis of detailed and technically framed rules, albeit, at the same time, in a varied and idiosyncratic manner. The thesis of this paper is that the coordination, control and exploitation mechanisms characteristic of the platform architectures are characterized by a strong hierarchical orientation in which elements of co-optation and the orchestrated participation of users are embedded. In this hybrid constellation, the platform companies have a high degree of structure-giving, rule-setting and controlling power - in addition to exclusive access to the raw data material generated there. While this power may manifest, at times, as rigid control, direct coercion or en-forceable accountability, for the majority of rule-obeying users it unfolds nearly imperceptibly and largely silently beneath the surface of a (supposed) openness that likewise characterizes the platforms as technically mediated spaces for social and economic exchange.

[…] article by Rituparna Patgiri originally appeared on the LSE Review of Books blog and is reposted under the Creative Commons license (CC BY […]

The study of race and racism in the digital society must produce theoretically distinct and robust formulations of Internet technologies as key characteristics of the political economy. The author puts forth racial capitalism as a coherent framework for this research agenda. The argument for racial capitalism draws on two examples of its engagement with two characteristics of the digital society: obfuscation as privatization and exclusion by inclusion. Internet technologies are now a totalizing sociopolitical regime and should be central to the study of race and racism.

"Trott interrogates how feminist activists navigate complex technological ecosystems to build awareness of misogyny, violence against women, and oppressive experiences women face both online and offline while cultivating transnational feminist networks and carving out spaces upon which to build and elevate women's voices. This book is guided by a few key questions: how is feminist activism transforming and being mutually shaped by a dynamic and volatile platform ecosystem? How are activists attempting to negotiate this terrain? And, how are (anti)feminist politics contested within the platform society? These questions are addressed through analysis of three key case studies: the international feminist organisation Hollaback!; the #EndViolenceAgainstWomen campaign; and the global #TakeDownJulienBlanc movement. Building on the intersecting fields of feminist media studies, platform and internet research, and political communication, this book addresses cultural and social questions about how digital platforms shape the values of our communities and how stakeholders negotiate and engage in civic practices. This timely and important work interweaves activist discourses, women's voices and scholarly literature together to provide insight into the realities of operating within a platform society. It will be of interest to students and scholars of journalism, gender studies, media and communication studies, culture studies, and sociology"--

"Trott interrogates how feminist activists navigate complex technological ecosystems to build awareness of misogyny, violence against women, and oppressive experiences women face both online and offline while cultivating transnational feminist networks and carving out spaces upon which to build and elevate women's voices. This book is guided by a few key questions: how is feminist activism transforming and being mutually shaped by a dynamic and volatile platform ecosystem? How are activists attempting to negotiate this terrain? And, how are (anti)feminist politics contested within the platform society? These questions are addressed through analysis of three key case studies: the international feminist organisation Hollaback!; the #EndViolenceAgainstWomen campaign; and the global #TakeDownJulienBlanc movement. Building on the intersecting fields of feminist media studies, platform and internet research, and political communication, this book addresses cultural and social questions about how digital platforms shape the values of our communities and how stakeholders negotiate and engage in civic practices. This timely and important work interweaves activist discourses, women's voices and scholarly literature together to provide insight into the realities of operating within a platform society. It will be of interest to students and scholars of journalism, gender studies, media and communication studies, culture studies, and sociology"--