Platformed professionalization: Labor, assets, and earning a livelihood through Airbnb

This paper analyses processes of professionalization on Airbnb in Berlin, exploring who is able to take part most successfully in urban value creation processes facilitated by short-term rental platforms. In doing so, it intervenes in debates on platform urbanism that focus on the role of digital platforms in reconfiguring urban governance and livelihoods. Combining a political economic approach and affordance theory, I conceptualize professionalization as a particular platform logic that benefits Airbnb and hosts who are able to take part, while reinforcing existing inequalities. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork in Berlin, I show how these professionalization practices differentially affect the strategies and practices of hosts, offering benefits to some while worsening the position of others who are unable or unwilling to professionalize. As such, professionalization processes produce inequalities and power asymmetries both on and off the platform, between hosts as well as between the platform owner and platform users. In a context where a growing number of city-dwellers rely on platforms to generate their livelihoods, such power shifts resulting from platform dynamics have a significant impact on who is able to benefit from platformization and thrive in a platform society.

Welfare Mediators as Game Changers? Deconstructing Power Asymmetries Between EU Migrants and Welfare Administrators

Under EU law, EU citizens constitute a particular group of immigrants, as they can, mostly without restrictions, move to, and reside in, another EU country, enjoying equal treatment with nationals in terms of accessing employment and social rights. However, as this article demonstrates, the settlement of EU citizens in another member state does not happen without hurdles. Through a careful in‐depth study of access to transnational welfare rights in practice, we analyse knowledge and resulting power asymmetries impacting interactions between certain EU migrant claimants and street‐level bureaucrats in Austrian and German social administrations. Following an inductive approach, based on an extensive data set of 144 qualitative interviews, this article first unpacks the different types of knowledge asymmetries relating to administrative procedures, formal social entitlements and the German language. We then analyse how such knowledge asymmetries may open space for welfare mediation in order to compensate for a lack of German language skills and to clarify misunderstandings about legal entitlements and obligations embedded in the claims system. Finally, our contribution offers a typology of welfare mediators and their characteristics, as not all types can be regarded as equally effective in reshaping power asymmetries. Overall, this article allows for insights into how welfare mediators, as more or less institutionalised opportunity structures, can shift policy outcomes in unexpected ways, enabling access to social benefits and services for otherwise excluded EU migrant citizens working, or seeking to work, in another EU member state.

The teaching of Law and Development: towards inclusiveness and reflexivity across time zones

An exploratory qualitative analysis of Law and Development (L&D) course descriptions reveals plurality and heterodoxy across time zones through the way in which they approach ‘law’ and ‘development’. We see this contestedness as a manifestation of the inherent power asymmetries of the field and offer the notion of time zones to better describe plural and contested forms of L&D knowledge. We seek to explore teaching as an important arena where knowledge is created and argue that the characteristics of substantive complexity and methodological heterodoxy of L&D provide promising conditions for making teaching more inclusive and reflexive. In this way, teaching can help in further provincialising the field. Additionally, inclusiveness and reflexivity can also have an impact on the epistemological trajectory of L&D more broadly by giving voice to a diversity of narratives, concepts and values.

Embodiments and frictions of statehood in transnational criminal justice

Outside of criminology, dominant conceptions of postcolonial statehood in the Global South as ‘fragile’ or ‘failed’ have long been criticized. In criminology, however, the theoretical outcomes of this critique have been scarce. In this article we therefore ask how ideals and practices of transnational criminal justice are informed by and productive of specific (Global North) conceptions of statehood. Exploring encounters between transnational and local criminal justice in the context of international state-building in Mali and Liberia, we observe frictions in which statehood divergences and global hierarchies become apparent. Through penal aid, we argue, a particular kind of penal statehood is produced wherein the options of how to perform penality are increasingly limited by the embeddedness in global power asymmetries.

EXPRESS: Investigating how the Clock‒Event Time Dialectic Shapes the Doing of Time in Organizational Change

Enacting both clock and event time – ambitemporality – in organizational change is beneficial but contradictory. Prior research establishes that actors valuing the co-existence of both time conceptions enables ambitemporality in change. However, this is likely to be problematic in many organizations because clock time is hegemonic. Clock time not only exerts systemic influences, but its proponents also work to exclude event time perspectives from affecting change. So how does event time influence change in these contexts? I explore, in an ethnography of an organizational change, how the clock‒event time dialectic shapes the doing of time in change. The study’s primary contribution is in showing that event time proponents gain power to influence change through two types of political action: uncertainty switching and plasticizing temporal boundaries. A secondary contribution demonstrates the specific features of conflict that enable ambitemporality to emerge despite power asymmetries existing between the contradictory time conceptions.

Digital labour platforms in Pakistan: institutional voids and solidarity networks

PurposeWhile digital labour platforms are being increasingly studied across the Global South, the existing literature does not conceptualise the theoretical link between such platforms and socio-economic development. This paper theorises such a link drawing on the notion of institutional voids defined, as in Khanna and Palepu (2010), as “the absence of intermediaries to efficiently connect buyers and sellers” in an economy. We frame digital labour platforms as means to fill institutional voids, seeking to create “development” in the form of earning opportunities in contexts of deprivation.Design/methodology/approachWe draw on an interpretive case study of an online work training project in a deprived region of Pakistan, where members of marginalised communities were trained to become freelancers for global digital labour platforms. We use the notion of market-enabling institutions aimed at filling institutional voids as a lens to study the project's declared goals, examining the extent to which these were met in practice for the workers who participated in the training.FindingsOur analysis reveals three types of market-enabling institutions–credibility enhancers, aggregators and distributors, and transaction facilitators–through which digital labour platforms seek to fill institutional voids. However, workers' narratives reveal that institutional voids are only partially filled by these platforms, and their perpetuation results in diverse forms of power asymmetries leveraged by clients and owners of the platforms. We also observe the formation of solidarity networks among workers, networks that are intra-familial and societal rather than characterised by formal unionisation.Originality/valueThe paper offers a novel perspective to theorise the link between digital labour and socio-economic development. Applying such a perspective in a Global South context, it also finds the limits of the digital platforms' institutional void-filling potential, highlighting the emergence of power asymmetries and the emerging formation of worker solidarity networks.