Actually Existing Platformization

In this article we examine the partnership as a heterogeneous boundary resource that enables platforms to generate dependencies, become locally embedded, and gain power in urban settings. Pushing back against narratives of platform-driven disruption, which tend to universalize and totalize platform power, we discuss three cases of what we term “actually existing platformization”—a path-dependent and locally situated process in which platform companies engage in various forms of “boundary work” with other actors seeking to retain and/or gain power. Each case focuses on a distinct industry: food delivery, short-term housing rental, and the social/voluntary sector. In each of these domains, we show how asset-light platforms initiate and develop partnerships as a frequently nebulous boundary resource that opens up potential avenues for (1) market consolidation, (2) logistical integration, (3) social mobilization, and/or (4) institutional legitimation. Such strategic moves, we argue, have become particularly pertinent following the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit urban areas particularly hard and is intensifying certain social dependencies and institutional shortcomings that platforms are seeking to exploit.

Digital Workers, Urban Vectors, and New Economies

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.

Neoliberal Platform Capitalism and Subjectivity

Across the globe, algorithmic technologies have undeniably altered the way labor relations are governed. The purpose of this article is to investigate a particular manifestation of that phenomenon: how, in Brazil, platform capitalism consists in a hybrid rationality whose control over the sphere of work combines new mechanisms of governance with structural characteristics that are particular to a type of precarious work commonly found in peripheral areas of Brazil, known as viração. While such a scenario presents us with a multitude of aspects worthy of consideration, this article focusese on the apparatuses for the psychic management of workers deployed by platform capitalism in Brazil. Within this scope, the article develops a double analysis: first, it examines the forms of subjectivity and the libidinal economy of Brazilian peripheral workers, with a particular emphasis on how certain of their characteristics have been subordinated, controlled, exploited, and ultimately disseminated by application software companies in Brazil; second, and conversely, it evaluates how the form of subjectivity associated with platform capitalism has, through the neoliberal discourse of self-entrepreneurship, impacted viração.

Connecting the Levers of Platform Control

Drawing from a transurban field research conducted in the ride-hailing sector in Paris and Brussels regions, this article investigates platformization as a productive model defined by the articulation of an outsourced labor regime with an algorithmic and data-driven type of management. Beyond the formal sharing of an independent contractor status, nuanced by a variety of positions including salaried work, platform drivers are unified in practice by their common economic dependence on platforms. This situation gives them the role of an adjustment variable in platforms’ commercial strategy, forcing them to raise their work time to adapt to the cost decreases in the mid-2010s, which dramatically reduced their income. To ensure a flexible flow into the workforce, platforms have favored the development of small intermediaries to outsource hiring and thereby skirt labor law and evade taxes. Market pressure is also enforced by its inclusion, with other productive goals such as service fluidity and quality, into a digital model of management inspired by lean production. The application is configured to operate as a device of technical and hegemonic control that incorporates just-in-time and intensification commands. Digital control is completed by the inclusion of a customer feedback system used to implement service standardization and further involvement in work.

The Limits of Algorithmic Management

Much of the existing research on platform work has focused on the role of data and algorithmic management. These new techniques of management need to be critically understood, but there is a risk of overemphasizing the importance and power of these techniques. The obscuring processes of data collection and analysis make it hard to comprehend how data is being used in practice. Less is known about the ways in which workers are resisting these methods, as well as developing new forms of organization that can effectively build on this. This article reflects on the practices of algorithmic management in platform work, considering the limitations of this approach. It considers the ways in which data is, and can be, used in platform work, drawing attention to the limits. While algorithmic management and the collection of data serve a role for capital in platform work—and are increasingly finding broader applications—the article argues that is crucial that research does not lose sight of the role and agency of workers against capital.

Momentum vs. Labour’s Bureaucracy

The creation of Corbynist organization Momentum was the way in which the wave of socialist revival in the UK tried to take an organizational form and work toward the transformation of the Labour party. The first-past-the-post system meant that the only realistic option for socialists was working within the existing mainstream left party, while at the same time developing a parallel structure to mobilize youth supporters suspicious of bureaucratic structures. However, as I argue in this article, ultimately the stubbornness of the Labour party bureaucracy used as a defensive redoubt by party centrists managed to successfully fend off attempts for deep party reforms, and once Corbyn resigned it was easy for centrists to undo the change in the internal balance of forces. The failure of the Corbyn movement in overcoming these difficulties highlights how party organization constitutes a strategic bottleneck for all transformative movements, and that the only way to reclaim existing parties is to radically reshape them as a matter of priority.

Platform Urbanization and the Impact on Urban Transformation and Citizenship

Many of the defining characteristics of the urban are shifting to virtual platforms. This process imbues all dimensions of urban life, from governance to politics and participation. During the global pandemic and the lockdown in many countries, this shift has gathered speed and is changing the way we communicate and work, challenging the everyday life of our cities. As a result, we are confronted with a new topology of negotiation, participation, governance, and control in a virtual realm. With that, rights and duties of citizens are also being transformed, which creates a new dynamic that needs to be captured to ensure an alternative way to perform and enable citizenship. What we refer to as “platform urbanization” is a planetary phenomenon that needs to be investigated as a new driving force in the transformation of the urban condition and in terms of the impact it has on citizenship and the way cities are produced.

“Platformization” beyond the Point of Production

Outside of the literature focusing on the platformization of specific “informal” feminized and racialized sectors, especially care and domestic work, in which reproductive labor has been traditionally carried out, there is a dearth of research on platforms from long-term and intersectional perspectives that go beyond the mere male/female balance. This essay, based on ongoing research and founded on a series of interviews with ride-hailing and food-delivery platform workers in London and Paris, explores the impact of digi-talization in two male-dominated sectors. It shows how reproductive labor weighs on the lives of platform workers, determining their tactics, strategies, and working patterns.