Platform-Capital’s ‘App-etite’ for Control: A Labour Process Analysis of Food-Delivery Work in Australia

By A. Veen, T. Barratt, Caleb Goods. Work, Employment and Society, 2019

517 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This qualitative case study adopts a labour process analysis to unpack the distinctive features of capital’s control regimes in the food-delivery segment of the Australian platform-economy and assesses labour agency in response to these. Drawing upon worker experiences with the Deliveroo and UberEATS platforms, it is shown how the labour process controls are multi-facetted and more than algorithmic management, with three distinct features standing out: the panoptic disposition of the technological infrastructure, the use of information asymmetries to constrain worker choice, and the obfuscated nature of their performance management systems. Combined with the workers’ precarious labour market positions and the Australian political-economic context, only limited, mainly individual, expressions of agency were found.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d68650b1232dde122aefcffa5e6a22cfe0368299

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Citations in the corpus

‘I’m my own boss…’: Active intermediation and ‘entrepreneurial’ worker agency in the Australian gig-economy (2020, methodology): “Yet, concurrently, labour is tightly controlled and managed through the digital ecosystems and algorithmic management (Peticca-Harris et al., 2018: Veen et al., 2019; Rosenblat, 2019).”
Working on my own: Measuring the challenges of gig work (2021, background): “Some gig workers have a great deal of freedom to determine how and when they work, while others face more limited autonomy owing to the algorithms constructed to control their effort (Ashford et al., 2018; Lehdonvirta, 2018; Veen et al., 2020).”
The organisation and experience of work in the gig economy (2019, methodology): “Given its associations with control, and current concerns about worker exploitation and deskilling through gig work, there will undoubtedly be more analysis using a labour process lens (Gandini, 2018; Veen et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2019).”
From Flexible Labour to ‘Sticky Labour’: A Tracking Study of Workers in the Food-Delivery Platform Economy of China (2021, background): “In addition to hiring more full-time workers, TSAs appear to exert more direct control on the couriers’ labour process, which defies the categorisation of a flat organisational structure or de-humanised control regime typically associated with platform-based service provision (Veen et al., 2019).”
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control (2020, background): “…automated, they may be deliberately underplaying their role in calibrating and intervening in the systems ’ architecture, nudges, and sanctions; this in-visibility may make it harder for workers to find a relevant target for contestation (e.g., Lee et al., 2015; Rosenblat, 2018; Veen et al., 2019).”
Algorithmic Control in Platform Food Delivery Work (2019, background): “Synthesizing the literature on algorithmic management with this older tradition reveals that while algorithmic control over labor may be relatively new, it replicates many features of older mechanisms of labor control (Mason 2018; Veen, Barratt, and Goods 2019).”