The platform economy has positioned itself as a labour alternative for minorities (Gebral, 2022), migrants and the underemployed of the world’s urban centres. With a business model that does not recognize any labour obligations on the part of platform companies, platform work has built its rapid growth on two fundamental contradictions. First, the services it facilitates involve material transactions and spatial trajectories. Yet, these companies are spatially ambiguous, with all contact between workers and the organization being performed virtually or by phone. Second, with its reliance on algorithms to match clients to service providers, it has gained an unprecedented level of control over the participants in the transactions it facilitates (Lupton, 2021). At the same time, it provides workers with nothing more than piecemeal compensations, excluding them from access to any information on how jobs are allocated and forcing them to provide the necessary assets and skills for each gig, including the potential costs associated with delays, repairs, and road hazards. Research indicates that women bear the sole responsibility for navigating contentious interactions and complex urban environments. This not only deepens existing disparities in their experience of the city (Benvegnu & Kampouri, 2021; Zhang, 2024) but also generates new forms of inequality and social hierarchy (Hardaker, 2024). In this proposal, I focus on the intersection between these two contradictions to present an ethnomethodological ethnographic study that focuses on the practical rationality underlying the interactions between human and technology. 

 References:

Gebral, D. (2022). Racial platform capitalism: Empire, migration and the making of Uber in London. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 54(4), 1170-119. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/10.1177/0308518X221115439
Lupton, D. (2021). ‘All at the tap of a button’: Mapping the food app landscape. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(6), 1360-1381. /https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494211055732
Benvegnu, C., & Kampouri, N. (2021). “Platformization” beyond the point of production: Reproductive labor and gender roles in the ride-hailing and food-delivery sectors. South Atlantic Quarterly, 120(4). 733-747. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9443294
Zhang, B. (2024). Gender segregation in the labor process: A study on female food delivery riders. Labour & Law Issues, 10(2), 227-241. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-2695/20924
Hardaker, S. (2024). A critical perspective on the increasing power of digital platforms through the lens of conjunctural geographies. In M. Vale, D. Ferreira, & N. Rodriguez. (Eds.), Geographies of the Platform Economy (pp. 33-48). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53594-9_6