The active production of consent for employment precarity and the euphemisation of coercion in platform economies: The case of food delivery riders

Sofía Pérez- de-Guzmán Padrón, Amparo Serrano-Pascual and Marcela Iglesias-Onofrio
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Sofía Pérez- de-Guzmán Padrón: Universidad de Cádiz, Facultad de Ciencias del Trabajo, Spain
Amparo Serrano-Pascual: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, TRANSOC Institute, Spain
Marcela Iglesias-Onofrio: Universidad de Cádiz, Facultad de Ciencias del Trabajo, Spain

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2024, vol. 45, issue 4, 1040-1066

Abstract: The mobilisation of new distance-based technologies that permit the governance of platform workers’ behaviour constitutes a watershed in the organisation of work and a transformation of the grammar of wage-earning society. Employing a qualitative methodology, this article analyses Spanish riders’ (delivery couriers) experiences of these psychopolitical mechanisms. The results show that the neoliberal and entrepreneurial dispositive deployed by digital platforms induces new rationalities of self-governance that are characterised by productive self-optimisation and self-surveillance. However, the analysis also found that the interpellation of the dispositive and its technologies of subjectivation were not homogeneous across all of the study participants. The article describes the characteristics and argumentative positions of three groups of riders whose sociostructural position shaped their experiences and engagement with the platforms as well as resistance to control mechanisms and disciplinary processes.

Keywords: Algorithmic governance; entrepreneurial dispositive; precarisation of work; riders; technologies of subjectivation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:45:y:2024:i:4:p:1040-1066

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X231219465

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