First Rule: Keep Pedalling. Co-Theorising with Food-Delivery Workers How to Make Digital Platforms Capability-Enhancing

Pietro Ghirlanda

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 2025, vol. 26, issue 1, 59-86

Abstract: In both academic and public debate, there is an increasing consensus that digital labour platforms can have both positive and negative impacts on digital workers’ well-being. This article has two aims: the first is to evaluate this impact through the multidimensional lens of the capability approach, taking the food-delivery sector in the city of Verona as a case study. The second aim is to involve selected riders in a co-theorising process to imagine how platforms should be designed to become capability enablers. To reach them, the research combines two different qualitative methods: a covert auto-ethnography, during which the author worked for a food-delivery platform, and a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews, inspired by the dynamic public reflective equilibrium technique. In addition to contributing to the principles that should govern platforms’ design, this article makes two specific contributions to the existing literature on the capability approach. Methodologically, it contributes to the so-called list debate by proposing a synthesising method for selecting capabilities that combines philosophical and empirical insights. Theoretically, it frames the relevant capabilities which were identified during the research under a meta-capability for meaningful work, opening the path to a multi-level analysis of a flourishing life’s different dimensions.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/19452829.2024.2380290

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