Delivered: Living and Working with Algorithms

Abstract

Labor platforms—digital platforms that algorithmically mediate between companies, workers, and consumers—have caught the attention of organizational scholars, sociologists of work, and science and technology scholars. Attention has been given primarily to algorithmic control—that is, the usage of algorithmic systems to manage workers at a distance. Less attention, however, has been given to how the algorithmic systems embedded in labor platforms are experienced on the ground by workers who are embedded in specific cultures and economies. Without scholars paying attention to how algorithmic systems in labor platforms unfold in situ, these systems remain conceptually static and closed. In this dissertation, I address this gap by moving from algorithmic control to algorithmic practice. In particular, it investigates the practices, interpretations, and contestations that workers have with regard to algorithmic systems. To do so, I draw from 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork spent working alongside platform-based food delivery couriers in Mexico City, 75 semi-structured interviews with platform-based food delivery couriers, and online ethnography conducted in online Facebook communities. This dissertation is organized in three articles. The first article draws primarily from interviews to address how couriers evaluate platform-based delivery gig work in relation to other available options in the urban labor market in Mexico City. Evaluation and perception of platform-based work is dependent upon workers’ past employment trajectories. This article moves away from a conceptualization of homogenous reception to address workers’ heterogeneity. The second article draws from participant observation as a food delivery courier, ethnographic observations at bases, and online ethnography in Facebook forums to address how the labor process in food delivery platforms is sedimented across spaces exhibiting different levels of virtuality. Rather than concentrating solely on algorithmic control, this article takes seriously the agency of couriers and details how they engage in practices of consent and resistance as they interact with algorithmic technologies embedded in food delivery platforms. The third article also draws from participant observation as a food delivery courier, ethnographic observations at bases, and online ethnography in Facebook forum in order to address the gap that exists between technological design of food delivery platforms and local economic practices, particularly the saliency of cash in Mexico City. Given that cash administration requires physicality, this task is delegated from platforms to couriers. This results in an added layer of algorithmic control given that platforms must ensure that couriers are completing this task adequately. Moreover, this task is not experienced uniformly among workers as existing socioeconomic divides shape this delegated task. This article addresses how algorithmic control does not follow a universal template and how local economic contexts shape technologies themselves. Across these three articles, this dissertation offers insightful contributions to our understanding of the intersection between technological diffusion and digitally mediated labor control. Despite the world of work experiencing an era of technological convergence, local contexts shape how these digital technologies are interpreted, navigated, and contested by workers on the ground.