Full Description
This open access book provides an overview of urban digital platforms such as Airbnb and Deliveroo, which, along with Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other IT companies, constitute by now the infrastructures for other businesses to operate on and for our social life to go on. These platforms serve as standards-based techno-economic systems that simultaneously capture cooperation through remote coordination and organize labor via algorithm management.
Based on a three-years research project, this contributed book outlines a general theory of platform capitalism that conceives these platforms not only as technical devices, but as generative engines that operate at the interface of several aspects, such as digitalization of forms of social cooperation; algorithm-based management of labor and participation; and private and vertical appropriation of profits. These elements are somehow iconic of the capitalist evolution of the last decades, and they open up a reflection on new forms of "primitive accumulation" (in particular regarding data), on the mechanisms used to capture and extract social surplus value, and on the logistic-financial dimensions of capital. Finally, in light of the transformations associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors examine how platforms can evolve into hegemonic organizational structures.
Assuming we are all already living in the age of the platform, this book takes a multifaceted approach—combining sociology with urban studies, and political sciences with economics—to grasp the challenges our societies face in terms of ensuring fair economic growth, adequate social protections, and labor rights. It will appeal to anyone interested in digital platforms and how they are changing the organization of labor, urban spaces, and forms of governance.
Contents
Part I. Theoretical Foundations.- Chapter 1. Introduction (Sandro Mezzadra).- Chapter 2. Operations of Platforms. A Global Process in a Multipolar World (Sandro Mezzadra).- Chapter 3. The process of valorization in the platform capitalism (Andrea Fumagalli).- Chapter 4. Out of the Standard. Towards a Global Approach to Platform Labour (Maurilio Pirone).- Chapter 5. What Urban Future: Do High-Tech Metropolises Dream of Electric Sheep? (Niccolò Cuppini).- Chapter 6. The Politics of Platforms. Exploring Platform's Infrastructural Role and Power (Mattia Frapporti).- Chapter 7. Managing the Wheel: Managerial Normativity from the Wage Society to the Platform Age (Massimilano Nicoli).- Chapter 8. Digital labour, informal unionism and the rise of a new workers subjectivity (Marco Marrone).- Chapter 9. Platform capitalism: Infrastructuring migration, mobility, and racism (Stefania Animento).- Chapter 10. Affect, precarity and feminised labour inAirbnb in London (Eleni Kambouri).- Part II. Notes from the Field.- Chapter 11. Why the sectoral context matters for platform work (Bettina Haidinger).- Chapter 12. A Variegated Platform Capitalism? Algorithms, Labour Process and Institutions in Deliveroo in Bologna and Uber in Lisbon (Marco Marrone).- Chapter 13. Perceiving platform work as decent work? Views regarding working conditions among platform taxi drivers in Tallinn (Marge Unt).- Chapter 14. Skills development as a political process: Towards new forms of mobilization and digital citizenship among platform workers (Filippo Bignami).- Chapter 15. How to build alternatives to platform capitalism? (Mayo Fuster Morell).- Chapter 16. Labour policies for a fairer gig economy (Annamaria Donini).- Chapter 17. Engaging stakeholders with platform labour: The social lab approach (Raúl Tabarés).- Chapter 18. Local best practices. Urban governance and the ongoing platformization process (Michelangelo Secchi).- Chapter 19. Social protection, basic income and taxation in the Digital economy (Cristina Morini).- Chapter 20. Latent conflict, invisible organisation: Everyday struggles in platform labour (Moritz Altenreid).
