Fair’s fair: psychological contracts and power in platform work

Abstract

Platform work can be understood as a particularly acute instance of the individualization of economic risk. Responding to the broader trends of labour commodification and decline of the standard employment relationship, psychological contract theory emerged as a way to conceptualize fairness in individualized work arrangements. In this paper, we draw out the critical potential of psychological contract theory by mobilizing Lukes’ theory of power. We apply this lens to 12 semi-structured interviews with platform-mediated food delivery couriers, supplemented by both online and offline participant observation, to identify ways in which platform firms use decision-making, nondecision-making and ideological power to encourage the acceptance of platform work as fair: through the unilateral modification of exchange terms, through the nondecisions of communication and technology design, and through the ideological power of neoliberalism and tribalism. In so doing, we also identify coping strategies deployed by couriers in response to violations by platform firms of perceived exchange terms, variously resistant to and reinforcing of these forms of platform power. In this way, we uncover mechanisms by which firms present risk individualization as a fair exchange of worker security for worker autonomy, as well as more and less effective ways workers can resist this framing.

Keywords:

• Psychological contract
• labour relations
• platform work
• gig economy
• power
• fairness

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank wholeheartedly the study participants who generously shared their time and insights regarding their work. We are also thankful to participants of the International Working Party on Labour Market Segmentation conference at the University of Manchester (2017), the MOTI seminar at the Grenoble Ecole de Management (2017), the Insecurity for One is Insecurity for All colloquium organized by the Work, Labour and Globalisation network at Strathclyde Business School (2018), and the SASE conference at the New School, New York (2019), for their feedback on earlier versions of the paper. Finally, we thank the guest editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions, guidance, and encouragements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the first author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 See Annex 1 for a full list of interview questions, sources and modification rationales.

2 For this analysis, we separated out those participants arguably still establishing their initial conception of the exchange, having three or fewer months of experience with food delivery platform work at the time of interview (based on the contention that the PC creation phase lasts for three months, Rousseau et al., 2018). While these couriers – I3, I4, I6, I7 and I8 – do demonstrate some of the above-discussed coping responses, this can be understood as part of the PC calibration process. The remaining seven participants had longer tenure at the time of interview, and thus were able to detail clear moments of PC violation and their responses, corresponding to the repair phase of the dynamic model of the PC (Rousseau et al., 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This

work was supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under Grant Agreement no. 613256 (http://www.style-research.eu).