Black box or hidden abode? The expansion and exposure of platform work managerialism

Abstract

This Special Issue holds that managerialism is not an abstract, trans-historical category, and this article argues that neither is it hidden within an impenetrable black box. An important new form of managerialism is being revealed which is specific to what Moore and Joyce argue to be a very observable, and also widely contested, platform management model (PMM). Marx’s ‘hidden abode’ is a more appropriate metaphor than a black box, thus, given empirically demonstrable cases of control and resistance. Drawing on insights from labor process theory, the article reveals how control methods are at work, and transversally, how platform managerialism generates considerable levels of worker and union resistance. Despite its seeming inevitability and invincibility, platform managerialism is as knowable and as contestable, indeed, as contested, as other forms.

Keywords:

• Platform work
• labor process
• future of work
• digitalized work
• black box
• algorithms

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors of this Special Issue, Matthew Eagleton-Pierce and Samuel Knafo, and the other contributors to the Issue for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts. We would like to acknowledge three generous reviewers for their insights and guidance in turning this article into a piece of work that can contribute knowledge to the emerging field of platform work studies and highlight the control methods and resistance to the adverse working conditions platform workers face. We also would like to thank Anna Biondi, Six Silberman, Janine Berg, Valerio de Stefano, Ruth Cain, Mark Stuart and Chris Forde for their insights and guidance throughout the process of writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See, for instance, https://qz.com/about/; https://www.bloomberg.com/technology.

2 Labor process is a concept originating in Marx’s Capital Volume I, Section I where he wrote that ‘the elementary factors of the labor-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments’ (1867/2015: 127). While labor ‘effects an alteration’ in the material worked on, the product absorbs the appearance of the final product. Therefore, the product is a ‘use-value’, and ‘the process disappears in the product’. As a use-value, the product is ‘nature’s material adapted by a change of form to the wants of man’. In that sense, labor is materialized (but not necessarily ‘seen’). Indeed, the movement of labor becomes something fixed in the product. The labor process then is the process whereby the capitalist attempts, for ‘efficiency’ reasons, to make sure there is no ‘unnecessary waste of raw material’ and ‘the means of production are used with intelligence’, where labor power is a commodity purchased by the capitalist and absorbed into the product. Thompson and others look at this process as one of control and indicate that resistance inevitably emerges, thus the ‘control and resistance’ framework that their modelling relies on. LPT in particular became interested in how technology becomes the ‘instrument of labor’, which Marx calls a ‘thing, or a complex of things, which the laborer interposes between himself and the subject of his labor, and which serves as the conductor of his activity’ (1867/2015). Earlier work, i.e. the Grundrisse, showed Marx views technologies as being utilized to invisibilize labor power and labor agency in the production process. In that sense, the ‘man/product relation gives way to the machine/product relation and jobs and tasks are treated as the residuum of the machine/product link’ (Davis & Taylor, 1972, p. 12, 300-1, cited in Littler, 1982, p. 22).

3 These findings taken from research published in Moore (2018b).

4 See Moore (2018a) for a detailed account of other initiatives to collect data about workers’ physical health at work as a way to enhance productivity and rising resistance (Moore 2018c). Striking education workers in West Virginia went on strike in part over employer plans to introduce a requirement for staff to download a tracking app onto their phones to collect data on their levels of physical activity (Gaffney 2018).

5 This evidence drawn from research published as Joyce (2016).

6 Evidence gathered by Joyce (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Phoebe V. Moore

Associate Professor Dr Phoebe V Moore writes about labour and technology and the risks workers face in the new worlds of digitalised work. She has written three research monographs on global worker struggle (2007), critiques of employability policy (2010) and most recently on the issues surrounding digitalisation and self-tracking for quantified work (2018). Dr Simon Moore has several media appearances based on her research including on Radio 4 and in the Financial Times and Atlantic. Moore has been commissioned to write high level reports for the International Labour Organisation, European Union and European Parliament on work and digitalisation.

Simon Joyce

Dr Simon Joyce's main research interest lies in developing understandings of how processes of change take place in employment relations, the management of labour, and worker responses; with an emphasis on political economy and the (re)organisation of work over the longue durée of capitalism. Previous research has looked at national-level employer policy, and workplace level relations between managers and trade union reps. Current research focuses on platform work and the gig economy, its drivers and dynamics, the emergence of new practices of management and of worker contestation, and impacts on more standard forms of employment.