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Platformization and Informality

Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation

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  • © 2023

Overview

Editors:
  1. Aditi Surie

    1. Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, India

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Ursula Huws

    1. Analytica Social and Economic Research, London, UK

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Identifies the interactions between informality as a signifying feature of emerging markets
  • Shows how the emergence of platforms can change the relationship between citizens and the state
  • Analyses the particular outcomes for democracy of disenfranchisement, disinformation and data injustice

Part of the book series: Dynamics of Virtual Work (DVW)

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvii
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  2. Platformization and Informality: Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation

    • Aditi Surie, Ursula Huws
    Pages 1-12

  3. Platformizing Informality, One Gig at a Time

    • Alessio Bertolini, Mark Graham, Mounika Neerukonda, Sanna Ojanperä, Balaji Parthasarathy, Janaki Srinivasan et al.
    Pages 13-45

  4. Work on Online Labour Platforms: Does Formal Education Matter?

    • Uma Rani, Rishabh Kumar Dhir, Nora Gobel
    Pages 47-87

  5. (In)Formality and the Janus Face of the Platform: Production of the ‘Space of Taxi Driving’ between Everyday Realities and Rationalities of State and Market

    • Tobias Kuttler
    Pages 89-138

  6. Uberization: The Periphery as the Future of Work?

    • Ludmila Costhek Abílio
    Pages 139-160

  7. Gojek as Labour Infrastructure: Platformization of Work in Indonesia

    • Onat Kibaroğlu
    Pages 161-182

  8. Feminist Approaches to Location-Based Labour Platforms in India

    • Pallavi Bansal, Payal Arora
    Pages 183-211

  9. Metaphors of Work, from ‘Below’

    • Ambika Tandon, Aayush Rathi
    Pages 213-235

  10. (Re)Conceptualizing Gendered Structures of Informality for Domestic Workers in the Platform Economy

    • Abigail Hunt, Emma Samman
    Pages 237-269

  11. Correction to: Gojek as Labour Infrastructure: Platformization of Work in Indonesia

    • Onat Kibaroğlu
    Pages C1-C1

  12. Back Matter

    Pages 271-279
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Keywords

About this book

In this edited volume, scholars from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Jakarta, Cape Town, Sao Paulo and other cities of the global South explore the complex relationship between platformization and informality through a different lens. Drawing on extensive theoretical, quantitative and qualitative scholarship, they provide both a useful overview and insights into the lived realities of gig work for platforms covering a range of skills, working conditions, and forms of algorithmic management. Platform work has attracted considerable attention from scholars in the global North, who have tended to view it as a form of casualisation of work that was previously regulated. But what about the global South, where most employment, especially that of women and migrant workers was historically already informal?

Beyond a focus on livelihoods, employment, and work, the authors show how labour platforms take on powers that bring about broader impacts, including those affecting identity and personal wellbeing. They also illustrate the impact of platformization on the governance of affected sectors by public agencies, thus affecting political power, and how public data infrastructures contribute to further platformization. The purpose of this pioneering work is to lay bare these interactions to then rebuild our understanding of platformization and its social, political, cultural and economic impacts. Its insights are attentive to gender and ethnic differences, as well as geographical ones.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, India

    Aditi Surie

  • Analytica Social and Economic Research, London, UK

    Ursula Huws

About the editors

Aditi Surie is a Researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, India where she studies technology, capitalism and metropolitan economies of the global South.

Ursula Huws has held professorial positions at London Metropolitan University and the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and is now working independently. She has been researching the economic and social impacts of technological change, the restructuring of employment and the changing international division of labour since the 1970s.


Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Platformization and Informality

  • Book Subtitle: Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation

  • Editors: Aditi Surie, Ursula Huws

  • Series Title: Dynamics of Virtual Work

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11462-5

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-11461-8Published: 12 May 2023

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-11464-9Due: 01 October 2023

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-11462-5Published: 11 May 2023

  • Series ISSN: 2947-9290

  • Series E-ISSN: 2947-9304

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XVII, 279

  • Number of Illustrations: 17 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Sociology of Work, Media Sociology, Sociology, general, Digital/New Media

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