Racial platform capitalism: race, labour and the making of platform infrastructures

Gebrial, Dalia (2023) Racial platform capitalism: race, labour and the making of platform infrastructures. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

The critical platform studies literature has built a compelling picture of how techniques like worker (mis)classification, algorithmic management and workforce atomisation lie at the heart of how ‘work-on-demand via apps’ actively restructure labour. Much of this emerging scholarship identifies that platform workforces are predominantly comprised of migrant and racially minoritised workers. However, few studies theorise migration and race as structuring logics of the platform model and the precarity it engenders. This thesis uses multi-sited ethnography to develop a theory of ‘racial platform capitalism’ from the standpoint of on-demand app-based workers in London. Drawing on ethnographic interviews of over 100 workers on ride-hailing platform Uber and childcare platform Bubble, this thesis makes three distinct, original contributions: 1) to the platform labour literature, it takes the passing observation that workers on gig platforms are disproportionately migrants and racial minorities, and situates this as a central analytic category of the platform economy’s emergence in urban contexts; 2) to the racial capitalism literature, it pushes for scholars to consider how processes of social differentiation operate differently through data-driven systems; 3) to the platform urbanism literature, it unpacks how, given these two observations, platforms are (re)shaping how racialised surplus populations are moving through and producing urban socio-spatial relations, by organising them into the gaps of urban and social reproductive infrastructures. Additionally, this thesis develops an innovative methodological rubric for conducting platform work ethnographies. It calls for this emerging method to be reconceptualised as an ethnographic inquiry not into ‘workplaces’, but into ‘worlds-of-work’, with multiple temporal and spatial registers.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2023 Dalia Gebrial
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Sets:	Departments > Geography and Environment
Supervisor:	Zeiderman, Austin and Sanyal, Romola
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4595

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