Crash helmet capitalism: Kampala’s moto-taxis at the crossroads of digital inclusion

Mallett, Rich (2024) Crash helmet capitalism: Kampala’s moto-taxis at the crossroads of digital inclusion. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

When digital ride-hailing platforms first hit the streets of Kampala in the mid-2010s, there were high hopes that the Ugandan capital’s vast workforce of informal moto-taxi operators, known locally as boda boda riders, would finally get the reforms they and the city needed. Having long been considered impervious to formal state regulation, with the arrival of the platform economy came the promise not just of safer and better livelihoods for riders but of more effective governance over the sector as a whole. To what extent have the events of the past decade borne this out? Drawing on original case study data from observations, interviews (n = 112) and surveys (n = 370), carried out at various points between November 2020 and February 2022, this thesis pieces together the story of the recent ‘platformisation’ of Kampala’s boda boda industry. By situating the contemporary realities of digital boda work in relation to what came before, both in terms of the ‘already-precarious’ working conditions faced by riders and the wider ‘analogue’ politics that have locked these into place, it puts forward a grounded, worker-centred and theoretically informed analysis of what really happens to Southern systems of informal work when the promises of digital inclusion come to town. In contrast to the prevailing assumption that digital labour platforms can provide a pathway to upgrading and formalising work across the global South, it shows that recent changes in Kampala’s boda sector have instead generated an ‘aesthetics of formality’ at the surface that not only leaves the core, underlying structures of riders’ labour informality completely intact, but which also conceals a deeper mechanics of corporate control and extraction that filters into the everyday of ‘platformised’ boda work. In doing so, inclusion in the platform economy materialises for many as a new form of ‘adverse digital incorporation’ that leads to repeated waves of voluntary de-automation from below – and to fundamental questions about the apparent inevitability of digital futures of Southern work.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Rich Mallett
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HE Transportation and Communications
Sets:	Departments > International Development
Supervisor:	Meagher, Kate and Mercer, Claire
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4801

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