Andamiajes y derivasla mediación algorítmica en la práctica de los riders

  1. Cañedo Rodríguez, Montserrat
  2. Allen-Perkins, Diego
Zeitschrift:
Empiria: Revista de metodología de ciencias sociales

ISSN: 1139-5737

Datum der Publikation: 2023

Nummer: 59

Seiten: 103-130

Art: Artikel

DOI: 10.5944/EMPIRIA.59.2023.37940 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

Andere Publikationen in: Empiria: Revista de metodología de ciencias sociales

Zusammenfassung

There is a growing interest in the field of social sciences in the study of topics related to the so-called gig economy or platform economy and, among them, in the figure of the rider—a term that refers to the home delivery workers employed through digital platforms. In these platforms, the work of the riders is organized from algorithmic management logics, a mediation in which the panoptic quality of their forms of control and governmentality has tended to be emphasized. In contrast to these frameworks, this paper presents a theoretical-methodological approach that emphasizes the co-constitution—in an open agency—of the rider and the application, to ethnographically approach the everyday labor practices of riders. In the interest of exploring how algorithmic mediation functions in the diversity of riders’ experiences, we analyze the coordination tasks responsible for producing the shared space-time geography and the flexible control strategies that mediate the application. The text describes how the algorithm generates a kind of scaffolding that defines directive spatiotemporalities in the riders’ operations, within which the deliverers extend the landscape of calculability to those elements that the algorithm cannot consider and to those others that the rider must incorporate in order to make his activity compatible with the algorithmic logic. This article presents the initial results of an ethnography carried out in Madrid since September 2021 with riders from several of the main digital home delivery platforms: Glovo, Uber Eats, and Getir. Along with the fieldwork with riders, we interviewed four technologists in urban logistics. The results show that salaried riders have a less intense experience of the directive chronography of the algorithm, showing how autonomy is not necessarily equivalent to the riders’ capability to choose.

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Fuente de los datos: Dialnet