Our Science, Technology and Society list publishes books that examine the social, political and economic implications of developments in science and technology.
Recent highlights have included Data Lives, The Imposter as Social Theory and We Have Always Been Cyborgs. Path-breaking book series include Dis-positions: Troubling Methods and Theory in STS and Contemporary Issues in Science Communication.
Science, Technology and Society
As the two Amazon case studies have been isolated from one another to grasp their complexity, this chapter contrasts these and contextualizes them within the larger platform economy. It highlights how the case of Amazon warehouse workers illustrates, on the one hand, the historical continuation of traditional time-wage laboring where workers are assembled in the same physical space within the platform economy, sharing similarities with platforms such as Google. MTurk, on the other hand, sheds light on a different historical continuation, namely of piece-laboring, adopted by capital into the new dimension of the digital. Although even other time-wage laboring platforms are known to contract labor and depend on the ghost work of laborers like that of MTurk, the MTurk case is meant to give insights into the significance of laboring remotely through the web and that of piecework. The gig economy is founded precisely on the latter, constituting an essential part of the platform economy (see also location-based gig platforms). This chapter ultimately highlights how the platform economy may contain some peculiarities, but ultimately (re)produces current capitalist trends towards algorithmic management of labor processes, hypertaylorization of work, fragmentation of the workforce and precarization of the labor market.
This chapter examines the second case study, Amazon Mechanical Turk. In stark contrast to warehouse workers, these are organized on a web-based platform to complete piecework. This chapter investigates the relation of these dimensions to the alienation of MTurk workers regarding their labor activity, the product of labor, their species-being and their fellow humans. These are premised on an anonymized relation between the worker, who receives an alphanumerical ID, and the requester, who may not identify themselves on the platform. Workers are essentially regarded as independent contractors onto whom all possible costs are shifted, with the exception of Amazon’s physical and digital infrastructure in the form of the MTurk platform. Laboring microtasks, termed Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), from behind their screens, workers are confronted within various hyperoutsourced and virtual assembly and production lines across geographical and temporal zones. These gigs can range from classifying videos to identifying objects and answering surveys for which workers receive a piece-wage upon their completion and evaluation. Their human labor, and their labor products in the form of data, can be further used for machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) more generally. This can prove to be central to general contemporary and future technological developments which are bound to have their own repercussions.
It is becoming increasingly clear: platforms, formerly hidden behind the veils of entrepreneurship, are (re)shaping the world of work and workers. As Amazon has become a forerunner in setting these trends, this book examines two key and contrasting Amazon platforms: its e-commerce platform and its digital labor platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). By accessing the workers of the (digital) shop floor, it explores how different organizations of platforms estrange and alienate workers, and how, despite these conditions, workers organize within their political-economic contexts to express their agency. To do so, it differentiates between the nature of the platform and the nature of the work. While the former can be location-based or web-based, the latter refers to a traditional time-wage or gig wage. The case of Amazon's e-commerce platform, meaning the workforce in its warehouses, resembles a location-based traditional time-wage platform, whereas MTurk is an example of a web-based gig piece-wage platform. By investigating these platforms within their political-economic context and approaching their workers on a (digital) shopfloor level, this book argues that the nature of the platform and the nature of the work organize and alienate workers in different ways, with different repercussions for their collective organization, which make themselves felt in traditional and more alternative ways. In doing so, this book shares insights into the different ways in which platforms are structured and reproduce historical continuities in organizing workers and their labor, as well as into contemporary developments that reshape labor realities and how workers organize themselves within these.
This chapter focuses on humanizing the backbone of Amazon – the manual labor that circulates commodities sold via the platform in the warehouses. This chapter dives, therefore, into the first of the two case studies as an example of a location-based traditional time-wage platform. It examines this manual labor on the shop floor, reminiscent of factories in the industrial era yet brought into the 21st century, and analyzes the four relations of alienation: from the labor activity, from the product of labor, from species-being and from fellow humans. The organization of these warehouses reflects Taylorist techniques of scientific management that monitor and control every step of the labor process. Although workers have a set hourly wage, and are not paid piece rate, the pace of their labor is dictated by an enforced Units Per Hour (UPH) regime of productivity rates. The possibility of both social and technological surveillance, as a result of being within a single physical location, ensures a docile and (also algorithmically) disciplined workforce to keep up with the ever-increasing demand and expansions of the corporation. As Amazon reproduces many trends on the labor market from Taylorization common in production lines to the work culture similar in many platforms, it pushes these to new dimensions.
Having looked at the two contrasting Amazon platforms in terms of their platform organization, and having compared and contextualized these within the larger platform economy, this short concluding chapter takes a step back to underline the importance of researching the agency of workers generally, and the platform economy more specifically. It stresses the importance of and necessity for future and further research, both in terms of grasping labor and the labor movement in relation to gendered and racialized dynamics, material contexts and subjectivities and in terms of changing political–economic realities as a result of COVID-19 and ongoing wars that further exacerbate inequalities. Acknowledging the importance of platform cooperatives as alternatives, this book concludes by interweaving reflections to: the reader and consumers, who as members of society are exposed to the omnipresence of platforms; researchers, who support the power resources of workers; the workers, who labor and power the heart of platforms; unions, which have historically pushed for rights and are now co-evolving along intersectional lines and grassroots efforts; and finally regulators, who must hold platforms accountable given their growing political–economic, societal and technological powers.
Moving on from the larger historical development of the platform economy, this chapter focuses on contextualizing Amazon’s expansion and platforms within this larger trajectory. Amazon spreads its roots across the platform economy, becoming foundational to it and making it increasingly difficult not to encounter Amazon in one way or another while using the Internet. This chapter traces its development within the larger platform economy from its establishment in the 1990s to the monopoly it has grown into today. Focusing mainly on the perspective of capital, this chapter underlines the dimensions of Amazon’s growing and expanding ecosystem. It highlights how Amazon has organically created platforms across all three generations in relation to the wider context in which these are situated. It especially focuses on its e-commerce platform and digital labor platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, as these constitute the focus for the later investigation of the world of workers. Amazon is increasingly regarded as a trendsetter for other platforms and industries, holding repercussions and implications within and possibly beyond the platform economy.
It is becoming increasingly clear: platforms, formerly hidden behind the veils of entrepreneurship, are (re)shaping the world of work and workers. As Amazon has become a forerunner in setting these trends, this book examines two key and contrasting Amazon platforms: its e-commerce platform and its digital labor platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). By accessing the workers of the (digital) shop floor, it explores how different organizations of platforms estrange and alienate workers, and how, despite these conditions, workers organize within their political-economic contexts to express their agency. To do so, it differentiates between the nature of the platform and the nature of the work. While the former can be location-based or web-based, the latter refers to a traditional time-wage or gig wage. The case of Amazon's e-commerce platform, meaning the workforce in its warehouses, resembles a location-based traditional time-wage platform, whereas MTurk is an example of a web-based gig piece-wage platform. By investigating these platforms within their political-economic context and approaching their workers on a (digital) shopfloor level, this book argues that the nature of the platform and the nature of the work organize and alienate workers in different ways, with different repercussions for their collective organization, which make themselves felt in traditional and more alternative ways. In doing so, this book shares insights into the different ways in which platforms are structured and reproduce historical continuities in organizing workers and their labor, as well as into contemporary developments that reshape labor realities and how workers organize themselves within these.
This chapter focuses on the perspective of capital, which is crucial to grasp the world of labor, as capital–labor relations operate in relation to the wider co-evolving context. It traces and analyzes the organic development of the platform economy in relation to the political–economic, social and technological conditions. Grounded within the neoliberal context, in which venture capital (VC) and Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) fueled the growth of the platform economy, this chapter identifies three specific generations of platforms. The first one is traced back to the dot-com era in the 1990s, evolving from the creation and wider dissemination of the Internet. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, technological conditions resulted in a more user-friendly Internet while political–economic conditions pushed second-generation platforms to search for a new source of financial capital. As changes in the wider conditions also bring about changes in the platform economy, I finally look at the third-generation platforms that erupted after the economic crisis of 2006–8. This chapter ultimately demonstrates that each kind of platform, with its own way of organizing workers, has organically developed in relation to the wider conditions within capitalist temporality. The platform economy is not separate from, but part of, the larger economy.
As this book seeks to move away from a deterministic analysis, its analytical framework includes not just how workers are organized but also how they organize themselves. This chapter thus provides the second part of its analytical framework to investigate the agency of workers. While this does not constitute the focus of the book, it refers to the importance of class consciousness and subjectivity, in order to bridge the relations of alienation within the larger analysis of agency. It then focuses on sketching out the Power Resources Approach (PRA), inspired primarily, but not exclusively, by the works of Beverly Silver and Erik Olin Wright. It presents four different power resources that workers mobilize while navigating (counteracting) political–economic conditions. Understanding these power resources as co-evolving with one another and bound to their larger context, this chapter first presents the structural power of workers (marketplace and workplace), tying the latter to different forms of resistance. It then moves on to discuss associational power, institutional power and societal power (coalitional and discursive power). The analysis of these power resources is integral to examining the case studies, highlighting labor’s different efforts in organizing and fostering solidarity given the implications but to an extent also possibilities of the differing nature of the platform and of the work.
This chapter sets out its theoretical foundation before delving into the first part of its analytical framework based on examining alienation. Understanding the development of material production, and thereby social life, as the guiding force of history, its theoretical foundation is informed by an understanding of historical materialism, dialectics and labor theory of value based primarily on Volume I of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. In doing so, it centers the workers within capitalist class relations and focuses on the systematic analysis of the relations of alienation based on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. These relations are fourfold: alienation to the labor activity, labor’s product, species-being and fellow humans. When regarded holistically, these relations underline the different dimensions by which workers are estranged and fragmented through their organization and working conditions within capital’s larger circuit of accumulation. The relations of alienations are crucial for the later analysis of the case studies, where their appearance can differ depending on the organization of the platform, demonstrating how these foster atomization and individualization, and, in part, explaining why workers may not organize.
