Our Science, Technology and Society list publishes books that examine the social, political and economic implications of developments in science and technology.
Path-breaking book series include Dis-positions: Troubling Methods and Theory in STS and Contemporary Issues in Science Communication.
Science, Technology and Society
Chapter 2 is about the context to the emergence of lean platforms, and platform rhetoric, the inseparable constellation of stories, categories and semantic games used by platforms and their allies to frame and shape reality in a way intended to shape regulation through processes and trajectories that are described subsequently. The chapter describes the emergence of lean platforms in the context of the economic crisis, and their contradictory relationship with neoliberalism. The emergence and rapid growth of platforms benefited from the political economic context and a wider culture of deregulation; at the same time, platforms presented themselves as addressing the problems of the crisis and of neoliberalism. This leads into a discussion of the rise and fall of the morally laden notion of the Sharing Economy, a term which has long generated confusion, yet secured early institutional support. The chapter describes narratives around change and the future, where platforms are often framed as modernity and progress, important in denying the legitimacy of state regulation, and asserting the futility of resisting platform business aims: however, the evidence shows that resistance and regulation are significant in shaping outcomes. Finally, the language used by lean platforms, their ‘phrasebook’, is analysed, focusing in particular on the ways that work, platform corporations themselves, and democracy, are redefined.
The final chapter reprises the key arguments of the book and reflects on the implications of its findings for debates around corporate power, political activity and lobbying. It reflects on themes of innovation; social movements and civil society; and the new digital economy at large. It finishes by discussing, finally, the alternative ways that platforms and platform commentators have imagined the future. An increasing number of imaginaries and scenarios are circulating in this space. Arguments about contingency, critique and political struggle are beginning to displace and debunk prevailing narratives of technological determinism.
This chapter presents the key aims of the book, describing the development of controversy and contention in public debates and social science around digital platforms. It defines platforms, locates them in a particular political economic moment, and identifies four modes of platform politics: platform rhetoric; platform dissent; platform power; and platform possibility. It discusses the ubiquity of platform politics, but also the absence of reliable information and data, and introduces the sources used for the book: interviews with former platform public policy staff who developed and executed Airbnb’s repertoire of contention in 14 different countries, alongside documents, grey literature, secondary literature and media sources. It finally describes the organisation of the book, introducing each chapter.
This chapter discusses the most well-resourced example of platform power in the world to date, Airbnb Citizen. First it discusses the creation of the Airbnb Citizen –by asking the question of how prospective landlord-activists are selected, recruited and mobilised. Participants in Airbnb’s political campaigns are carefully curated, with commercial landlords on the platform excluded, apparently in order to present a more benign narrative of the company. Interviewees describe an extensive search for appropriate recruits, an intensive series of meetings and meet-ups, followed by increasingly political activities which involve increasing responsibility. Landlords’ personal biographies are used in marketing frames, media and for campaigns to lobby key decision makers. The chapter also identifies the forms of support and influence that Airbnb offers landlord activists. These include the political education of landlords, identification of political opportunities, selecting and curating of selected user stories, editing these stories, preparation and rehearsal with platform staff, the creation of placards, co-participation in protests, chartering buses, and suggesting preferred policy that landlords fight for.
The platform economy, powered by companies like Airbnb, Uber and Deliveroo, promised to revolutionize the way we work and live. But what are the actual benefits to our society and economy?
This book interrogates the ‘sharing economy’, showing how platform capitalism is not only shaped by business decisions, but is a result of struggles involving social movements, consumer politics and state interventions. It focuses in particular on the controversial tactics used by platform giants to avoid regulation.
Drawing on cutting-edge research and analysis, this book provides a critical overview of this important topic, and imagines the different possible futures of the platform economy.
This chapter identifies four main approaches to the mobilisation of users and allies by platform businesses, each of which has influences from other sectors and from civil society. These are the temporary mobilisation of platform users and allies in short-term initiatives to oppose or neutralise political threats; the selecting and editing of the personal ‘stories’ of user-lobbyists in curated storytelling, where individual testimonies become the basis of narratives used in public consultations and media exercises; the creation of front groups, allowing businesses to construct third-party entities to advocate on their behalf; and grassroots alliances, where grassroots partners are identified and mobilised in exchange for in-kind services; all ways of building legitimacy and placing pressure on policy makers through practices and discursive frames adapted from civil society. Each approach to mobilisation is illustrated with examples. The chapter also identifies the five ways in which platform power is distinctive from existing corporate grassroots lobbying, arguing that platforms build on and innovate around existing practices. It finishes by locating platform power in a wider set of trends around neoliberalism and the influence of corporations on politics.
Chapter 3 reviews and analyses what happens in conflicts around platforms, identifying common processes and tactical approaches. The trajectories are characterised, in the argument, in three sets of processes, with distinctive platform tactics employed in each. The first, incursion, expansion and habituation, describes and discusses the arrival of a platform business in a jurisdiction without notifying authorities, ignoring extant legislation, and rapidly expanding, developing relationships with users and customers which can subsequently be exploited in the case of regulatory challenge. This sets the groundwork for politicisation, framing and mobilisation, where a platform is challenged, a process of questioning or politicising an issue or set of issues, by social movements, unions or state institutions. This is met with the processes widely seen as the most significant, and most innovative, of platforms in the context of struggles: confrontational platform rhetoric and the mobilisation of users and allies in platform power. It is the two processes of framing and corporate mobilisation which are examined in the previous and subsequent chapters. Finally, there are frequently ongoing challenges around inhibiting enforcement, through non-cooperation, withholding data, stalling, and venue-shifting to attempt to prevent, delay or overturn unwanted regulations.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Some of the largest quantities of data produced today occur as the result of experiments taking place at Big Science facilities.
This book tells the story of a unique research journey following the people responsible for designing and implementing data management at a new Big Science facility, the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden. It critically examines the idea of data as an absolute ‘truth’ and sheds light on the often underestimated, yet essential, contributions of these data experts.
Providing a unique glimpse into the inner workings of Big Science, this book fills an important gap in science and technology studies and critical data studies.
At Big Science facilities like the ESS, experiments using powerful sources produce vast amounts of data and lead to results that fundamentally change our understanding of the world around us. The preceding empirical chapters show how the DMSC is geographically, organisationally and intellectually separated from the ‘main show’ of the experiment, which will take place in Lund. In the concluding chapter, I suggest that this separation is both product and producer of the invisibleness of the work done in scientific computing, and which is achieved through creation and maintenance of certain boundaries. Studying these boundary lines brought me to a point where I started thinking about experiments at the ESS as having a ‘front stage’ and a ‘back stage’ aspect to them. In my closing remarks, I once again draw attention to the sociohistorical specificity of the work being done at the DMSC, and frame my study as indicative of important changes in how ‘Big Science’ is understood and performed.
In a field outside Lund in southern Sweden, the world’s most powerful neutron source is finally ready for action. This neutron source is located at the heart of the European Spallation Source (ESS), a Big Science facility that – when fully operational – promises to help us understand another of the universe’s mysteries or solve a major societal challenge. This chapter provides a user-friendly introduction to Big Science, and the ESS, while highlighting the apparent paradox that motivates the book as a whole: If data are so fundamental to scientific results achieved at these facilities, why has data management not been more visible both in scholarly accounts of these facilities and in the facilities themselves? And what does this matter to how knowledge is produced at Big Science facilities like the ESS?
