Digital work in the age of precarity : a case study of web-based platform workers in Turkey

Date

2024-5-22

Author

Aydoğan, Emir

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Digital labor platforms have come forward as one of the leading agents in the transformation of relations and processes of work under contemporary capitalism. Built upon the efficient mechanisms constructed by the digitalized phase of the capitalist economy, they push the existing dispositions of work toward the extremes, combining novel mechanisms of management and control with already existing modalities organizing work. This thesis takes the algorithmic management model enabled by data monopolization and the outsourcing mechanism it provides as the distinctive characteristics of the regime of work under digital labor platforms. There is also an accompanying continuation of fragmentation of contracts and employment relations and an overall flexibilization, which have been employed to an increasing degree since the beginning of the post-Fordist era, that is lived as precarization by the workers. In light of this conceptual perspective, this thesis investigates the outcomes of this transformation by looking at the subjective experiences of workers in web-based labor platforms in Turkey through a case study. In this sense, this thesis tries to understand how the general dispositions organizing processes of work in platform capitalism affect intellectual labor in the case of web-based digital labor platform workers in Turkey.

Subject Keywords

digital labor platforms, intellectual labor, algorithmic management, precarization, post-Fordism

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/109764

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis