Dividuals at Work: Data-Driven Subjectification in the Gig Economy, lessons from Mexico City.

• In Event: 20220 - Section on Communication, Information Technology, and Media Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Section on Communication, Information Technology, and Media Sociology Roundtable III: Digital Infrastructure I

Abstract

Early accounts on the gig economy, focused on algorithmic control—that is, on the different algorithmic and virtual techniques embedded in labor platforms to discipline workers and maximize the value of labor (Kellogg, Valentine, and Christin 2020; Vallas and Schor 2020). A recent turn on this literature has focused on the embodiment of algorithmic control. Primarily, scholars have focused not only on unpacking algorithmic management systems, but revealing how these systems are experienced, navigated and even resisted on the ground (Chesta, Zamponi, and Caciagli 2019). Furthermore, accounts have begun investigated the gap that exists between technological design and the embodied experience of workers. Missing from these accounts is the gap between data-representations of tracked behaviors and the embodied experience of the self. Drawing from participant observation, and 75 semi-structured interviews with food delivery gig couriers in Mexico City, I join Deleuze and Foucault in conversation to explore the disciplinary process by which workers cease to be full individuals in the eyes of the platforms and become dividuals—and how in turn, workers make sense of this process. I contend that while Deleuze updates Foucault, by showing how power in conjunction with organizational forms, have been transformed in our data-obsessed societies, Foucault reminds us that despite technocentric dreams (or nightmares) of automatization, subjectivity and the corporal body remain with us, fighting against and working with the compartmentalization of individuals into slices of data. This article contributes to our understanding on the changing modalities of power in the now present “future of work.”

Author

• Mariana Manriquez, University of Arizona