Disciplining or Empowering Consumers?: How Consumers Simultaneously Reinforce and Challenge Platform Governance

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 7: Platform Work

Abstract

Algorithmically mediated consumer control is most pronounced on digital platforms. As consumers replace managers in the platform economy, much of the existing research has focused on the coercive relationship between workers and consumers. Yet, we know relatively little about consumers' multiple roles in the labor process. Thus, in this paper, we ask two interrelated questions: 1) How do consumers and consumer evaluation systems function as a governance system for platforms? 2) What are the implications of this governance for worker commitment? We answer these questions by drawing on a pooled comparison of content creators in Turkey and drivers in Nigeria and Ghana, as well as 103 semi-structured interviews and archival data. We find that consumers and consumer evaluation systems engender two labor outcomes. First, they serve as a dual governance system of platforms, which we conceptualize as bifurcated consumer control. Bifurcated consumer control consists of simultaneously disciplining workers and fostering commitment through metrics, ratings, and worker-consumer interactions. As a second unintended labor outcome, consumers and evaluation systems can enable workers to leverage in-person interactions or metrics for off-platform earnings and career opportunities, thereby challenging the long-term sustainability of platform governance. Here, we also show how the type of relations with consumers shapes the extent to which platform governance is challenged. Our findings extend the earlier literature on the role of consumers in controlling work by showing the dual nature of consumer control (i.e., disciplining and generating commitment), the fragility of consumer-mediated control, and how the type of relations with consumers (parasocial vs pseudo-relation) shapes the extent to which platform governance is challenged.

Authors

• Elif Birced, MIT

• Lindsey D. Cameron, University of Pennsylvania