Scalable Sociality in the Platform City - Social Infrastructure of Digital Finance in Urban India

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17: Urban Markets

Abstract

This paper examines how ride-hailing drivers and delivery workers in the city of Kolkata, India, collectively learn to use and manage digital money. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 39 interviews, and observation of 8 WhatsApp and Telegram groups, we find that platform micro-entrepreneurs move between two types of urban groups to make sense of digital finance: small trust groups of friends and neighbours who meet daily in shared city spaces, and large city-wide networks on Telegram. Trust groups function as spaces where new payment applications and loan products are collectively tested, debated, and verified through hands-on training. The larger networks circulate normative advice about financial conduct, often pushed by fleet owners whose patron-client authority carries over from the pre-platform taxi sector. Micro-entrepreneurs filter this advice through their trust groups, where general prescriptions are reworked into practical strategies. Both formations are shaped by the city, trust groups are rooted in neighbourhood life, while the larger networks are bounded by the limits of platform service provision in Kolkata. Extending the concept of scalable sociality (Miller et al., 2016), we argue that this movement between intimate and expansive urban groups constitutes a distinct form of collective financial socialisation that challenges accounts of platform workers as isolated economic actors. The paper contributes to urban sociology by showing that the city is not simply where platform work happens but what makes collective financial navigation possible.

Authors

• Rajorshi Ray, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India

• Shriram Venkatraman, University of Southern Denmark

• Jillet Sarah Sam, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur