Making Platforms Work: Conceptualizing Platform Labor and the Management of Publics

• In Event: Algorithms at Work: The Practice of Prediction - I: Algorithms-in-Practice in Institutional and Organizational Perspective

Abstract

Scholars of “platform governance” argue that platform companies manage users through the use of algorithms and programmable interfaces. In this study, we focus instead on “relationship work,” which is complementary to technical work but systematically excised from platforms’ accounts of what they do. Relationship work is a form of articulation work that is carried out by platform companies to maintain relationships with users.

To describe relationship work, this study draws on ethnographic research to compare the organizational practices of two different platform startups. AllDone built a digital platform for buyers and sellers of local services. edX partners with institutions to offer Massive Open Online Courses comprised of text, videos, and machine-graded assessments.

Our findings leverage variation in organizational contexts to elaborate the divergent strategies for platform governance and types of relationship work that each platform deployed. AllDone, which was pressured by venture capital funders to prioritize rapid revenue growth, undertook a strategy of account management. AllDone interpellated and responded to users as individuals, triaging users’ particularized grievances via e-mail and telephone exchanges. edX’s platform governance strategy was one of identity management: the enterprise framed the platform as a social movement with the goal of “reinventing education,” and engaged in a variety of community-building activities (e.g. conferences, user forums, meetups) to engage users.

The article demonstrates how variations in organizational context--including funding models and relative resource scarcity--account for divergent strategies for governing user participation in digital platforms and documents variation in the processes through which governance is accomplished and contested.

Authors

• Benjamin Shestakofsky, University of Pennsylvania

• Shreeharsh Kelkar, University of California, Berkeley