Disrupting Algorithms: Innovating Work and Life in the Digital Economy - I

Abstract

Work is increasingly shaped by algorithms and automated technologies that standardize and organize the labor process, incorporate managerial tasks, and contribute to new forms of value generation. While this is depicted as a smooth process of innovation, the field is ripe with frictions and tensions. Disrupting Algorithms: Innovating Work and Life in the Digital Economy consists of three panels. Altogether, they discuss how algorithmic power is confronted, negotiated, and disrupted by workers in today’s booming sectors of logistics, online crowdwork, service work, and the gig economy. The papers document how workers in different geographical, social and political contexts redefine the meanings, opportunities, risks, and rewards imposed by system algorithms and other technologies. Building on STS, political economy of technology, feminist theory of technology, and labor process theory, they study how algorithmic control is met with strikes and refusal, new forms of worker-led organizations, as well as everyday resistance and coping. The aim is to challenge the assumption of technology as an external force that single-handedly configures and controls the workforce, and to shed lights on how both the materiality and ideology of innovation are contested and practiced outside of corporate control.

Disrupting Algorithms: Innovating Work and Life in the Digital Economy I features papers that explore a wide range of workers in the digital economy and their diverse means to comprehend, negotiate, and disrupt algorithms.

Individual Presentations

• Informal Disruptions: Ride-Hailing and Incrementalism in Bandung, Indonesia - Bronwyn Frey, University of Toronto

• Descrying the Inscrutable: How Upworkers Make Sense of Algorithms - Will Sutherland, University of Washington

• Talking About Business: Occupational Communities and Democratization of Labor in Startup Companies - Alberto Lusoli, Simon Fraser University

• The Refusal of Algorithmic Prescription by the Information Professionals: The Resistance around Twitter’s “Show the Best Tweets First” Feature - Alexandre Coutant, UQAM; Florence Millerand, Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM; Gabrielle Silva Mota Drumond, UQAM

Session Organizers

• Alessandro Delfanti, University of Toronto

• Yujie Chen, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto