Coordinating Realization: Labor, Consent, and the Internal Supply Chain in Platform Retail

• In Event: AI, Digital Capitalism, and Infrastructural Power

Abstract

World-systems and global value chain scholarship has documented how buyer-driven economies dominate and discipline suppliers in commodity chain that stand astride core–periphery relations. This paper builds on that body of work but shifts the analytic focus away from supplier relations and questions of production toward the problem of realization, defined as the ways commodities are transformed into money through labor and organizational coordination. I advance the concept of realization labor to capture the heterogeneous work performed by platform engineers, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, and consumers, that drives circulation in contemporary retail capitalism at the end of the commodity chain.

The analysis draws on a synthetic reading of secondary literatures that examine these sites of realization (platforms, warehouses, delivery trucks) independently, including research on platform governance, logistics and warehousing, and last-mile delivery. By juxtaposing these node-specific studies, the paper conceptualizes the internal supply chain as the central organizational form through which realization is coordinated between online interfaces, fulfillment centers, and delivery networks. Across these nodes in the chain of realization, gendered and racialized labor regimes emerge, each distinctively coordinating the pace of work, the use of surveillance and metrics while conditioning the expression of resistance across differentiated sites of circulation.

I argue that control over consumer-facing platforms is pivotal to this system, as gateways to retail goods, they deepen and expand control over markets by capturing behavioral data, often coordinated through the “uninformed consent” of consumers, which ultimately enables domination over upstream suppliers. “Uninformed consent,” is the juridical and organizational fictions in which workers and consumers formally agree to participate while lacking the information or capacity to apprehend the scope of surveillance, metrification, and data extraction embedded in these relations. By foregrounding realization labor and its coordination, the paper reframes platform retail as a key site of capitalist accumulation and extends world-systems analysis beyond production to the organization of circulation and value realization in the contemporary global economy.

Author

• Eileen M. Otis, Northeastern University