Platformisation as an Organising Logic of Inequality

Éditeurs invités

• Amanda Peticca-Harris, Grenoble Ecole de Management
• Annalisa Murgia, University of Milan
• Julieta Haidar, Workers' Innovation Centre-CONICET

Synthèse

This special issue examines how digital platforms function as systems that organise and reinforce inequality rather than simply producing it as an outcome. Platform labour operates as survival work for those already positioned within broader structures of inequality, including migrants, workers excluded from formal employment, and women managing care responsibilities. The issue seeks work that connects domains often treated separately—such as legal status, gender, and labour stratification—and explores how these intersect in shaping platform participation across geographical contexts.

Contributors are encouraged to examine how livelihoods are assembled through platformisation across labour, migration, and everyday life, with particular attention to care work and social reproduction. The issue also welcomes research on how workers navigate, adapt to, and contest platform-mediated inequalities through resistance, collective organising, and everyday survival strategies, recognising that agency emerges within the systems that organise inequality itself.

Thèmes proposés

• To what extent do platform-based systems depend on inequality? How do they organise it?
• In what ways are insecurity and risk embedded within platform-based systems?
• How is labour supply structured through marginalised populations within platform economies?
• How are visibility, ratings, access to work, and valuation differentially organised across workers and contexts?
• How are platform systems becoming embedded across domains such as mobility, food, care, logistics, and urban life?
• In what ways do platform arrangements rely on, reproduce, and organise gendered, racialised, classed, generational, ableist, or otherwise undervalued forms of labour?
• How are livelihoods assembled through platform work across contexts shaped by migration, informality, and low incomes?
• How do workers combine multiple income streams, care responsibilities, and relational resources to sustain everyday life?
• What forms of agency, everyday tactics, informal solidarities, survival strategies, resistance, or adaptation emerge in response to inequalities embedded within platform-based systems?
• What methodological approaches can make visible the unequal, relational, embodied, and infrastructural dimensions of platform-mediated work and livelihood?