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Existing literature examines control and resistance in the context of service organizations that rely on both managers and customers to control workers during the execution of work. Digital platform companies, however, eschew managers in favor of algorithmically mediated customer control—that is, customers rate workers, and algorithms tally and track these ratings to control workers’ future platform-based opportunities. How has this shift in the distribution of control among platforms, customers, and workers affected the relationship between control and resistance? Drawing on workers’ experiences from a comparative ethnography of two of the largest platform companies, we find that platform use of algorithmically mediated customer control has expanded the service encounter such that organizational control and workers’ resistance extend well beyond the execution of work. We find that workers have the most latitude to deploy resistance early in the labor process but must adjust their resistance tactics because their ability to resist decreases in each subsequent stage of the labor process. Our paper, thus, develops understanding of resistance by examining the relationship between control and resistance before, during, and after a task, providing insight into how control and resistance function in the gig economy. We also demonstrate the limitations of platforms’ reliance on algorithmically mediated customer control by illuminating how workers’ everyday interactions with customers can influence and manipulate algorithms in ways that platforms cannot always observe.

We examine how platform-based experimentation influences worker autonomy when workers do not have access to the same relational opportunities that workers in conventional bureaucratic organizations have traditionally relied on to preserve their autonomy. By analyzing longitudinal qualitative data from one of the world’s largest digital labor platforms, we found that the platform implemented three experimentation regimes—explicit, concealed, and unbounded—that reconfigured workers’ autonomy in unexpected ways. We theorize the introduction of and successive changes in platform-based experimentation as constitutive of the experimental hand. Our model of the experimental hand captures how successive changes in platform-based experimentation regimes reconfigure workers’ degree of autonomy: workers first experienced increased autonomy, followed by diminished autonomy, and finally workers normalized their diminished autonomy as a “business as usual” aspect of work life on the platform. Whereas prior research has primarily examined the design and efficacy of experiments from the perspective of organizations, our study builds new theory on the social effects of experimentation, capturing the implications faced by workers.