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In this paper, I consider how the COVID‐19 pandemic shaped the gendered self‐understandings of cabdrivers in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. Extending research on the pandemic's effect on economically and socially marginalised groups such as app‐based cabdrivers and by taking into account masculinity as a framework of analysis, in this paper, I ask: how does a crisis like the pandemic impact self‐understandings of men cabdrivers? How does the intensification of precarity during a global crisis affect the way men understand themselves as gendered selves? Based on ethnographic fieldwork collected both before the pandemic and during, I trace two emergent patterns which I briefly explore in this paper. First, I show how and why the ‘breadwinner’ trope (and the attendant ideologies of protection and provision) was largely reinforced but also, sometimes, challenged during the pandemic. I then move the analytical gaze outside the space of the home to examine how care structures interrelatedness among cabdrivers as a community in the register of brotherhood. Ultimately, I argue that adopting a gendered lens on the pandemic offers an analytical flashpoint in identifying when and why ideologies of manhood, particularly among subaltern men, intersect with broader socio‐economic forces in shaping individual experiences and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of digital technologies, a political‐economic configuration recognised as “platform capitalism” has raised concerns over monopolistic tendencies, lack of accountability, expanded rentiership, workers’ precarity, and more. Existing analyses, however, show a distinctly urban bias—centring on housing, transportation, retail, and gig labour—and have yet to engage with the agrarian dimensions of this phenomenon despite considerable potential impacts on the future of farming. Here we begin the process of theorising agrarian platform capitalism, offering a typology of platforms in the agri‐food sector, and bringing together critiques of platform capitalism with the distinctive features of agrarian political economy. Our analysis identifies four prominent characteristics of agrarian platform capitalism which largely corroborate existing critiques albeit with some distinctive contours. As in other sectors, platforms intensify rentiership regarding both real estate and digital assets. Agricultural platforms also display a familiar tendency to thrive in spaces of regulatory retreat and are in some cases even endorsed by regulatory agencies, highlighting the potential for public–private platformisation. Some agricultural platform companies deploy populist rhetoric beyond established tropes of consumer welfare, latching onto farmers’ deep frustrations with the highly concentrated agribusiness sector. Efforts to reign in agrarian platform power may be further constrained by legitimising discourses of hunger relief and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of popular commentaries in recent years have contended that the emergence of an advanced, platform-oriented digital economy marks the end of capitalism as such. This paper evaluates these claims from theorists such as Mckenzie Wark and Yannis Varoufakis. Ultimately the paper suggests that a more useful and plausible alternative to them is to be found in the Regulation School assertion that 'platform capitalism' constitutes a new 'regime of accumulation': a successor to 'Fordism' and 'post-Fordism'. The paper explains the historical origins of this approach, arguing for its continued usefulness and its compatibility with important recent developments in institutional, technological and media sociology. It explains the compatibility of an approach characterising 'platform capitalism' as a new regime of accumulation with a range of other perspectives on both 'platformization' and contemporary capitalism, and discusses both recent changes to popular music culture and broad trends in populist politics in recent decades as exemplifying cultural, social and political features of platform capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The educational technology industry includes numerous learning providers and platforms offering cohort-based courses. In this paper, we examine, analyze, and critique one such platform called Maven. We focus our analysis on Maven because this specific platform describes itself as building 'the university of the future' and has recently received significant attention and funding, making it a compelling case study to better understand the potential roles and risks associated with education platforms operating outside of and alongside more traditional higher education institutions today and into the future. We highlight specific concerns about cohort-based platforms like Maven, including lack of transparency, risk of surveillance, lack of adequate financial support for learners, and over-reliance on social media networks as signifiers of educator/instructor qualification. Suggested benefits include adaptability, suitability to changing skills needs, and responsiveness to changing environmental scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Platform work represents a new form of non-standard work without recognition by European labour law. In recent years, the issue of improving working conditions in platform work has been at the heart of political and academic debate. On 11th March 2024, the employment and social affairs ministers of the EU Member States endorsed the agreement reached with the European Parliament on the Commission’s proposed directive on platform work. The directive tackles situations of wrong classification of employment status, introducing a rebuttable legal presumption and reducing the burden of proof on persons performing platform work. In addition, the directive introduces the first EU rules to regulate algorithmic management in the workplace. This paper traces the positions advocated by the European institutions in defining the strategy for improving working conditions within digital platforms and offers an extended analysis of the final text of the directive that has just been approved.

The body of literature addressing platform capitalism, platform labour and platform urbanism paints a compelling picture of how digital platforms shape the dynamics of both leisure and labour within the framework of the platform's model for extracting value. However, this literature rarely captures how the global timespaces of digital platforms are translated in platform-mediated fields of work and which frictions occur in this process. Therefore, the contrasts between the rhythms of the platform prompting users towards instantaneous data production and the production capabilities of the humans, whose daily (work) life has become dependent on such platforms, remain largely unexplored. In this article, I develop the lens of timespace friction, by integrating the existing research on platform labour with a timespace perspective. The aim is to present a framework that reveals the contrasting relationship between the conflating rhythms of platform capitalism and platform-mediated labour. The mechanisms are explored utilising an ethnographic case study of the digital labour of independent fashion designers on Instagram. The proposed perspective on timespace friction demonstrates that mobile apps function as metronomes, nudging the timespaces of daily (work) life. Timespaces are thus negotiated in the polyrhythmic encounters of daily life, where designers challenge the rhythms of the platform or accelerate their practices to follow the imposed pace. A timespace friction perspective therefore sees beyond the smooth operating mechanisms of the platform economy that promise real-time data, flexibility and efficiency, revealing the hidden struggles of synchronisation (speeding up), de-synchronisation (slowing down) and losing grip (going viral). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scams are endemic to digital capitalism, whether they manifest as bitcoin bubbles or bullshit jobs. Drawing on two years of digital ethnography in Myanmar's Facebook land markets, this article explains what happens when the land scam migrates online. By unraveling warnings of trickery, interviewing wary participants, and inhabiting Facebook Live real estate tours, we argue that the scam is a vocation born of hope and desperation that targets land as the most-stable asset amidst crisis, one which operates through the networked and affective affordances of social media sites. Specifically, we highlight how Facebook enables brokers to 'crowd' transactions and amplify hype around sought-after plots, obscuring risk and responsibility while generating excitement and competition. Live video formats enable brokers to cultivate digital intimacy and authenticity from afar, creating a collective emotional investment in what we call the "virtual reality of land." Bringing together critical geography and media studies, our analysis situates the scam in particular histories of inequality while explaining how these relations are reformulated through social media sites' sensory, affective, and connective affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a first analysis of representation in the African press of the fast-emerging amalgamation of online financial services popularized under the label 'Fintech'. Authors conducted content analysis of selected African newspapers, deploying the concept of framing to examine how the Fintech story is communicated to news readers in Africa. Authors identified nine frequently apparent tropes in a sample of Fintech news and used these tropes to reveal dominant themes in news coverage. The sample of 386 pieces was drawn from multiple African news sources published between 2016 and 2021, a period characterized by rapid uptake of Fintech across the continent and by a global pandemic. Findings suggests that the Fintech story in African newspapers is a predominantly positive, celebratory, and enabling narrative offering little critical reporting. News media examined demonstrate collaboration with the local/transnational finance sector to present a vision of progressive modernity and to reinforce afro-optimism and a techno-utopian discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its appearance 12 years ago, the digital platform Airbnb has revolutionized the temporary accommodation system worldwide, leading to diverse territorial impacts beyond the tourism and hospitality industries. Despite its distinct presence in Latin America, there is no review of the existing academic literature in the region to date. Against this backdrop, the purpose of the article is to develop a literature review of Airbnb in Latin America from the critical perspective of urban studies. To do so, exploratory-descriptive research was carried out based on the review of scientific publications that addressed the topic of Airbnb, up to and including 2020, in four international academic journal databases: Scopus, Dialnet, Scielo and Redalyc. The main results show that the existing literature on Airbnb in urban studies in Latin America is still at an early stage, with little development compared to that of other world regions, where the tourism and business model approaches seem to occlude other facets of the phenomenon. These results made it possible to outline a future research agenda on temporary accommodation in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital transformation of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) is being hailed as a panacea for the sectors' problems, with major actors in government and business promoting it as a benevolent harbinger of greater efficiency, productivity, better quality, and environmental performance. However, advancing digitalization in AEC is intertwined with a distinct political-economic logic that involves new constraints, dependencies, and a reconfiguration of power relations. Specifically, Building Information Modeling (BIM) as a digital convergence of three-dimensional building models, databases, and interfaces for multidisciplinary collaboration operates as a runway technology for digitalization and an entry point for platformization impelled by global software giants, such as this article's empirical case of software company Autodesk and its BIM product portfolio shows. BIM's linkage of governmental policy strategies with the techno-economic platform logic of software subscription models, open application programming interfaces, and cloud-enabled collaboration ensures management and control of construction data and software interoperability. At the same time, BIM's techno-economic and political configuration facilitates a near-monopolistic structure in the global architecture and construction software market. It thus grants one hegemonic company immense power to define what formats, standards, and data for building models and design processes are being used in creating the built environment. The expansive, intersecting logics of assetization, platformization, and datafication have been taking hold in the AEC sector, raising questions about their stratifying effects in the built environment and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Recent literature has argued that digital technologies reinforce existent inequalities along race, class and gender. However, the relationship between digital capitalism and racism is yet to be explored in depth. How does digitalisation rework social relations and social cooperation to produce new forms of racialised hierarchisation and differentiation? The article is based on an international project on platform labour spanning seven European cities. It focuses on the sector of ride-hailing in Berlin and analyses the interactions between processes of platformisation and (de-)racialisation. Finally, it shows how racism becomes infrastructural when platforms organise its circulation.

Technological innovation can serve a multitude of conflicting and diverse interests, often reflecting prevailing worldviews and ideologies. This article focuses on the shaping of innovation directionality in the context of digital platform capitalism, which has emerged as a powerful innovation paradigm. Simultaneously, digital platforms have sparked significant concerns regarding labour rights, economic inequalities, and injustices. We investigate the strategies of resistance, appropriation, and re-direction of digital platform technology in the case of CoopCycle, a food delivery riders’ platform cooperative. The case consists of a digital platform co-owned and governed by a federation of 70 rider cooperatives worldwide. The case study reveals that, under certain conditions, existing and well-established innovation pathways might be steered in different and more responsible directions through contestation and experimentation driven by social demands for equality, democracy and participation.

Platform business models rest on an uneven foundation. Online behavioral advertising drives revenue for companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon, with privacy self-management governing the flows of personal data that help platforms dominate advertising markets. We argue that this area of platform capitalism is reinforced through a process whereby seemingly incompatible conceptions of human subjects are codified and enacted in law and industrial art. A rational liberal “consumer” agrees to the terms of data extraction and exploitation set by platforms. Inside the platform, however, algorithmic systems act upon a “user,” operationalized as fragmentary patterns, propensities, probabilities, and potential profits. Transitioning from consumers into users, individuals pass through a suite of legal and socio-technical regimes that each orient market formations around particular accounts of human rationality. This article shows how these accounts are highly productive for platform businesses, configuring subjects within a legitimizing framework of consumer sovereignty and market efficiency.

Platform capitalism is a growing reality with a widening social and economic impact. The rapid expansion of Short-Term Rental (STR) platforms has led to new challenges for policy regulation. The main objective of this paper is to shed some light on current conflicts surrounding the regulation of STR. The body of literature on this topic mainly focuses on the increasing substitution of sharing economy by commercial hosts. By contrast, we explain that the ideological notion of host hinders the understanding of the supply-side structure. A critical approach (as critique of ideology and ideological categories) should entail a class perspective based on rent theory and engage with critical works on platform capitalism. In this article, we propose an innovative analytical approach to STR supply-side supported by rent theory, which focuses on the relationship of agents with land and technology ownership and specialised management services, as these are forms of rent appropriation. From this point of view, these supply-side agents are not hosts, but class factions with common and competing economic interests in rent appropriation. Therefore, they can employ a variety of strategies to influence the political regulation of STRs. Based on in-depth interviews with landlords, individual managers, and corporate agencies in Andalusia (Southern Spain), we show the conflicting internal structure behind the ideological notion of host and even professionalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to develop some interpretative hypotheses on the transformation of education that digitalisation and neoliberalism have brought about in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on changes in the Italian education system to outline the general, structural trend. In order to illustrate how transformations in the education system can be viewed as a process of capitalist valorisation, we present the insights offered by a set of contemporary workerist enquiries and use the theoretical concepts of 'hyperindustrialisation' and 'hybridisation', drawn also from the research work of Romano Alquati. Our conclusions show how work in education can be reconceptualised in relation to the general process of digital socialisation and its contradictions: we unveil hidden sides of the platformisation of education and provide a disenchanted view of digital solutionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Review of Public Law is the property of European Public Law Organization and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article describes a new concept called the errand economy. It examines the dark side of the platform economy and the gig economy and makes a valuable contribution to the field. The concepts, especially for liberal scholars, hide the negative impact of platform capitalism on production relationships and the working class by emphasising digital technologies and piecework. The errand economy, however, especially highlights the degradation of labour, regardless of its qualifications, alongside processes such as flexibilisation, precarisation, and informalisation. That is because, under the conditions of the errand economy, platforms treat all types of work as cheap, worthless and degraded errands. The main mission of the platform economy is to end employment by using the discourse of flexibility and entrepreneurship and to transform all employees into errand workers by classifying them as self-employed. For this reason, the article proposes to use the concept of the errand economy together with the platform economy, which refers to digital infrastructures, and the gig economy, which emphasises the piecework.

The paper sets out to dissolve a contrast between traditional coop sectoral enclosure, on the one hand, and platform coop diversity, on the other hand, which often resonates with precariousness, marginalisation, fragmentation, whitewashing and corporatisation. To tackle traditional and platform coop discordance, the paper draws on the model of open cooperativism introduced by Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens, passed through the lens of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory of hegemony, to weave a narrative that seeks to unite and broaden the scope of the cooperative sector. In doing so, the paper reviews CoopCycle as an illustrative case study of platform cooperativism. CoopCycle is a global federation of bike delivery coops that deploy the digital commons to install workplace democracy in the bike delivery sector. The paper aims at contributing to the understanding of platform cooperativism, all the while embedding the model of platform cooperativism into the counter-hegemony of open cooperativism aiming to challenge the current hegemony of neoliberalism. The main argument here is that the model of open cooperativism bears comparative advantages vis-à-vis closed proprietary socio-economic models.

This paper examines the concentration of wealth and power in the networked ecosystem of digital platforms in light of the Marxist theory of rent, which views rental income as a form of economic gain without engaging in productive labor. The article discusses the dominance of digital platforms and their transformative effects of platform capitalism on labor markets, highlighting the growth of gig economies and the challenges of labor rights, income security, and regulatory frameworks in this new paradigm. Since platforms enabled by advancements in technology and digital connectivity, they have revolutionized traditional business models and reshaped the ways in which value is created, distributed, and captured. These platforms, while revolutionizing economic interactions and information exchange, also reflect elements of rent extraction identified in Marxist thought. This amplifies concerns over economic inequality and the accumulation of power, mirroring the Marxist critique of rent as an exploitative mechanism. By scrutinizing digital platforms through a Marxist rent theory framework, this study aims to comprehend how these platforms fit into the broader landscape of capitalist relations, shedding light on the complex interplay between technological innovation, economic structures, and the perpetuation of class divisions.

The paper aims to analyze the accelerated growth of distance education (EaD – acronym in Portuguese), its relationship with the COVID-19 pandemic and the advancement of digital technologies in teacher training in a context of private-commercial domain and capitalism platform. Digital business platforms and private HEIs are driving the growth of distance learning, transforming it into a profitable market. These peculiar service companies act as intermediaries, connecting students, teachers, and educational institutions through their digital platforms. The analysis undertaken here considers data from the INEP Higher Education Census since the last decade of the 20th century, focusing, however, on more recent times, from the triggering of the COVID-19 pandemic which, in our understanding, served as a catalyst for the exorbitant expansion of EaD. The article seeks to establish the debate on equal access to education, digital inclusion, as well as reflecting on the privacy of the actors involved in the teaching-learning process and also on the conflict between public and private, especially in teacher training in Brazil.

This is an edited transcript of the audio recording of the roundtable on Future, Democracy, and Platforms, which was organized at the EUMEPLAT project meeting at Charles University in Prague on 15 January 2024, in collaboration with the MeDeMAP (Mapping Media for Future Democracies) project. The current digital public spaces have been transformed by platformization, and besides the positive consequences such as democratization of communication or access to information, these processes driven by algorithms have brought political, cultural, and economic asymmetries. At the roundtable, we discussed challenges and threats to fostering more democratic platform environments in the future with experts from fields such as digital and economic anthropology or new media philosophy. Among the discussed platform related topics were public and cooperative ownership, the need to strengthen their democracy and imagination or pleasure as the key principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing impact of algorithmically driven processes on human societies, which can exacerbate political, economic, and cultural asymmetries, raises questions about reducing human agency by constraining platform structures. We draw on the theoretical concept of algorithmic imaginary, which captures users' appropriations and ideas of these processes. In this paper, we focus on the dynamics between agency and structure in algorithmic imaginaries regarding the future of digital media platforms in Europe. The paper takes structuration theory as a theoretical starting point and employs methods of futures studies to analyze how the future is constructed in scenarios developed by a diversity of experts participating in a series of workshops. The future scenarios analysis is mapped around four actors, namely platform users, platform corporations, algorithms and institutions. By considering the role of various actors, particularly institutions, and their interdependencies this paper contributes to more balanced conceptualizations of algorithmic imaginaries, which tend to be centered around users' perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, we have been experiencing the increasing role of platforms in the spheres of production and social reproduction, as platform urbanism reshapes financial, spatial and cultural scapes all over the world. Major actors of the platform economy, mainly large for-profit companies like Airbnb, Uber and Wolt claim that the practices they facilitate have a positive economic, social and environmental outcome, a discourse that is reflected in the description of these practices as “sharing” and “cooperation”, while they are adopted as a means of benefiting from the advantageous regulations compared to the “conventional” economy. The article explores the impacts of digitally mediated short-term rentals (STR) in the city of Athens and in particular on housing, urban environment and labour. Through a mixed methods approach based on 27 semi-constructed interviews with actors of the STR market as well as the processing of quantitative and mapping data retrieved from the platforms AirDNA and Inside Airbnb, the article reexamines and questions the potential of platforms like Airbnb to contribute towards the financial, social and urban sustainability, as they reproduce and, in many cases, reinforce capitalist practices, resulting in deepening existing inequalities and exclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Purpose. The study identifies the effects of the small local networks of renewable energy generation on the economy. It defines the potential and necessary conditions to establish value creation networks, or distributed production systems, based on participant cooperation. Design. The paper examines increasing opportunities to guarantee sustainable economic development. At the same time, the challenges of digital technologies also create serious threats to the community’s social cohesion. The monopolization of digital platform marketplaces and the emergence of “platform capitalism” follow the growth of the platform business model. The proprietors of the core of digital platforms own disproportionate market dominance. Findings. The emergence of “platform capitalism” and “platform cooperativism” models discussed in the contingent upon certain socio-cultural conditions. It has proven that cooperative digital platforms are particularly vital during the full-scale war of Russia against Ukraine and the post-war reconstruction period. Originality. A proposed cooperative digital platform-based model develops a microgrid ecosystem to produce renewable energy. Digital platform cooperatives exemplified the benefits of geographic or specialty localization (specialization) with the activities’ globalization. Digital platforms allow united independent developers of scientific and technical innovations and technological knowledge, as well as owners of material funds and financial resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociología del Trabajo is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article describes a new concept called the errand economy. It examines the dark side of the platform economy and the gig economy and makes a valuable contribution to the field. The concepts, especially for liberal scholars, hide the negative impact of platform capitalism on production relationships and the working class by emphasising digital technologies and piecework. The errand economy, however, especially highlights the degradation of labour, regardless of its qualifications, alongside processes such as flexibilisation, precarisation, and informalisation. That is because, under the conditions of the errand economy, platforms treat all types of work as cheap, worthless and degraded errands. The main mission of the platform economy is to end employment by using the discourse of flexibility and entrepreneurship and to transform all employees into errand workers by classifying them as self-employed. For this reason, the article proposes to use the concept of the errand economy together with the platform economy, which refers to digital infrastructures, and the gig economy, which emphasises the piecework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper sets out to dissolve a contrast between traditional coop sectoral enclosure, on the one hand, and platform coop diversity, on the other hand, which often resonates with precariousness, marginalisation, fragmentation, whitewashing and corporatisation. To tackle traditional and platform coop discordance, the paper draws on the model of open cooperativism introduced by Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens, passed through the lens of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory of hegemony, to weave a narrative that seeks to unite and broaden the scope of the cooperative sector. In doing so, the paper reviews CoopCycle as an illustrative case study of platform cooperativism. CoopCycle is a global federation of bike delivery coops that deploys the digital commons to install workplace democracy in the bike delivery sector. The paper aims at contributing to the understanding of platform cooperativism, all the while embedding the model of platform cooperativism into the counter-hegemony of open cooperativism aiming to challenge the current hegemony of neoliberalism. The main argument here is that the model of open cooperativism bears comparative advantages vis-à-vis closed proprietary socio-economic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Perspectivas de Politicas Publicas is the property of Universidad Nacional de Lanus and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of O Social em Questão is the property of Faculdades Catolicas - Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Gig work platforms such as Lyft, Uber, Wolt, and Flink undertook intense efforts to make their work more 'fun,' with the aim of motivating their workers and making them more efficient. This paper looks at how platform capitalism intertwines the gamification and precarization of labor, leading to an increased blurring of work and leisure. Employing the video works Delivery Dancer's Sphere (2022) by Ayoung Kim and Platform (2022) by Johannes Bü ttner as case studies, the text examines how the gamification and precarization of labor through delivery platforms are addressed and critiqued in contemporary media art and how both Kim and Büttner utilize gaming aesthetics and mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of MEMLEKET: Politics & Administration / Siyaset Yönetim is the property of Local Governments Research, Assistance & Education Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Research in Economics, Politics & Finance / Ekonomi, Politika & Finans Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of Journal of Research in Economics, Politics & Finance and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this contribution we offer a conceptualisation of the cycle of struggles recently happening in the food delivery sector in Italy. As a part of an in-depth co-research conducted among Riders Union Bologna (RUB), we investigate this case by adopting the lens of recognition. Despite its long-standing roots, recognition is a category that has largely been neglected by Industrial Relations (IR) debate. The article will present its potential in understanding some precarious workers' struggles, focusing their successful path in establishing IR in an anti-union environment, such as that of food delivery platforms. Three dimensions of recognition will then be explored: the internal recognition that is fundamental in forming workers' collective identity; the institutional recognition leading to the development of new regulations in the sector; the recognition by employers that makes collective bargaining possible. In conclusion, after highlighting the main evidences of the research, reflections will be conducted on the potential of the category of recognition in renewing IR theories, including struggles that often escape traditional approaches.

Objective: to perform a philosophical analysis of the problem of emotions monetization, which is currently expanding the scope of manifestations and effects, as well as to disclosure the causes and features of this process.Methods: existential-phenomenological, analytical and logical, as well as structural and system-functional approaches. The ideas of D. Harvey, J. Baudrillard, N. Srnicek, R. van den Akker, A. Gibbons and T. Vermeulen on the state of modern society served as material for theoretical comprehension of the problem.Results: the research revealed that today the emotions monetization plays a significant role both in the life of a modern individual spending a lot of time in social networks, whom we call an electronic nomad, and of producers of goods and services, advertisers and intermediaries, bringing large profits to the latter. The consumerism ideology and the consumer society contribute to the emotions monetization, as well as the two-world, chaotic and fragmented here-existence of an electronic nomad, their loneliness and unstable structure of feelings. Consumption is not rationalized by a modern individual; it is associated with the desire for excess and is subject to a change of emotions and feelings. The nomad relies on advertising to satisfy his needs, where they are offered a product/service in an excellent form as a tempting deficiency. Today, to construct an advertising myth, databases and various platforms are used, targeting of potential customers is carried out, which allows manipulating their emotions and forcing them to make a choice. At the same time, the purchase of a product or service is associated with quickly forgetting the emotions, and possibly with subsequent disappointment. The electronic nomad, yielding to emotions, demonstrates lack of will, manipulability, and lack of reflexivity over what is happening.Scientific novelty: the results of the analysis of the current state of consumer society allow posing the problem of emotions monetization, identifying the reasons for the intensive development of this process in an electronic nomad, and discovering the features of manipulation tactics that lead to the conversion of emotions into monetary equivalent.Practical significance: consists in using the research results for further study of monetization using databases, recognizing the manipulative tactics exploiting the emotions of an electronic nomad, and problematizing the totality of emotions monetization and improving the quality of goods/services common in modern society.

Este artículo despliega el trabajo teórico de David Harvey para entender los procesos contemporáneos de urbanización del “capitalismo de plataformas”. Empezamos por aislar varias de las principales innovaciones conceptuales de Harvey para contextualizar el desarrollo del capitalismo de plataformas y explicar la importancia de las plataformas digitales y los “ecosistemas” de startups. Luego, el artículo los aplica como heurística para explicar críticamente cómo las dinámicas de financierización, conversión en activos (assetisation) y reproducción de formas específicas de la fuerza de trabajo se han fusionado con procesos de urbanismo emprendedor en la producción del distrito de innovación del 22@. Finalmente, el artículo se centra en el caso de Glovo, la plataforma de “comercio rápido”, para ilustrar los aspectos más nocivos y controvertidos de la urbanización contemporánea del capitalismo de plataformas en Barcelona. This article deploys the theoretical work of David Harvey to comprehend contemporary processes of the urbanisation of ‘platform capitalism’. It isolates several of Harvey’s key conceptual innovations in order to use them to contextualise the development of platform capitalism and to explain the significance of platforms and start-up ‘ecosystems’. The article then applies these as heuristics to explain and critique how dynamics of financialisation, assetisation, and the reproduction of specific supplies of labour-power have fused with supply-side urban entrepreneurial placemaking processes to produce the 22@ innovation district. The article homes in on the case of the quick commerce delivery platform, Glovo, to illustrate the more deleterious and contested aspects of the contemporary urbanisation of platform capitalism in Barcelona.

Este artículo describe y analiza las estrategias empleadas para introducir Uber en España. Se emplea el concepto de entramado sociotécnico poniendo de manifiesto la interacción de múltiples factores para lograr la estabilización del modelo. Entre ellos es relevante el papel jugado por la tecnología, pero este concepto nos sirve para considerar la importancia de otras cuestiones o las diferentes dimensiones que encierra su uso. Concretamente, se describen las adaptaciones respecto al diseño original que tuvo que realizar el modelo Uber para lograr operar en España, poniendo atención a la situación de mercado que se estableció y su influencia sobre las condiciones de trabajo de su fuerza laboral. Se considera como un rasgo característico del modelo la hiperflexibilidad, circunstancia previamente existente en el mercado de trabajo español, pero que es aprovechada y expandida por medio del empleo de los algoritmos aplicados a la gestión del trabajo. Esto supone un incremento aún mayor de dicha hiperflexibilidad descrita en el texto. Los datos empleados para el análisis proceden de un prolongado trabajo de campo. Este material es combinado con la información procedente de fuentes secundarias, principalmente prensa económica, sentencias judiciales y los datos proporcionados por el Ministerio de Transportes Movilidad y Agenda Urbana español. La principal aportación de este trabajo reside en que da cuenta de parte de un trabajo con un nivel de extensión y profundidad inédito para el caso español. This article describes and analyzes the strategies used to introduce Uber in Spain. The concept of sociotechnical framework is used, highlighting the interaction of multiple factors to achieve the stabilization of the model. Among them, the role played by technology is relevant, but this concept helps us to consider the importance of other issues or the different dimensions involved in its use. Specifically, we describe the adaptations with respect to the original design that the Uber model had to make in order to operate in Spain, paying attention to the market situation that was established and its influence on the working conditions of its workforce. A characteristic feature of the model is considered to be hyper-flexibility, a circumstance previously existing in the Spanish labor market, but which is exploited and expanded through the use of algorithms applied to labor management. This implies an even greater increase in the hyperflexibility described in the text. The data used for the analysis come from extensive fieldwork. This material is combined with information from secondary sources, mainly the economic press, court rulings and data provided by the Spanish Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda. The main contribution of this work lies in the fact that it reports part of a work with an unprecedented level of extension and depth for the Spanish case.