Digitisation of Labour: Configurations of Real and Virtual Migration

Project: Research

Project participants

Description

Digitisation is profoundly changing labour relations and patterns of mobility. On the one hand, almost all existing areas of work are changing. On the other hand, digitisation produces new forms of digital labour which, with the help of the internet, are increasingly globally distributed. One central element of this transformation is the rise of digital platforms: from online retail, over taxi and food delivery services, through to crowdworking platforms for digital labour. While the platform-driven digitisation of labour and life is beginning to receive attention within the social sciences, there is a lack of studies with ethnographic depth, especially concerning the practices of mobility and the migration projects produced by this transformation of the world of work.On the basis of two exemplary cases, the project researches how the practices of mobility and labour migration – and, as such, labour itself – changes under digital conditions. The case studies are globally distributed digital labour on crowdworking platforms and digitised labour on the ‘last mile’ of parcel and delivery services as an example of the digital transformation of ‘traditional’ professions. In both fields, platform-driven digitisation changes labour; not only through flexibilization and algorithmic management, but also in terms of the mobility requirements faced by workers. Crowdworking platforms allow the global distribution of digital labour down to the personal computers and smartphones of the workers, who become ‘virtual migrants’ (Aneesh 2006) without changing their location. The economic importance of ‘last mile’ delivery services has increased enormously due to online retail and platforms, while requiring place-bound forms of digitised labour that are also connected to new mobility practices. Here, a high number of ‘real life migrants’ are employed whose flexible mobility practices correspond with the requirements of labour.A demand-oriented, flexible and just-in-time allocation of labour is characteristic of both fields. The interplay of forms of virtual and real migration shows how processes of digitisation produce and reconfigure heterogenous mobility practices which are increasingly flexible, differentiated and temporalized. This raises epistemic and socially relevant questions about the concept of migration, and for research on migration. These will be addressed theoretically and in relation to the ethnographic research.
StatusFinished
Period01.05.1830.04.21

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  2. How Differences in Ratings of Odors and Odor Labels Are Associated with Identification Mechanisms
  3. Nonlinear anisotropic boundary value problems – regularity results and multiscale discretizations
  4. Survey on challenges of Question Answering in the Semantic Web
  5. Application of friction surfacing for solid state additive manufacturing of cylindrical shell structures
  6. Local responses to global technological change.
  7. Practical Formalist
  8. Towards a Comprehensive Framework for Environmental Management Accounting
  9. Gamma GAMM applied on tree growth data
  10. An integrative research framework for enabling transformative adaptation
  11. Implicit Mental Processes in Ethical Management Behavior
  12. Joint Proceedings of Scholarly QALD 2023 and SemREC 2023 co-located with 22nd International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2023
  13. Finding Datasets in Publications: The University of Paderborn Approach
  14. Robust Control of Excavation Mobile Robot with Dynamic Triangulation Vision
  15. Interactions between ecosystem properties and land use clarify spatial strategies to optimize trade-offs between agriculture and species conservation
  16. Introduction to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in German
  17. Ob lang oder kurz, berührbar oder nicht: Ist die Längenschätzkompetenz eindimensional?
  18. Othering Space
  19. Photodegradation of micropollutants using V-UV/UV-C processes
  20. Factored MDPs for detecting topics of user sessions
  21. "And I Think That Is a Very Straightforward Way of Dealing With It''
  22. Development and validation of the Later Life Work Index for successful management of an aging workforce
  23. Wireless power transmission via a multi-coil inductive system
  24. How secondary-school students deal with issues of sustainable development in class*
  25. High resolution measurement of physical variables change for INS
  26. Introduction: The representative turn in EU Studies
  27. Chapter 9: Particular Remedies for Non-performance: Section 1: Right to Performance
  28. Energy model, boundary object and societal lens
  29. Instruments for co-operative planning in spatial management concerned with flooding issues