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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Publications

  1. Collaborative open science as a way to reproducibility and new insights in primate cognition research
  2. Practical Formalist
  3. Crowdsourcing
  4. Executive function and Language Learning
  5. Interactions between ecosystem properties and land use clarify spatial strategies to optimize trade-offs between agriculture and species conservation
  6. Othering Space
  7. Photodegradation of micropollutants using V-UV/UV-C processes
  8. How secondary-school students deal with issues of sustainable development in class*
  9. Neural Networks for Energy Optimization of Production Processes in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises
  10. Do guided internet-based interventions result in clinically relevant changes for patients with depression?
  11. Educational reconstruction as model for the theory-based design of student-centered learning environments in electrical engineering courses
  12. Automatic feature selection for anomaly detection
  13. From teacher-centered instruction to peer tutoring in the heterogeneous international classroom
  14. Biodegradability and genotoxicity of surface functionalized colloidal silica (SiO2) particles in the aquatic environment
  15. Understanding Records. A Field Guide to Recording Practice
  16. Multidimensionality of tree communities structure host-parasitoid networks and their phylogenetic composition
  17. Clustering design science research based on the nature of the designed artifact
  18. A matter of connection
  19. Towards a caring transdisciplinary research practice
  20. What´s in a net? or: The end of the average
  21. A slow-fast trait continuum at the whole community level in relation to land-use intensification
  22. Additive Manufacturing of Soft Robots
  23. Effects of plyometric training on postural control in static and dynamic testing situations
  24. Self-perception of the internal audit function within the corporate governance system - Empirical evidence for the European Union
  25. Simulation-based Investigation of Energy Flexibility in the Optimization of Hinterland Drainage
  26. Exploring transition research as transformative science
  27. Predicting the Individual Mood Level based on Diary Data
  28. Using a Seminorm for Wavelet Denoising of sEMG Signals for Monitoring during Rehabilitation with Embedded Orthosis System
  29. Knowledge Decolonization à la Grounded Theory