Today, there are few who have not used one or another platform to take a taxi, rent a scooter, order home-delivery from a restaurant, rent a room, or recruit somebody to design your webpage or fix your sink. Only a decade old, platforms have become convenient intermediaries between service providers and those seeking a service,  so common that brand names of some platforms, like “uber” and “airbnb”, have attained a status of verbs in everyday communication. Enjoyment of convenience and low prices of platform services often makes one forget the work that is behind them, making platform work or gig-work a peculiar contemporary phenomenon that is invisible while often being in plain-sight. Using in-depth study of food delivery platforms Wolt and Bolt and workers providing services through them in Riga, the project seeks to examine gig-work, to deepen understanding of how it is practiced, perceived and felt, and, thereby, contribute to understanding of much broader question of how social relations and culture is changing at the age of digital capitalism. 

Platforms are companies that intermediate between independent service providers and their customer base visa digital infrastructure that, typically, includes an app or apps with separate interfaces for service providers and users through which users can place and service providers receive orders and both exchange a payment, while platform receives a fee for each job and uses algorithms for managing the work-flow (Srnicek 2016; Woodcock & Graham 2020). Platforms are part of what is called “on demand economy” (Shapiro 2018) or “gig” economy, where gig does not stand for a giga-byte, but rather for a short term arrangement – “a gig” – carried out traditionally  by a musician, but more recently by a diversity of  so called “gig worker” (Woodcock & Graham, 2020). Gig-work might encompass services that require geographic proximity between the provider and receiver of the services, such as taxi services, food delivery, home-care (e.g. companies like Uber, Lyft, Deliveroo, Wolt, Bolt), or work that is not geographically rooted and is requested and accomplished entirely on-line (most notably, Amazon Mechanical, Freelancer.com, Upwork, or TaskRabbit). The latter, also called microtasking or microwork (Webster 2016), involves diverse jobs starting from data entry and transcription to web design and creative writing. 

Autonomy and freedom are two traits of gig-work praised by the platforms to recruit workers (Rosenblat & Stark 2016). Governments, city officials and international organizations emphasize flexibility and freedom of gig-work in eagerness to lower unemployment and increase economic growth. At the same time, discursive analysis of platform employers show that beneath this discourse of autonomy employers enjoy the lack of commitment towards workers (Shabata, 2020). Many critical accounts of the gig-economy points to precarity of gig-work (MacDonald & Giazitzogly 2019; Barratt et al 2020), isolation and  alienation of workers (Glavin et al 2021), and their exploitation using misclassification of employees as independent contractors, regime shopping, and targeting of the most vulnerable groups of society, such as immigrants (Zwick 2017). Some emphasize that gig economy feeds on neoliberal ideology that frames and renders workers responsible for their own precarity (MacDonald & Giazitzogly 2019; Zwick 2017) and disguises such labor relations under euphemisms of “flexibility”, “workers autonomy” and “freedom” (Zwick 2017; Shabata 2020). Others point to novel aspects of platforms, such as asymmetry of power and information between the workers and the owners of the platform (Rosenblat & Stark 2016) and use of algorithmic management and gamification (Lee et al 2015; Attoh et al 2019) for surveillance and control. On the other hand, there are studies that indicate that platforms provide opportunities for workers who would find it difficult to be employed in standard employment, e.g. mothers of young children prefer gig work since it allows them to combine paid employment with child care (Milkman et al 2021). Also, flexibility to work when and how much one wants and an autonomy from a supervising eye of a boss are two positive aspects mentioned by those engaged in gig-work as taxi and food delivery drivers or micro-taskers around the world (Milkman et al 2021;  Shapiro 2018; Wood et al 2018). 

The clash between these utopian and dystopian narratives of gig-work indicates that a deeper and more nuanced understanding of opportunities and realities of gig-work is necessary. We propose to attain it by socio-cultural analysis of autonomy of gig-workers – how in what contexts it is understood, experienced, perceived and felt by the workers and how it is framed by the institutional and sociocultural context.

Autonomy – an attribute of “a rational, self-determining social actor, who is not subject to some form of determinism but expresses his or her own goals and interests”, (Marshall 1998, 31) – has been an issue of sociological concern since the founding fathers of the discipline. Karl Marx warned that autonomy had been seen as disappearing under harsh and alienating capitalist-employee relations. Emile Durkheim was concerned with issues of social order and integration where both lack of autonomy and excess of autonomy were seen as detrimental to social integration or connection. John Stuart Mills’ (2000 [1959]) noted that, in contrast with expectations of Enlightenment thinkers that rationality would lead to more freedom or autonomy, rationalization and bureaucratization in all spheres of life had made people unable to use their rationality for the sake of their practice of freedom, leading to rationality without reason, to a man as a “Cheerful Robot” that is alienated from society and self, “uneasily unaware” of limits of his autonomy. In these circumstances, Mills argued, freedom or autonomy became a problem to be addressed using “sociological imagination” (Mills 2000 [1959]). More recent scholarship reveals how the discourse of individual autonomy and freedom has been used as a ideational mechanism to establish neolibreal regime across developing as well as developed world, a regime which in many ways is fundamentally limiting towards such autonomy (e.g.: Harvey 2005; Wacquant 2010).  

Tendency to analyze gig-work apart from its social and institutional context is noted as one of shortcomings of research done so far (Vallas & Schor, 2020).  Therefore, even if the overall purpose of the project is to shed light on the gig-work as a social and socio-cultural phenomenon at large, its embeddedness in local context will be an important part of the project. The fieldwork will be carried out in Riga, the capital of Latvia. In comparison with Western democracies (Milkman et al 2021; Barratt et al 2020), as well as Asian and  African countries where gig-work has been studied (Wood et al 2021), Latvian society is extremely neo-liberal, making it an interesting environment for study of autonomy and gig-work with its complex ties to precarity, alienation, and control. Latvia has been described as a product of extreme market rule and harsh neoliberal engineering (Bohle & Greskovits 2007; Sommers 2009; Sommers & Woolfson 2014) that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, came from international and supranational institutions, such as IMF, WB and EU, and was eagerly accepted by the ruling elites in exchange of Latvia’s belonging to the West. Neoliberal engineering relied on neoliberal culture which “depolitiz[ed] political economy” (Centeno & Cohen 2012), and cultivated individualisation and the marketisation of social problems, constant competition and entrepreneurship as the best means for a better life (Harvey 2005; Centeno & Cohen 2012). The result was a society where “hyper individualism” and “lack of solidarity” prevails (Sommers 2009), where many chose to emigrate (Woolfson & Sommers 2009; Ķešāne 2019) or embraced living in socioeconomically precare conditions with minor protest (Ozoliņa 2019). Social acceptance of precarity to some extent may be attributed to what Mills explained as an individual trouble of freedom – people being “uneasily unaware” of the constellations which limits their freedom and opportunities (Mills 2000 [1959]). On the other hand, people may actually be aware of these constellations but, in order to make their life livable under precare conditions, they frame their life in the narrative of individual choice and autonomy (Ozoliņa 2019).  We believe that this neo-liberal context, which relies heavily on the idea of individual freedom, will provide a fertile basis for in-depth examination of gig-work from workers’ perspective and the complex relationship gig-work has to autonomy, alienation, precarity, flexibility, freedom and other possibly defining traits work and life in digital capitalism. 

The project will focus on two platforms – Bolt and Wolt. Bolt was founded in 2013 under the name Taxify and is headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia. Initially established as a platform for taxi services in Tallinn and Riga, since then it expanded its  operations to electric scooter and e-bike rental, food delivery, and car sharing and is valued at 4.75 billion USD. It claims to serve 75 million customers in 300 cities in 45 countries (Wikipedia). Wolt is solely a delivery platform, established in 2014 and headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. It currently operates in 180 cities and 23 countries  (Wikipedia) and is valued at 1 billion USD (TechCrunch 2021).

Even though Bolt and Wolt delivery workers are very visible in the city, riding around the city on bikes or scooters with large quadrangle delivery bags in bright blue and green colors, there is no publicly available reliable data on their number or their sociodemographic characteristics. Platforms collect extensive data not only on basic operations of their workers, but on their every move while they are on the platform – the routes taken, the time spent, the customers served, and other (Attoh et al 2019). But, because analysis of this Big Data and its use in management of service provision using carefully devised algorithms is at the heart of the platform as a commercial enterprise, it is not publicly available. Some studies have pointed out that the data the platforms run on are products of labour for which workers are not compensated (Attoh et al 2019), and others have emphasized this information asymmetry between the owners and the workers of the platforms as a crucial trait of gig-work as such (Rosenblat & Stark 2016). In these circumstances, our main source of data will be interviews and participant observation, as well as publicly available communication materials circulated by the platforms. In addition, we will approach the platform management and explore possibilities to gather data through webscraping of social platforms and forums. 

To summarize, the purpose of the research is to develop a “thick description” (Geertz 1973) of autonomy of gig-workers engaged in food delivery via Bolt and Wolt platforms in Latvia. To develop it, we focus on the following questions:

1. How do gig-workers practice and perceive “autonomy” and how it relates to precarial aspects of gig-work indicated in literature, such as alienation and isolation?
2. What is the sociocultural composition of the food delivery gig-workers in Latvia (immigrants, students, parents) and how do they differ in their perceptions and practices of “autonomy”?
3. How are these perceptions embedded in the institutional and sociocultural context of gig-work in Latvia? 

Since our work aims to study practices and meaning making of autonomy, for interviews with Wolt and Bolt workers we will use a biographical interview method. Not only it will  provide the very needed insight into life histories of gig workers (Glavin et al 2021), but also, biographical data in combination with the knowledge of wider social context will facilitate true “sociological imagination” (Mills, 2000 [1959]) about the state of autonomy at gig-economy. Biographical interview is recognized as a humanistic approach to social research since this method does not treat individuals as statistical numbers but reveal individual as full of “self, feelings and emotion” allowing researchers to “generate thick description” and “in-depth insights into lived experience” (Barabasch & Merrill 2014, 288). At the same time biographical interviews are “never fully individual” since they reveal “shared experiences” of various social issues, such as, for example, “work, class, ethnicity and gender” (ibid). In our case, a biographical interview may also provide a deeper insight in the current state of autonomy from the historical perspective or to see what is autonomous about the gig-work in comparison of what was before.