This article is the third in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network. Read the introduction to the series here, and the second post in the series here.
As the landscape of technology-mediated work has evolved rapidly over the years, spanning across diverse geographical contexts, a wide range of academic disciplines, knowledges, and expertise have become relevant for engaging with the technopolitics surrounding it. The multidimensional and dynamic expansion of digital platforms into yet newer industries and sectors, through the use of novel technological and institutional forms, has made interdisciplinary approaches for the critical study of technology and society indispensable for grounding technological innovation in contextual realities. Moreover, intricately entangled global supply chains in the age of hyper-financialized technocapitalism restage labor politics as industry and work are restructured.
As a result, sociological perspectives on labor that trace the political economic undercurrents of these developments increasingly draw from fields such as organization studies, management studies, and so on. Meanwhile, pervasive issues of legal misclassification, which have led to the elision of social protection for gig workers, have meant that platform work has become embroiled in legal debates, with activists and movements building on scholarship from legal scholars and practitioners to counter corporate narratives that justify extractive norms prevalent within the platform economy. It is at this juncture that we position this conversation between three researchers from different institutional, geographical, and disciplinary backgrounds and locations, with a shared interest in the labor politics that characterize platform work. In the third post in this series, we attend to questions of writing and meaningful engagement with the groundwork of mobilization from these distinct yet overlapping vantage points.
We present this conversation as a dialogue that charts the three authors’ individual trajectories and forays into this research and eventually gravitating questions of collective bargaining. We then outline our motivations and rationale for employing a grounded approach to address the labor question (or the lack thereof) in our particular contexts. Finally, we reflect on the maneuvers that help sustain, navigate, and enable speaking across diverse contexts, meditating on the possibilities opened up by collective spaces such as the Labor Tech Research Network’s (LTRN) India Chapter that brought us together and in conversation with each other.
Introductions
A sketch of an online meeting of the Labor Tech Research Network’s (LTRN) India chapter
Debopriya: I am doing a PhD in Management at the University of Bristol Business School — and I am looking into the question of how the Indian State is influencing certain work practices in the local platform economy, and how the workers in turn are interacting with the state. In Bristol, I am part of the Work & Organisation academic group, where many of the academics are devoted to the study of labor and sociology of work.
Malcolm: I am pursuing my PhD in law at the Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada. My PhD looks into what type of strategies unions have used to organize Amazon warehouse workers in Canada. Alongside this, I am also deeply interested in platform work and the evolving landscape of labor law in India; an area I explored in depth for my Master’s thesis.
Anushree: I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IITH). My doctoral research employs multidisciplinary lenses to understand platformization and the tectonic digital shifts that have reshaped collective urban life in the Global South since the pandemic. Drawing on perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology, Platform Studies, and Southern Urban theory, my research traces the intertwined trajectories of platformization and urbanization amidst multiple ongoing and interlinked crises. Through my work, I pull focus towards emergent forms of networked collectivity and possibilities for collective action, premised on an ethic of care, in and around the platform economy. Having a background in engineering and development studies, I am deeply interested in combining theoretical perspectives from the cultural studies of technology with political economic analyses to understand the contemporary platform economy landscape in India and engage meaningfully with workers’ struggles.
The Need for Grounded Research on Labor and Platformization
Debopriya: My own foray into platform work research began while I (like many others) was trying to grapple with the rapid platformization of the urban environment. Around the same time, there were protests in Kolkata by delivery workers against the exploitative policies of the platforms which exposed me to the precarious working conditions. What has fascinated me since is the state response and to speak of it broadly the state question in light of the platform economy. Needless to say, at the most immediate level, the state is pro-platform, and indulges in what can be termed as state-platform nexus. But it also manifests ambivalence at other levels, perhaps due to compulsions of legitimacy, or itself being a site for various actors to fight out their class interests. Therefore, I was inspired to think about the state question beyond the orthodox understanding of the state being only a vehicle of class rule (Jessop, 1990).
Malcolm: My engagement with labor law revealed the limits of doctrinal analysis in studying how platforms impact workers. In India, where most most workers are within the informal economy or (mis)classified as self-employed, legal debates surrounding misclassification, though important, often moves into the background as the more immediate fight for slow formalization through minimal social security rights plays out. Even during the classification exercise, where law alone cannot grasp the material conditions of work, the inquiry ought to move from legal silos to “what would be the consequences of this legal classification on the workers’ lives?” In my informal discussions with union organizers and workers, I witnessed a gap between the legal abstractions I offered and the protections workers were actually seeking. This made me recognize the “limitations of a piece of paper” (Slinn, 2006), pushing me towards grounded and worker-centered research. It clarified that normative judgements are a critical part of law but only coupled with social science research do they allow us to observe effects and curb the researcher’s own biases. This guides both my research on platform work in India and my PhD research on union organizing strategies in Amazon warehouses in Canada.
Anushree: I began engaging with the technical politics surrounding digital platforms in 2019, as part of a field research project (roundtable discussion) that mapped the contours of the emerging platform economy in India. Since then, I have tracked the normative conditions of precarity that persist within the gig economy, paying close attention to workers’ everyday experiences. Given the sheer imbalance of power and the blatant extractivism prevalent within the platform economy, over the years I have become deeply invested in the possibilities of mobilisation and supporting worker-led collective bargaining efforts that attempt to counter obstinate power hierarchies and structural issues. Simultaneously, a training in STS has attuned me to the cultural politics of technological artifacts, their social embeddedness and construction (Pinch and Bijker 1984), and subsequent entanglement with political agendas. Considering technological artifacts as active contributors to the socio-material worlds we inhabit collectively, Feenberg’s (2017) call to attend to the technical politics that underwrite the contemporary social lives of technological objects in order to revive the critical theory tradition within the field resonates deeply with me. Additionally, a commitment to feminist praxis insists on producing knowledge that challenges the status quo by visiblizing marginal actors through writing to counter the systematic erasure of their labor. In my work, I adopt these approaches to engage with workers’ lived experiences, centering their narratives in telling the story of tech-mediated work in India. To expand the scope and methodological purview of my work, I employ anthropological methods, including ethnographic and fieldwork-based approaches, that enable producing a grounded view of the socio-technical systems constituted by digital platforms.
Labor as a Lens
Debopriya: Michael Burawoy (2009) reminds us that in an interconnected world, labor movements are never secluded islands. Notwithstanding differences across geographies and temporalities, they still carry convergent histories. In recent times, platform work, especially location-based work, has drawn a great deal of attention in academic circles. Platformization has meant the emergence of a new global labor force which despite its national differences also has many commonalities that can be a harbinger of global solidarities. In the academic world, it allows forming connections between disciplines and geographies that often remain enclosed within their own silos. These globalising tendencies foster new critical spaces that can accommodate conversations and understand interspersed social realities even if the dominant form of the day is that of economic nationalism (see: Ness et al., 2023). In short, I see and think of labor as a unique category/force that can provide a counter-secularizing route to the hegemonic universalism of capital.
Malcolm: Using labor as an analytical lens allows me to move beyond doctrinal formalism, refocusing attention on the rights of the worker – both individual and collective. Importantly, it allows for a scrutiny of practices that facilitate worker exploitation, not as something separate from debates on industrial policy and institutional reform, but as integral to understanding the system as a whole, with the worker as the center. It also necessitates that legal doctrines, including ones developed through case laws (at least in common law jurisdictions), ought not to be treated as isolated constructs, but as products of pre-existing socio-economic structures that often relegate workers to the fringes.
Anushree: The necessity to use labor as a lens in my work stems from the urgent need to attend to the negotiations and maneuvers that enable technological artifacts and systems to function seemingly smoothly. STS scholars have insisted on opening up the ‘black-box’ of digital platforms (see Rosenblat 2018). The application of a critical sociological lens that foregrounds labor relations supplements this theoretical exposition by visiblizing the very actors who are purposely erased from hegemonic discourses of progress and efficiency that scaffold the growth of these digital platforms. Workers’ efforts to collectivize act as counterweights and offer crucial oppositional narratives that destabilize the perception of digital platforms as engines of growth, especially in a context such as that of India, where gig work is at best a placeholder, and at worst an impediment, for the creation of secure jobs through formal employment. Through my research, I assert that a critical study of technology needs to account for the wider social, political, and economic context that shapes technological artifacts as such.
Navigating and Translating Across Diverse Disciplinary and Institutional Contexts (Sociology, Law, STS/Anthropology)
Debopriya: The social sciences and humanities have been facing significant funding cuts in recent years, while business Schools have increasingly established themselves as stable sources of revenue for universities across the world. In the context of the UK, this has led to the migration of researchers from fields such as the sociology of work, industrial relations, and what is often described as critical management studies, creating a degree of disciplinary flexibility and openness. However, this form of disciplinary migration is not without its challenges and moments of confusion. As Parker (2015) observes, business schools in the UK have followed a curious trajectory, becoming sites of refuge for sociologists who do not always feel at home, particularly as they find themselves at odds with managerial constructions of what constitutes the actual world.
At the same time, coming from a state university in India where disciplinary trajectories tended to follow rigid paths, joining a business school has exposed me to far more heterodox and eclectic forms of scholarship, both theoretically and politically. Engaging with related disciplines such as industrial relations and economic geography, alongside adopting an interdisciplinary approach to idea generation, has significantly broadened my perspective. Nevertheless, the tension between disciplinary openness and school objectives remains as a contradictory structuring logic.
Malcolm: Institutional expectations within legal academia, both in the Global North and the Global South, structure not only how labor law is studied, but whose experiences are made visible. There is a convergence where the legal field in general holds doctrinal precision in high regard, while empirical engagements with workers, power, and political economy analysis is often limited. As Slinn (2006) observes, traditional legal research is often narrow in scope because the legal education locates doctrine within sources and applies it to the factual pattern of the case. Therefore, it excludes the broader societal influences on law, which could be captured empirically through social science research. This disjuncture is not a problem of method but a broader issue of the discipline’s location. I realized this soon after completing my Master’s thesis. In a country like India, where labor markets are structured by caste, informality, and fragmented labor regime, law’s effects cannot be simply understood through doctrine alone. The questions that mattered most to workers were largely invisible within the legal disciplinary boundaries that I have been trained into. The methodological narrowness of the legal field, especially in common law jurisdictions, in both the Global North and South, is not simply an academic inconvenience, but it shapes what stories are considered worth telling. As a researcher based in a Global North law school analyzing platform economy in India from afar, the need to empirically examine these issues and tie them to the broader class struggle, taking workers’ own voice and dignity into account, becomes central. I realized that I ought to broaden the methodological boundaries of legal research, and to ensure that studying issues of the Global South from a Global North institute, I am using grounded research to tell the workers’ stories.
Anushree: While STS offers theoretical perspectives to appraise technologies as cultural objects, a political economic analysis is necessary to advance this understanding by bringing into focus the underlying relations of production that help produce these artifacts as such. I build on precedents within STS scholarship that engage with these questions, and acknowledge the role of social movements and collective bargaining efforts for resisting and countering hegemonic techno-solutionism and technological determinism. This body of work helps advocate for a deeper analysis of scientific knowledge and technological artifacts, framing them as deeply political. While my work builds on these legacies, I attempt to further scholarship in the field that closely engages with labor movements, especially around platform work, and offering insights into the labor dynamics that underpin the contemporary platform economy in India. This entails writing technological artifacts as actors into the study of society, while pushing back at technological deterministic accounts to foreground stories of specific human actors, such as workers who sustain technological systems, against narratives of technological progress that align with the interests of capital. It also involves taking an active political standpoint that aligns with working class interests and affirms movements that counter capitalist hegemony.
However, training to be a social anthropologist at one of the premier technology universities in India has both privileges and challenges, in terms of support as well as acceptance of social science research in wider and institutional academic contexts. Doing such research in contexts that are often indifferent or antagonistic towards critical social theory and the nuances of social scientific research, can be daunting. Further, in an academic landscape that discourages dissent and stifles critiques of the technocratic state, it is difficult to be overtly critical of the cultures of technological hubris and techno-solutionist approaches that have led to the rise of exploitative labor arrangements within the platform economy and the underlying business models that continue to sustain them. In my work, I am often confronted with the question of sustaining such a mode of inquiry, especially as acceptance of such scholarly work is limited and marginalized. Researchers navigate various constraints, forced to justify their methodological choices and other aspects of research design vital for doing rigorous research. Support has to be sought through other means, through cross-disciplinary and transnational networks, where other scholars are pushing back against similar institutional and disciplinary limitations. Creative modes of resisting these mandates are not only important but necessary to do genuinely transformative and grounded research.
Collective Spaces as Grounding
Debopriya: To me this collective is a living example of what the social sciences should be like. That is, a field of careful collaboration where the values of solidarity are central to the learning process itself. Along with disciplinary differences, it is also a matter of strength that our own positions are widely distributed in the immense geographical and social differences that India posits. Therefore it provides a unique opportunity to create a network that connects the mainland to the hinterland or centre to the periphery. Having said that, it is not differences that serve as the primary mobilizing force, but a shared commitment to platform workers and to forms of knowledge production that are public-facing and socially engaged is most significant. Finally, if I may say so, in times of general ‘pessimism of the intellect, it is the optimism of the will’ in spaces like these that I have found most inspiring.
Malcolm: The LTRN India collective has helped me go beyond my legal abstractions and ground my research in addressing the concerns of the workers. Speaking not only with colleagues from myriad backgrounds, but also with union organizers made visible the gap between legal theory and the realities faced by platform workers. Given that my peers come from different backgrounds, they have pushed me to ask different questions, pay attention to power and precarity, ensuring that as a researcher you are not merely a conduit but are also accountable to the workers whose lives you are writing about.
Anushree: This collective is one such example of a space where we are attempting to build a community of scholars who identify and take ownership of these scholarly and political agendas. More importantly, we are committed to working with ground realities and field-based approaches that privilege an ethic of care and reciprocity with worker unions and organizations. Using labor as a lens in our own individual projects, to push back against positivist disciplines and “technologized” fields of study, and then finding community in this collective space, with others also doing similar things and tackling similar challenges in their own contexts, offers affirmation and critical support to continue working and build shared spaces that facilitate collaborative knowledge production.
This post was edited by Contributing Editor Hae-Seo Kim.
References
Burawoy, M., 2009. The global turn: lessons from southern labor scholars and their labor movements. Work and Occupations, 36(2), pp.87-95.
Feenberg, A. (2017). Critical theory of technology and STS. Thesis eleven, 138(1), 3-12.
Harvey, D., 2007. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford university press.
Jessop, B., 1990. State theory: Putting the capitalist state in its place.
Ness, I., Ovetz, R., Roque, I., Swidler, E.M. and Zwick, A. eds., 2023. The Routledge handbook of the gig economy. London: Routledge.
Parker, M., 2015. Between sociology and the business school: Critical studies of work, employment and organization in the UK. The Sociological Review, 63(1), pp.162-180.
Slinn, S. (2006) The limitations of pieces of paper: A role of social science in labour law. Canadian Labour & Employment Law Journal, 12, 291-312.
Pinch, T. J., & Bijker, W. E. (1984). The social construction of facts and artefacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. Social studies of science, 14(3), 399-441.
Rosenblat, A. (2018). Uberland: How algorithms are rewriting the rules of work. Univ of California Press.
