(p.3) Although platforms are grounded in digital technology, they primarily emerge as a response to long-term social and economic developments, particularly the diminishing relevance and efficiency of enterprises and markets, two traditional methods for organizing human productive activities.

(p.55) The enactment of some form of regulation to establish the proposed portability of benefits would already represent a positive step forward to ensure more dignified conditions for workers in digital labour markets; various analysts, however, consider it insufficient in view of the facts that earnings are at times too low in the absence of any minimum wage rules, the flow of work is unstable and no employment benefits exists, there are clear information and power asymmetries, no protection against privacy violations, and various forms of information or reputation-based ethnic and gender discriminatory mechanisms occur unregulated.

(p.687) Originally considered a curious novelty, labor platforms have now established themselves as important players in domestic and, increasingly, global labor markets. Scholars have produced several insightful theorizations of them. We identified four controlling images in the literature; however, each has weaknesses. We have added a fifth, which contends that from the point of view of labor and the future of work, platforms should be thought of as a new economic form, distinct from markets, firms, and networks.

(p.64) A far more effective means of control was the ‘algorithmic management’ enabled by platform-based rating and reputation systems (Lee et al., 2015; Rosenblat and Stark, 2016). Workers were rated by their clients following the completion of tasks. Workers with the best scores and the most experience tended to receive more work due to clients’ preferences and the platforms’ algorithmic ranking of workers within search results. This form of control was very effective, as informants stressed the importance of maintaining a high average rating and good accuracy scores. Whereas Uber’s algorithmic management ‘deactivates’ (dismisses) workers with ratings deemed low (Rosenblat and...