Platformizing Informality, One Gig at a Time

Abstract

The emergence of increasingly powerful and affordable digital technologies with applications across a range of domains to extract business value has generated much excitement about ‘digital disruption’ (see Hill, 2017). This phenomenon of disruption, in the language of the Regulation theorists, represents a change in the “regime of accumulation’, based on Fordist mass production combined with mass consumption that has been prevalent since the mid-twentieth century, especially in the Global North (Jessop, 1990). While post-Fordism followed multiple trajectories, its leitmotif so far has been flexibility: flexibly-specialised production systems, flexible firms, flexible labour markets and flexible accumulation (Peck, 2018). The latter two sources of flexibility are attributed by Regulationists to changes in the ‘modes of social regulation’, or a set of co-evolving socio-political institutions, especially the Keynesian welfare state in its various forms (Jessop, 1990).