Upcoming Events – DOS RHUL

Venue: Online via Teams
Date: 25 April 2024, 09:00-12:15

We are pleased to invite to our DOS Webinar – Employment Status and Social Rights of Platform Workers: Asian and European Perspectives.

External attendees can register on the event page (https://shorturl.at/vyKT4 ) by 24 April 2024 12am BST. They will receive a Zoom link after registration. For enquiry, please contact Chris Chan (Chris.Chan@rhul.ac.uk) or Sunnie (Yu.Zheng@rhul.ac.uk).

Overview

A Directive to regulate the employment status of workers in the platform economy is under the discussion of the EU member states. In the UK, however, the Supreme Court ruled in November 2023 that Deliveroo workers are not entitled to collective bargaining and trade union rights as they were not in an employment relationship. Policy debates are also ongoing in many Asian countries including China and India.

How will these new developments influence the working conditions and social rights of platform workers? What are the new strategies to advocate for labour protection in the global platform economy? The webinar will bring in a group of committed researchers and activists working on platform, technology, and work to reflect on their research and engagement in Europe and Asia.

Join us for insightful discussions, expert panels, and interactive sessions where we delve into the challenges and opportunities faced by platform workers in today’s digital economy. Gain valuable insights from academics and activists as we explore the evolving landscape of work in the platform economy.

The DOS Research Centre is delighted to invite you to a public seminar given by our CBS partner, Prof. Mikkel Flyverbom. The event is organised by the DOS cluster of Digital Inequality, Ethics and Cyberactivism.

Speaker: Prof. Mikkel Flyverbom at Copenhagen Business School
Time: 2-4pm, Wednesday 2nd March
Venue: Shilling Lecture Theatre
Livestreaming link: Please contact DOSdirectors@rhul.ac.uk if you want to join this event.

Overlit: Digital architectures of visibility
(forthcoming in special section of Organization Theory, along with essays by Michael Power and Shoshana Zuboff)

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of digital technologies, data-driven approaches and algorithms, organization theory so far only engages with these developments in limited ways. A deeper engagement with the organizational ramifications of a digital, datafied world is urgently needed and must start from mappings of the phenomenon and the development of better theoretical vocabularies that can guide future research. Complementing the essays by Zuboff and Power in this exchange, my essay suggests a research agenda based on how digital technologies, data and algorithms impact and shape our lives in and around organizations by making us visible in novel ways. I unpack the technological and operational underpinnings of this phenomenon in two steps. The first is a broad conceptualization of the overall shape of what I term ‘digital architectures’. The second is a more granular theorization of how data-driven, algorithmic approaches make the ‘management of visibilities’ a central concern for humans, organizations and societies, as well as some reflections on possible responses to these developments. Taken together, these discussions highlight how digital ubiquity calls for novel theoretical perspectives and research avenues for organization theory to explore.