Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. is, suspending it as a space for both opportunity and critique. Drawing on participant observation at a sharing economy 'festival' and analysis of the vocabularies of online platforms, the paper outlines three performances of sharing through community, access and collaboration. It argues through these performances that the sharing economy is contingent and complexly articulated. It has the potential to both shake up and further entrench 'business-as-usual' through the ongoing reconfiguration of a divergent range of (economic) activities. Whilst offering an antidote to the narrative of economy as engendering isolation and separation, the sharing economy simultaneously masks new forms of inequality and polarisations of ownership. Nonetheless, the paper concludes in suggesting that by pointing to wider questions concerning participation in, access to and production of resources, the sharing economy should not be dismissed. Instead, it should serve as prompt to engage with 'digital' transformations of economy in the spirit of affirmative critique that might enact the promise of doing economy differently.
UK online food delivery company Deliveroo has a platform that automates the coordination of meal delivery, creating a market for the delivered meal. This market indicates the necessity to examine the social arrangements produced through the platform beyond the labour of the delivery worker. Markets comprise heterogeneous actors that require their coordination to be calculated. Deliveroo, though, offers two competing views of markets. First, as interfaces in which supply and demand are represented as autonomous blocs that are articulated through the goods of the delivered meal whose constitution, including the labour of delivery, is black‐boxed. Second, as agencement—formatting collective arrangements—in which the goods of the delivered meal are contingently calculated as a flexible arrangement of riders, restaurants and customers whereby these actors have differing degrees of choice concerning their participation, and through which new service performances are emerging in the necessity for their contingent interaction.
The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.
The problems and possibilities of platforms in cities lie in their constitution in urban space, thus moving away from a focus purely on the platform as company, and its on-screen interface and algorithm. The geography of urban platforms is distinct from both the space of a network and the place of node, although it draws on both. The platform is a flexible spatial arrangement that does not have a fixed territory but rather draws on other territorialised networks to actualise in urban form. The capacity for the platform to act therefore occurs through its ability to articulate together more or less territorialised urban elements. It implies a reorganisation of urban operations (such as transport, housing and so on) not through new physical infrastructures, but instead through novel technologies of coordination of those already existing. At present, discussion of platforms in cities is dominated by the platform as company, which generates private value from the coordination of differently networked actors. However, appreciating the urban geography of the platform as a flexible spatial arrangement indicates that platforms can hold much promise for the organisation of cities but requires a more equitable distribution of the value generated by coordination of urban actors.
The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.
Digital technologies enable the dispersal of office work from physical office buildings. The same technologies involve a counter tendency of concentration where offices are shared by different businesses, often for short periods, via the ‘space as service’ model. These opposing tendencies of workspace dispersal and concentration indicate the contingencies of technologies of work, in which their operations are mutually shaped by workplaces. Understanding what a technology of work is requires examining its situated actions and spaces of activity, like the office. Yet, the spatial characteristics of the present-day office demonstrate that ‘situatedness’ is by no means a straightforward vehicle for understanding contemporary technologies of work. Digital technologies tend less to divide space according to a specific function (i.e. work–life division), and more to create spaces of coordination that can adjust the definition of purposeful activity. Such spaces of coordination constitute the platformization of work with digital technologies in which spatial and temporal processes for instituting work extend beyond a single organization. Including but exceeding the ‘gig economy’ and ‘platform labour’, platformization indicates a wider reorganization of work through technologies that produces flexible arrangements of space and time, creating forms of independence, interdependence and dependency that challenge orders of work–life division.
Evocations of the 'sharing economy' claim disruptions through digital technology. Style is put forward to focus on subtle changes to the form and content of work through digital sharing. Digital sharing is a postwork style with ambiguous implications for worker identity and expression. Digital technologies share work through distributing the workplace beyond fixed location and by enrolling individuals as workers through processes of communication circulation. These styles of sharing challenge fixed spaces and times of work with utopian and dystopian postwork possibilities. This argument is supported through practices of shared digital work constituting co-working offices in Manchester, Cambridge and London.
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