On the road with Uber: an ethnography

Abstract

The article aims to investigate the work management strategies undertaken by Uber in relation to its drivers. Using the observant participation method, the researcher drove a car performing races mediated by the platform for a period of four months in the Metropolitan Region of Salvador, Bahia. The company operates with a management strategy that encourages false entrepreneurship and, at the same time, hides an employment relationship: dissimulation. To do so, it makes use of tactics such as encouragement, task management, pedagogism, fraud, risk-sharing and obscurantism, as ethnography has managed to identify.