Remanufacturing Consent: How Algorithmic Management Repurposes Workplace Consent

Abstract

This research explores how a new relation of production—specifically, the shift from human managers to algorithms as managers on digital platforms—reconfigures and repurposes workplace consent. Drawing on a six-year qualitative study of the largest sector in the gig economy, the ridehailing industry, I describe how workers navigate being managed by an algorithm. I begin by showing how algorithms segment the work at multiple sites of human-algorithm interactions. While some research suggests that this segmentation creates a hyper-monitored environment system that stifles workers’ discretion, I find that the reconfiguration of the work process actually allows for more frequent choice. These choices, which I label engagement and deviance tactics, while narrow, are real and ultimately do the work of manufacturing consent in the on-demand workplace. Yet due to the fungible nature of the algorithm management system and the independent contractor work arrangement, consent is more fragile than previously theorized.

Biography

Lindsey D. Cameron is an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on how algorithmic management is changing the modern workplace, especially individual’s behaviors at work. Professor Cameron has an on-going, five-year ethnography of the largest employer in the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, exploring how algorithms are fundamentally reshaping the nature of managerial control. She is currently studying how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting gig workers on different platforms (e.g., TaskRabbit, Instacart, AmazonFlex) as well as examining how ride-hailing drivers on three continents navigate disputes. Professor Cameron’s work has been published in leading academic journals, including Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery and the Academy of Management. She has also published opinion pieces in Fast Company, Kiplinger’s, and the Society of Human Resource Management’s flagship magazine People & Strategy and her research has been mentioned in numerous media outlets including Bloomberg, NPR’s Marketplace, Fast Company, the World Economic Forum, CNBC, Forbes, The Skim, and Inc.

In her prior career, Professor Cameron spent over a decade in the U.S. intelligence and diplomatic communities as a technical and political analyst and completed several overseas assignments in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. She holds a PhD in Management from the University of Michigan, MS in Engineering Management from the George Washington University, and an SB from Harvard University in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She also studied Arabic intensively at the American University of Cairo. She has trained in large group facilitation, and is an experienced practitioner and teacher in mindfulness and non-dual awareness practices, holding lineage in a tradition and having trained at several centers in the US.