Digital worker inquiry and the critical potential of participatory worker data science for on‐demand platform workers
基于苏格兰食品配送工人的三项实践，研究平台工人如何克服障碍探究自身受控系统，提出“工人数据科学”概念，帮助工人抵抗平台隐藏算法系统的指令与计算。
Abstract The knowledge that workers have of the systems they work under is an outcome of strategic choices by platforms and by workers themselves. Based on three initiatives undertaken by food distribution workers in Scotland, this article explores the obstacles that platform workers face when conducting inquiries into their systems of control, and investigates the potential for workers to overcome these obstacles through collaborative research projects. By drawing analogies from the history of workers' inquiries into changing labour processes, the article evaluates these three initiatives in light of previous efforts by workers to monitor complex and concealed management structures. It offers a new concept of ‘worker data science’ to describe the techniques, skills and methods that workers require to arrive at answers to questions that emerge through their inquiries, and concludes that such purposive science has the potential to equip workers to support one another and to resist and challenge some of the commands and calculations that emerge from platforms' hidden algorithmic systems.