Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age A Comparative Perspective
本书通过比较案例研究，分析数字技术如何重塑劳工概念和动员策略，聚焦外卖骑手、亚马逊司机等平台工人，为理解当代劳工冲突提供跨学科框架。
In Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age: A Comparative Perspective, Donatella della Porta, Riccardo Emilio Chesta and Lorenzo Cini examine how the rise of digital technologies is reshaping the concept of labour, which has become increasingly decentralised, precarious and fragmented. They also explore how labour mobilisation has adopted new dynamics and strategies over the past decade. Della Porta, a prominent scholar in social movement studies, has expanded her research on social movements throughout her distinguished career and collaborates with Chesta and Cini in this book to explore a slightly different subject. They focus on this evolving landscape through comparative case studies among digital platform workers, including food-delivery workers, Amazon drivers and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Their analysis highlights how these transformations redefine labour spaces, reshape social identities and introduce new challenges for social regulation. To support their findings, they draw on in-depth interviews and participant observations from Italian cases, complemented by secondary sources, including scientific articles, policy reports and unpublished manuscripts, to provide insights from some other Northern countries. Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age is theoretically compelling, utilising multidisciplinary perspectives that significantly contribute to both labour and social movement studies, offering fresh perspectives for both disciplines. The authors bridge the gap between labour studies focusing on formal workplace conflicts and union-led mobilisation and social movement studies emphasising grassroots activism extending beyond traditional workplace settings. They advocate for an integrated approach that combines insights from both fields to understand contemporary worker mobilisation better. Drawing on industrial relations literature and political economy analyses such as labour bargaining, the authors assess top-down pressures from institutional actors while also examining how grassroots activism exerts pressure from below through insights from new social movement studies. In doing so, the integration of two fields provides valuable frameworks for understanding movements that arise in workplaces characterised ‘by low levels of traditional union organisation and by high levels of technological innovation and control’ (p. 6). The book's central argument is thoroughly developed across its chapters. The book consists of four main chapters, and each chapter is structured to demonstrate why the intersection of labour studies and new social movement studies is essential, drawing on a wide range of theories — from industrial relations to Marxist and Neo-Marxist frameworks as well as theories of collective action, solidarity and global value chains. While this brief review cannot cover all of these concepts in detail, I will instead focus on two key themes that emerge from the discussion, which I believe have broader relevance beyond the book's specific subject matter. One of the book's main insights is that it has the ability to vividly illustrate how the digital-driven economy not only significantly reshapes workspaces but also how platform workers, in turn, are reconstructing spaces of mobilisation. Scholars studying social movements in the 2010s have increasingly emphasised the significance of digital spaces for organising grass-roots activism. The authors effectively demonstrate not only how digital platforms create new spaces of solidarity but also that successful mobilisations continue to rely on physical, real-world spaces. Workers engaged in individualised tasks, often without traditional supervisory relationships, can more easily organise in digital spaces while simultaneously utilising physical locations, such as city squares or parking lots, for collective action through innovative strategies. The book thus compellingly argues that the digitalisation-driven new economy is far from being devoid of physical spaces. Consequently, contemporary mobilisation is intricately linked to physical spaces, actively recreating and reshaping them. This perspective urges us to reconsider the spatial dimensions of modern mobilisation, particularly concerning digital platform workers. The second theme, closely tied to the first, is how the book provides a framework for understanding the reconstruction of social identities and class consciousness, even within the fragmented, geographically dispersed and often individualised nature of digital labour. It is often assumed that the new neoliberal work environment created by digital platforms intensifies precariousness and erodes class consciousness among workers. However, the book argues the opposite, showing how collective action fosters a sense of belonging and class consciousness, which can even take on transnational dimensions. Despite the unfavourable structural, socio-economic and political conditions imposed by the neoliberal digital work environment, workers across various sectors still manage to build collective actions and forge shared social identities, even though digital platform workers are often viewed as legally isolated individuals. For the authors, it is primarily due to the new opportunities that digital technologies offer, enabling workers to connect and organise in ways that were previously unavailable. The authors view these new formations of social consciousness as a potential remedy to the precarious conditions brought about by neoliberal deregulation. Although the book eloquently addresses its subject matter, its focus is largely confined to Global Northern countries, despite the fact that labour digitalisation is now a global phenomenon. While countries in the Global South still produce industrial goods for the global market, the number of digital platform workers in these regions is rapidly increasing. Incorporating peripheral countries into the analysis would have made the book even more compelling. Take Turkey, for example — a country with both high production and consumption, where the number of digital platform workers has surged, particularly in recent years. Like the grassroots mobilisations in Northern countries, Turkey has also witnessed significant mobilisation among digital platform workers, particularly among couriers. However, conditions in Turkey are more precarious, with workers enjoying fewer rights, and the response from authorities is harsher and more security-oriented. As a result, although the rights they gain are limited, they seek to extend their mobilisation not only among digital platform workers but also within the broader context of precarious sectors in the industry. Therefore, including countries like Turkey and others in similar positions in the comparison could provide valuable theoretical and empirical insights. Overall, Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age: A Comparative Perspective is an exquisite illustration of how digitalisation shapes work, labour conflict and mobilisation. The book's compelling and clear language and engaging format make it a valuable resource for non-specialists and students, particularly in sociology, geography, history, economics and law for those interested in labour studies. It is undoubtedly a timely contribution, given that digital technologies continue to transform every aspect of social life, including the labour force, and are likely to do so in even more unexpected ways in the future, especially amid increasing market liberalisation.