Abstract
"This feminist thesis aims at stripping food-delivery platform work. Departing from the existing treatments of platform work that often view platforms as technologically-based organizations and examine the relation between work practices and the technology, I chose to focus on food-delivery platform couriers as embodied workers. Synonymous with deconstructing, stripping refers to the process of progressively taking off layers of taken-for-grandness. The choice of words is deliberately evocative of a sexualized performance associated with women's bodies consisting of progressively taking off layers of clothes. Yet, while these performances generally aim at pleasing a masculine gaze, the performance I engage into does not share such an objective. Rather, I propose stripping as both a theoretical and a methodological tool for understanding social phenomena. Theoretically, my thesis explores the tension between the structural heterogeneity of the working crowd and platforms' structural tendency toward homogenization of work conditions to understand the surprising lack of collective endeavors in an otherwise heavily castigated industry. I follow a stripping process to analyze the effects of this tension on work practices, workers identities and structures, progressively getting at the core of the phenomena under study, from an empirical, theoretical, and methodological perspective. Thus, the first empirical and theoretical chapter (1.2) addresses aspects of food-delivery platform work that are more easily observable: practices and exchanges on digital groups of workers. The second empirical and theoretical chapter (2.2) dives deeper in food-delivery platform work since it addresses identities and takes into account workers' personal and social trajectories. The third empirical and theoretical chapter (3.2) dissects food-delivery work and exposes its flesh and bones through an examination of a developing organizational structure. Methodologically, my thesis illustrates the becoming of a feminist ethnographer as a stripping process along which I progressively take off layers to reveal a vulnerable but powerful nakedness that was previously dressed and policed. The chapter 1.1 exposes my ethnographic methodology: while I give minute details about the data collection and the overall research journey, I present a dressy version of the story. In contrast, to write the chapters 2.1 and then 3.1, I progressively take off some clothes to finally propose a naked version of this ethnography. In the chapters 1.3, 2.3 and 3.3, I discuss the insights of the two preceding chapters and conclude the corresponding part. Along with traditional critical literature, I explain that platform capitalism engenders relations of domination and potentially harmful working conditions and explain how workers find ways to compensate for organizational voids. Yet, departing from a widespread white and masculine tendency to fantasize over the resistance of oppressed populations and to subsequently associate political dimensions of the studied phenomenon with the resisting efforts of individuals who seek empowerment, I develop in this thesis a different approach on how organization studies could tackle the political dimension of new forms of work. Political shades of platform work materialize through the tension between a digital and deemed neutral algorithm that guarantees homogenization of treatment between individuals and the strong atomization of highly different, and sometimes even hostile one towards another, workers. I shed light on the micropolitical mechanisms that atomize food-delivery platform crowd: suffering from precarious working conditions and an associated low status, socially heterogeneous workers dissociate from collective formulations of shared grievances and contribute to an individualization of trajectories structurally induced by algorithmic management. Political shades of platform work are deeply inscribed in working bodies: racialized, gendered and classified depending on their social origin and financial capacity, bodies inspire the mechanisms of fragmentation that concur to maintain a corporeal capitalist industry that nourishes from workers' precariousness. "