Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Once hidden behind the veils of entrepreneurship, it is now clear that platforms are reshaping the world of work, and Amazon has been a forerunner in setting the trend.
This book examines two key and contrasting Amazon platforms that differ in how they organize workers: its e-commerce platform and digital labor platform (Mechanical Turk). With access to the people who are working at the heart of these platforms, it explores how different working conditions alienate workers, and how, despite these conditions, workers organize within their political-economic contexts to express their agency in traditional and alternative ways.
Written for social scientists studying and researching the platform economy, this is a timely and important analysis of work and workers on the (digital) shop floor.
1. Introduction
Part 1: Examining The World of Work and Workers
2. How to Study Alienation: Marx’s Four Relations
3. How to Grasp Agency: The Power Resources Approach
Part 2: The Birth and Growth of Platforms
4. Historicizing Three Generations of Platforms
5. Contextualizing Amazon’s Growing Empire
Part 3: Workers on the (Digital) Amazon Shop Floor
6. Cog in the Machine: Working the Amazon Circulation Line
7. “I Am Not a Robot”: (Trans)national Labour Organization at the Warehouses
8. “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”: Gigging on Amazon Mechanical Turk
9. Instrumentalizing Technology: Digital Solidarity with and among MTurk Workers
10. Alienation Across Amazon and the Platform Economy
11. The Power of Amazon Workers and Platform Workers
12. Conclusion