Beyond the click: Neoliberal governmentality and platform delivery labor in Türkiye’s on-demand economy
Abstract
This article examines the governance of location-based digital labor platforms in Turkey through the lens of Foucauldian neoliberal governmentality. It reveals how platforms reorganize labor by embedding neoliberal market logic into everyday work processes, operating as an integrated governmental dispositive that shapes behaviors, agencies, and environments of platform labor. Drawing on interviews with moto-couriers and secondary data, the study focuses on algorithmic performance strategies and state-level strategic (in)action as modes of governance, encouraging risky working conditions, individualizing risk and reinforcing market-driven conduct and precarity. The findings contribute to platform labor scholarship by foregrounding the interconnected dynamics of control, contestation, and resistance under platform capitalism, and call for greater attention to workers’ everyday experiences.
Keywords
Platform Work, Neoliberal Governmentality, Algorithmic Management, Labor Precarity, Turkey.
Supporting Institution
Ethical Statement
Thanks
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