December 2022 – Data Big and Small

I have just received my copy of the new book edited by Emmanuel Lazega, Tom Snijders and Rafael Wittek on Social Networks and Social Resilience.

It has been an amazing journey that has brought all of us as chapter authors to share ideas, learn from each other, and reflect together, both with the whole group and in smaller cliques. It’s been one of my best experiences of collaboration toward an edited volume – perhaps because of the network-minded leadership we had!

The result is an incredibly high-quality book that is up-to-date, well documented, and at the same time accessible to all, especially students.

My contribution is a chapter on ‘Social networks and resilience in emerging labor markets’. Its premise is that the recent emergence of digital platforms as labor market intermediaries disrupts collective work practices, fostering fragmentation and individualized sub-contracting. I therefore discuss how social networks operate, and how they support social resilience, in these environments where isolation dominates. Most importantly I ask how we, as researchers, can apprehend them. To address these questions, my chapter reviews insights from socio-economic studies of networks, discusses their applicability to platforms, compares and contrasts them to existing evidence on platform work. The analysis confirms that overall, technology-enabled platform intermediation restrains sociability and limits interactions, but specific cases where networking has been possible highlight the fundamental advantages it may have for workers, and suggest directions for future research and policy action.

More information about the book is here.

The full text of the chapter is available here.

On 3-5 November 2022, I was at the department of Sociology of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) for the 5th INDL conference “Features and Futures of Digital Labor”. The conference was co-organized by us (the DiPLab project at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris) together with the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Labor Institute of the General Confederation of Greek Workers.

The INDL (International Network on Digital Labor) project started as ENDL (the “E” standing for “European”) 5 years ago with an inaugural meeting in Paris. Since then, it has expanded internationally, and its members organized larger conferences in Paris (2019), Toronto (2019), Milan (2020, online), and Edinburgh (2021, online). INDL’s conference in Athens was the first in-person meeting since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The key idea behind the creation of INDL, and the organization of these conferences, is that digital labor is central to the digital transformation of society. Despite its pervasiveness, though, the ways it is inscribed in the current organization of production and the state remain elusive. Different fields of the social and economic sciences, political theory, law, and philosophy have attempted to capture its distinctive attributes. The group’s initiatives contribute to this conversation by mapping the new working environments and fostering dialogue around the nature of digital work and the possible futures that academic research may help bring about.