Flexing and floundering in the on-demand economy: Narrative identity construction under algorithmic management

Based on an autoethnographic field study involving 130 h of work as a food delivery driver in the on-demand economy, semi-structured interviews (N = 40), and observations in company meetings and online forums, I developed a model specifying how the sociotechnical context of app-work (independent contracting, technologically-mediated task environment, no coworkers) simultaneously threatens workers’ ability to constitute and animate their narrative identities and creates conditions for workers to attenuate that threat. Specifically, the same characteristics that workers experienced as depersonalizing reduced interpersonal accountability concerns, allowing workers to self-servingly construe identity-implicating experiences through narrative flexing, a form of narrative identity work that workers enacted intrapersonally (through narrative structuring, fantasizing, rationalizing) and interpersonally (through storytelling in online communities). Overall, this work reveals how certain technological and social constraints and opportunities affect the identity dynamics of a vast, yet understudied class of workers who are neither fully tethered to nor fully untethered from traditional organizations.