(Not) Seeing Like an Algorithm: Managerial Control and Worker Resistance in the Platform Economy

How has the relationship between control and resistance changed as organizations increasingly use algorithms to manage workers? Drawing on workers’ experiences from a comparative ethnography of two of the largest platform organizations, we found that platforms' use of algorithms to control workers made worker outcomes more visible, but worker activities leading to those outcomes were difficult for the algorithm to observe. Specifically, we found workers devised covert resistance tactics to manipulate the platforms’ algorithmic rating systems in order to maintain high ratings and receive access to future work opportunities. We also found that, compared to customers, workers had greater knowledge of how the platforms’ algorithms worked, and used this expertise to manipulate customers when employing covert resistance tactics. More broadly, our findings reveal that visibility asymmetry - a form of information asymmetry that highlights how organizations and workers have differing observations into the labor process - provides an important lens through which to examine the relationship between control and resistance. We further discuss how visibility asymmetries are based on an organization’s control system and the way work is configured. Taken together, our findings extend prior theories of control and resistance by characterizing the role of visibility asymmetry and demonstrating how these asymmetries transform visibility into a strategic engine of workers’ resistance.