Reimagining Work: Labour Perspectives on the Digital Economy

Abstract This paper analyses how algorithmic management reshapes the labour process in platform-based digital economies. Using the concept of digital Taylorism, it shows how contemporary platform business models embed managerial control within opaque computational systems that intensify monitoring, fragment tasks, and constrain worker autonomy.Drawing on Labour Process Theory and critical perspectives on digital capitalism, the paper examines how these forms of control reorganise relations of dependence and insecurity in the platform economy. Based on a qualitative review of the academic literature, the analysis highlights how platform firms externalise risk while maintaining effective control over work without conventional employment relationships.The paper contributes to debates on digital labour by demonstrating that precarity in platform work is not a transitional outcome of technological innovation, but a structural feature of platform capitalism. It argues that algorithmic management should be understood as a mode of governance within the labour process, rather than as a purely technical system, highlighting how control and insecurity are produced through organisational and economic arrangements in platformised economies.