Flickering agency: How algorithmic management shapes workers’ agency in the platform economy in India?

This study examines the impact of algorithmic management on workers’ agency in location-based platform work. Following a multi-platform model comprising six platforms and drawing insights from 101 semi-structured interviews with platform workers in India, this study demonstrates how workers’ agency is often unstable in relation to the algorithmic management deployed by platforms. We argue that when platform workers attempt to express their agency in relation to algorithmic management, their efforts to outmaneuver the algorithms persist only until the algorithms or the person controlling them become aware of workers’ efforts. We introduce the concept of ‘flickering agency’ to explain this phenomenon. We find that when platform workers attempt to express their agency regarding algorithmic management, their agency ‘flickers’ in three distinct ways. At the individual level, it ‘flickers’ between moments when workers want to express their agency and when they can do so because of the controlling or constraining features of algorithmic management. At the collective level, it ‘flickers’ because of the distrust induced by algorithmic management through workforce individualization, fragmentation, and wage gamification. Third, it ‘flickers’ between individual and collective levels as workers shift between these levels based on their successes or failures concerning algorithmic management.