How is the platform a workplace? Moving from sites to infrastructure

Abstract

Platforms indicate a partial but critical shift from the workplace as site to the workplace as infrastructure. Instead of focusing on platforms as mediators of labour, this article asks: how is the platform a workplace? Platforms involve a distinctive geography, creating flexible space that challenges clear distinctions between the inside and outside of the workplace and its action. It is this issue of the location of the structure for action in platformised work that is the problem of infrastructure. Infrastructure, as studies in information work have demonstrated, exists through practices that resolve the tensions between broader structures for activity and specific enactments. The implications of this workplace infrastructure approach have not yet been fully addressed in contemporary social science research on platforms and work. The article begins by outlining how workplaces are not simply sites where work occurs but rather contingently structure work. It then shows how infrastructure names the socio‐technical constitution of this contingent structuring of workplaces, which allows both standardisation and flexibility in information work. These two insights are combined in the infrastructural qualities of platforms that produce workplaces as contingent structures, with the socio‐technical practices of arrangement and coordination as the spatial drivers of workplace flexibility. As infrastructure, the platform workplace is understood as compositor of work; its parameters shape the occurrence of working activity, at the same time as work taking place also alters the parameters of the workplace. This infrastructural approach illuminates other agencies shaping work beyond employer and employee, in turn implying that the study of platform workplaces as infrastructure can shed light on the functioning of contemporary economic activities beyond work.