Talkin’ bout Digitalization. A Comparative Analysis of National Discourses on the Digital Future of Work

Abstract

New forms of work intermediation - the gig economy - and the growing use of advanced digital technologies - the new knowledge economy - are changing the nature of work. The digitalization of work, however, is shaped by how countries respond to it. Following a discursive-institutionalist approach, we argue that to understand how countries respond to digitalization we need to understand how they perceive and conceive of it in the first place. Using various methods of quantitative text analysis on a novel corpus of translated newspaper and policy documents from eight European countries as well as qualitative evidence from interviews and secondary sources, we show that there are clear country effects in how digitalization is framed and fought over; that formal and informal institutions are crucial to understand these differences; but that actors can also use their discursive agency to defend or attack these institutions.