Titel Deelnemers "Korte inhoud" "‘Digital Tournaments’: The Colonization of Freelancers’ ‘Free’ Time and Unpaid Labour in the Online Platform Economy." "Valeria Pulignano" "This article challenges positive views of the assumed relationships between skills, productivity and rewards in self-employed digital freelancing. It suggests that the upfront investments made by freelancers to build up positive platform ratings are not necessarily recouped in the form of increased autonomy, guaranteed work or more lucrative ‘gigs’. Drawing on 38 autobiographical narrative interviews and 12 audio working-diaries with diverse online freelancers in Europe, we show how the low barriers to enter platform work provide opportunities for those with limited work experience and other commitments outside of work. However, the intense competition between an ever-expanding pool of (both skilled and unskilled) task freelancers within ‘digital tournaments’ results in the colonisation of worker’s free time, and the normalisation of unpaid labour. This implies that ‘free time’ for freelancers is largely an illusion. Furthermore, the significant ‘sunk costs’ that freelancers make in terms of time, platform specific skills, reputation and networks are not fully recovered and cannot be transferred to other platforms." "Management divided: Contradictions of labor management" "Valeria Pulignano" "The platform discount: Addressing unpaid work as a structural feature of labour platforms" "Valeria Pulignano" "Digital labour platforms are able to structure work to limit paid working time, extract fees from workers to access labour, and shift costs associated with OSH compliance onto platform workers. We call this unpaid work the ‘platform discount’. Unpaid labour is embedded within platforms’ competitive strategies as platforms operate with labour oversupply while clients use multiple platforms to search for the cheapest option (multi-homing effect). The authors study pathways through law that would limit the incidence of unpaid work by revisiting three areas of the legal framework: working time, safety and health, and access to work/labour intermediation. The authors argue that reclassification, suggested, among others, by the draft Platform Work Directive, can reduce the platform discount for the misclassified workers, but will leave solo self-employed unprotected. The authors explore two possible strategies to reduce the platform discount for the solo self-employed working on labour platforms: 1) a broader understanding of the concept of working conditions on digital labour platforms covering both standard employees and solo self-employed; 2) proceeding area by area, with the extension of occupational safety and health to the solo self-employed on digital labour platforms being the most feasible and promising from a regulatory standpoint choice." "Inequalities in Neo-mutualistic Professional Organisations: The Boundary Work of Creative Workers in Italy." "Valeria Pulignano" "In this chapter, we discuss how multi-professional organisations, such as mutual aid cooperatives of creative workers, operate as agents of differentiation within and between professions. Analysing the actions of individuals and organisations and how they influence each other is key to understanding their implications in terms of differentiation ‘within’ and ‘between’ professions, in the dual sense of a growing division of labour, and also rising inequalities amongst workers operating in the same occupational ecosystem but in different professional fields. Drawing on Lamont and Molnar’s concept of ‘boundary work’ that is already used in the sociology of professions, we seek to uncover and explain the relational dynamics that characterise the ‘professional closure regimes’ set up in creative industries as a result of the activities of cooperatives of creative workers and of the workers themselves. Our work is grounded in a case study of an Italy-based creative workers’ cooperative employing approximately 8000 workers with different professional profiles; in the analysis, these are photographers, video makers, and lighting and sound technicians." "Connecting at the edge: Cycles of commodification and labour control within food delivery platform work in Belgium." "Milena Franke, Valeria Pulignano" "A global taxonomy of interpretable AI: unifying the terminology for the technical and social sciences" "Lidia Zofia Dutkiewicz, Katerina Yordanova, Valeria Pulignano, Lode Lauwaert" "Since its emergence in the 1960s, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown to conquer many technology products and their fields of application. Machine learning, as a major part of the current AI solutions, can learn from the data and through experience to reach high performance on various tasks. This growing success of AI algorithms has led to a need for interpretability to understand opaque models such as deep neural networks. Various requirements have been raised from different domains, together with numerous tools to debug, justify outcomes, and establish the safety, fairness and reliability of the models. This variety of tasks has led to inconsistencies in the terminology with, for instance, terms such as interpretable, explainable and transparent being often used interchangeably in methodology papers. These words, however, convey different meanings and are ""weighted"" differently across domains, for example in the technical and social sciences. In this paper, we propose an overarching terminology of interpretability of AI systems that can be referred to by the technical developers as much as by the social sciences community to pursue clarity and efficiency in the definition of regulations for ethical and reliable AI development. We show how our taxonomy and definition of interpretable AI differ from the ones in previous research and how they apply with high versatility to several domains and use cases, proposing a-highly needed-standard for the communication among interdisciplinary areas of AI." "The transformation of work: changing employment governance regime" "Valeria Pulignano" "The ‘Grey Zone’ at the Interface of Work and Home: Theorizing Adaptations Required by Precarious Work" "Valeria Pulignano" "This conceptual article develops a framework based on the ‘total social organization of labour’ for analysing the implications precarious work in the public sphere has for the reorganization of the private domestic sphere. The core proposition is that a ‘grey zone’ of unpaid labour exists which needs to be negotiated – or at least tolerated – within a household to engage in precarious paid work. A ‘grey zone’ is theorized as a necessary transition space under conditions of precarious work requiring temporal and spatial adaptations within the family household. The article explains how adaptations in ‘time’ and ‘space’ within a ‘grey zone’ context in the private domestic sphere entail new forms of unpaid labour. Employers have increasingly divested themselves of responsibilities to provide security through the wage relation; families and their pre-existing socio-economic position have adapted to support the unpaid labour necessary to access and survive under precarious work conditions." "Determinants of union strategies towards the twin digital and green transitions in the German and Belgian automotive industry" "Valeria Pulignano" "Workers’ contentions over unpaid labour time in food delivery and domestic work platforms in Belgium" "Milena Franke, Valeria Pulignano" "This paper examines how platform workers providing food delivery and domestic services in Belgium engage in contentions over unpaid labour time. Drawing on theories of organisational misbehaviour around the ‘wage-effort’ bargain, we explore how workers reclaim some control over their income by contesting their exposure to unpaid labour time. Based on a qualitative analysis of two labour platforms, the article illustrates how platforms’ systems of time control expose workers to unpaid labour time through work extensification (i.e., food delivery) and work intensification (i.e., domestic work). It also indicates how workers contest platforms’ control over unpaid labour time by developing various practices around platforms’ systems of control. Food delivery couriers increase their income by cutting down on unpaid idle time, while domestic workers try to improve their access to clients, jobs and pay which sometimes implies to intentionally prolong their unpaid labour time. Thus, we argue that examining workers’ contentions over unpaid labour time contributes to a better understanding of how workers can develop a sense of agency in a context of exploitative platform work by actively navigating and purposefully using their exposure to unpaid labour time to regain control over their income."