An Ethnographic Study of Delivery Work

This ethnographic project on delivery workers in Stockholm focused on how spatial navigation and temporal coordination provide insights into the precarious labor condition of the platform economy.

Called also ‘gig economy’ or ‘sharing economy’, the platform economy refers to short-term arrangements of on-demand labor between companies and workers facilitated through digital platforms It offers jobs to workers who sell their services to consumers through online platforms.

Although there is a growing literature on the platform economy, academic research on everyday experiences of workers in this sector is scarce. Scant attention has been paid to the lived experiences of the laborers who do the offline work. This project is orientated towards this gap.

The proposed project suggests using spatial and temporal aspects of delivery work as an intake to consider the work conditions, its consequences on three levels of precariousness: 1) precarious employment; 2) precarious work; 3) precarity (see Campbell and Price 2016). This study has two general aims.

First, to get insight into the nature of labor done by delivery workers. The project focuses on how workers respond to the rapidly changing labor condition in the platform economy.

Linking the experiences of workers in this specific sector to a more general question, the second aim is to understand how the precarity of the platform economy is different from the general labor precarity.

Geographically, the research will be conducted in central Stockholm, where services through digital platforms is a new but fast-growing sector. The focus will be one of main companies, namely Karma, Foodora, Wolt, and Bolt Food.

The field methodology will be ethnographic investigation, i.e., participant observation combined with open-ended interviews.

The general research questions are: * • How do delivery workers interpret and respond to the labor process? * • How do delivery workers navigation through everyday vulnerabilities? * • How do everyday vulnerabilities turn a life into a precarious life? This study will add novel aspects and approaches both theoretically and empirically to the field of labor studies.

Empirically, this study will contribute with original knowledge from an area which is currently under-researched.

Theoretically, it will develop new perspectives that can help us understand the contested new urban labor relationships in general.