Brown Bag: Assistant Professor Lindsey D. Cameron

The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation at ETH invites you to the brown bag seminar with:

Lindsey D. Cameron
Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
external page Speaker website

Date: Wednesday, November 6, 12:00-14:00
Location: WEV F 109-111

Presentation title: Bottom-Up Reliability: People as Infrastructure in Global Platform Work

Abstract

With the explosion of the platform economy, there has been a growing interest in the phenomenon of platform work. Yet, although platform work is a global phenomenon, few studies have examined how these contexts shape how the work is accomplished by individuals and how this affects platforms organizations being reliable. This article fills this gap by examining the lived experiences of platform workers in the largest sector of the on-demand economy, the ride-hailing industry, in several countries in the Global South: Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. Our multi-context, layered data includes participant observation, interviews (n=181), and archival data from online driver communities. While ride-hailing companies purport their work to be equally accessible across the globe, our research describes how individuals in these largely informal economies face different challenges than in the Global North because of resource availability and the platform’s incomplete technical closure. Faced with these challenges, workers create a system of dynamic reliability practices of varying cost and efficacy. Largely invisible to the platform company, these reliability practices allow platform companies to provide reliable services while workers’ efforts are invisible with individuals bear the economic and physical precarity associated with these practices.

About the speaker
Lindsey D. Cameron is an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and holds an appointment in the sociology department. She is a fellow (member) at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton and a Faculty Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society for the 2023- 2024 academic year. She is a current affiliate and former faculty fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute. Her research focuses on how algorithmic management is changing the modern workplace, with an emphasis on the gig economy. Professor Cameron has an on-going, seven-year ethnography of the largest sector of the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, examining how algorithms management changes managerial control. She recently completed a study on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected workers on various gig platforms (TaskRabbit, Instacart, AmazonFlex, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash). She is currently working on a project on how the gig economy’s business model adapts in the Global South, with a focus on the implications for management and workers.

Professor Cameron’s work has been published in leading academic journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, Academy of Management Annals, Journal of Management Inquiry, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery and the Academy of Management. She has won eleven best paper awards and several teaching awards, including the Wharton Teaching Excellence Award. She has published opinion pieces in Fast Company, Kiplinger’s, and the Society of Human Resource Management’s flagship magazine People & Strategy and her research has been mentioned in numerous media outlets including Bloomberg, NPR’s Marketplace, Fast Company, the World Economic Forum, CNBC, Forbes, The Skim, and Inc.


We look forward to welcoming you!

The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation