Algorithms at work: Control and resistance in platform organisations

This thesis aims to examine the nature of control and labour resistance in platform organisations. Specifically, it is concerned with the nature and effects of management accounting control as enacted over disaggregated forms of work. In platform organisations such as Uber, Airbnb and eBay, processes of control organise the performance of work from extraordinary distance and manage millions of individuals who seek freedom and empowerment as entrepreneurs. Platform organisations advance a disintermediated, and at times a moral, agenda; a technology infrastructure facilitates market exchanges between buyers and sellers in ways that lower unemployment and create competition. It is an agenda that delivers unprecedented wealth to platform investors; Uber Technologies Plc. was regarded as the most valuable privately owned company in the world before listing an initial public offering1 in May 2019 (DeBruyne, 2017). As such, the overarching motivation for this thesis is to investigate what underlies this evolution in free-marketopia, where the promise of empowerment and independence for workers is seen by some to correspond with a paradigmatic shift in capitalism.