Food Delivery Apps and Digital Labour

The article “Foodora and Deliveroo: The App as a Boss? Control and autonomy in app-based management – the case of food delivery riders” by Mirela Ivanova, Joanna Bronowicka, Eva Kocher, and Anne Degner explores the boundaries of autonomy and control with regards to food delivery apps and their employment contracts with their delivery drivers. The article shows that though the self-employment model of Deliveroo and the employment model of Foodora differ, the methods of autonomy and control are quite similar.  To center their study about autonomy and control in food delivery apps within the greater context of control in the workplace, the authors first differentiate between managerial control and control by the market. Managerial control is the control by a management level over a worker level specifically to maximize efficiency and profit. Control by the market relies on the ideas of supply and demand to influence the workplace. The majority of companies use some combination of the ...

This post will analyze data and algorithms used by different actors in food delivery, and discuss how they shape and are shaped by digital culture . This section begins with analyzing the main article “Exploring the inbound and outbound strategies enabled by user generated big data: Evidence from leading smartphone applications”, then evaluating it with a digital culture perspective, and linking it to other sources. I selected this article because it uses a unique theoretical framework the provided a new perspective to appreciate the power of data. Furthermore, the author’s methodology combines rich literary analysis, qualitative methods and quantitative analysis to provide convincing results. The approach of comparing four data-generating applications also broadened my perspective. This section will organize the relevant content of the article deepen our understanding of this blog’s topic. In this article, various concepts are used to analyze food delivery applications a...

 This is Anabella's Individual work, a Prezi presenting a sociological paper on food delivery app delivery workers.