ABSTRACT

Digital labour platforms act as intermediary agents between users and are imbued with the power to determine the rules of interaction within their own digital ecosystem. As the labour market has become increasingly integrated into the platform economy, digital enterprises have been able to use their concentration of power to experiment with new structures of labour regulation and management. The key transformation of labour by platform enterprises is the fragmentation of labour contracts into minute by minute tasks, with noteworthy implications for our understanding of human capital investment in the digital age. As individuals are required to sell their abilities as micro-skills such as photo-tagging and copy editing, long-term human capital investments such as higher education are devalued. These long-term assets are replaced by highly volatile and short-term human capital assets such as reputation scores and platform metrics. This paper will investigate these new forms of human capital, exploring how they are held hostage by platform enterprises to lock users in and structure how labour is practiced in the new digital economy.

摘要

数字劳动力平台充当用户之间的中介机构，并具有决定其自身数字生态系统内交互规则的权力。随着劳动力市场越来越融入平台经济，数字企业已经能够利用他们的权力集中尝试新的劳动力监管和管理结构。平台企业对劳动力的关键转化是将劳动合同分割成分分钟的任务，这对我们理解数字时代的人力资本投资具有重要意义。由于个人需要将自己的能力作为照片标记和复制编辑等微技能出售，因此高等教育等长期人力资本投资被贬值。这些长期资产被高度波动的短期人力资本资产所取代，例如声誉评分和平台指标。本文将研究这些新形式的人力资本，探讨它们如何被平台企业挟持以锁定用户，并构建劳动力在新数字经济中的实践方式。