The outlines of the impact upon work of the ever more pervasive online platforms are beginning to come into focus. Previously, fairly settled terms such as “jobs”, “employment”, “labor”, and even “work” itself are, for some, being replaced by “income generation” or “value creation”. To capture the difference between platform-organized work or labor and traditional activities, we use the commonly used term “platform work.” This raises the question of whether a different context for the way goods and services are delivered is emerging. This essay reviews the extant understanding of the...
Automation and the digitalization of work are having significant effects on the German labor market and are challenging policymakers to modernize the existing and proven instruments of Germany’s distinctive “social market” economy. The COVID pandemic has accelerated the pace and scope of these technological changes and intensified their effects on work and the labor market. To inform the modifications in policies and institutions necessary to achieve the goals of Germany’s social market system it is necessary to understand these effects.
We explore the impact of automation and digitalization on labor in the US agrifood system during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study considers each of the primary nodes in the system stretching from consumer through grocery stores and restaurants to last-mile delivery, distribution, food processing, farming, and agri-inputs. Not only automation and digitalization, but also the role of platforms such as Amazon, and food delivery firms such as GrubHub, Instacart, and Uber Eats are discussed. For restaurants, we consider not only dinein restaurants, but also “ghost kitchens”. Furthermore, the...
The new digital technologies offer remarkable opportunities to make agriculture more sustainable and contribute to the amelioration of inequality at the local and global level. And yet, digital innovations and, in particular, the adoption of platforms risk creating further distortions among and within countries. Digitalization could contribute to the further concentration of agriculture in a few giant firms and also lead to the rapid and unmanaged demise of subsistence farming as it is typically practiced in developing countries. Alternatively, if the implementation of the digital...
As the platform economy has risen and matured, it has had geographic consequences. Today, platforms can be understood as gigantic machines for organizationally and spatially centralizing value and thus power. This article proceeds in two steps First, we discuss the concentration of platform giants in terms of location on the US West Coast and market share in various services, such as search, maps and online sales. This has troubling implications: the fact that platforms are simultaneously intermediaries, two-sided markets, and data aggregators, creates synergies for platform owners and...
In order to better understand the complex and dialectical relationships between digital technologies, innovation, and skills, it is necessary to improve our understanding of the coevolution between the trajectories of connected digital technologies, firm innovation routines, and skills formation. This is critical as organizations recombine and adapt digital technologies; they require new skills to innovate, learn, and adapt to evolving digital technologies, while digital technologies change the codification of knowledge for productive and innovative activities. The coevolution...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses interwoven challenges. Defined as technology that uses advanced computation to perform at human cognitive capacity in some task area, AI must be regulated in the context of its broader toolbox - algorithms, data and platforms - and its regulation must be sector-specific. Establishing national and community priorities on how to reap AI’s benefits, while managing its social and economic risks, is an evolving debate. Digital Platform Firms are a fundamental driver of AI tools: they dominate the playing field and often pursue priorities outside the frames of...
Will the digital revolution, and its current manifestation in Cloud computing and platform-based work, inexorably lead to the elimination of jobs and work due to automation. Are new opportunities for work opening? Should we be thinking in terms of conventional work or is value creation the key? Certainly, nearly all firms are experiencing intense competition leading to commoditization based principally upon price. In the first section of this paper, we explore the pathways opened as cloud computing, transforms the way both goods and services are innovated, produced, and distributed....
Though economists have examined labor displacement due to digitization, few have considered the new work and value created. Unlike employment relations that brought workers together on the assembly line or in an office in a previous era, platforms enable a greater, more dispersed, and complex division of labor. New and reconfigured types of labor enabled by platforms create identification and measurement challenges. Previous studies of platforms invariably focused on specific organizational forms such as sharing or gigs. They built taxonomies based on the platform's organization –...
Up until about 10 years ago, when a person thought of fitness, health or weight loss, they did not necessarily associate those things with technology. However, as the world takes on a new digital landscape, health care industries from weight-loss to hospitals are becoming increasingly digitized. The idea behind this digitization of the health/fitness industries is that people able to quantify their health will be more likely to improve it (MacManus). Thus with the utilization of big data, big people will begin to no longer be an “epidemic” in our society. Though this is wishful thinking,...
