Email:
manriquez@arizona.edu
Phone:(520) 313-0873
Publications
Work-Games in the Gig-Economy: A Case Study of Uber Drivers in the City of Monterrey, Mexico.
Uber, the virtual service that connects drivers to passengers, presents a novel form of work organization in which managerial functions are transposed into a virtual platform. This ethnographic study documents how Uber drivers inthe city of Monterrey, Mexico navigate and make sense of the Uber model of work. Employing the conceptual device of the work-game, this study argues that engagement in the game of “earning coins” coupled the interest of drivers in generating the highest-possible income with the interest of management in maintaining a readily available labor pool. Reinforcing this coupling was Uber’s deployment of an entrepreneurial ideology of “being your own boss,”which was especially important given the company’s lack of a physical management structure. However, as Uber takes advantage of the deindustrialization that has gripped Monterrey, it attracts drivers exhibiting varied employment trajectories. This, in turn, creates different modes of playing the work-game and thus generates sharply divergent subjective understandings of the work—the subject of this chapter.
Revise and Resubmit
The Platform’s Cash Administrators: Delegation, Local Adaptation, and Labor Control in Mexico City (Revise and Resubmit at New Media and Society).
Under Review
The Platform is in the Eye of the Worker: Labor Market Trajectories and Food Delivery Gig Work in Mexico City (Under Review in Work, Employment, and Society).
In Progress
Dividuals at Work: Data-Driven Subjectification in the Gig Economy.
The Phyisical and the Digital: Towards a Methodology for Studying Internet-based Work Organizations.