New Advances in the Theoretical Study of Digital Labor
Foreign scholars use the term"digital labor"to mainly cover the online production and consumption practice and the traditional labor practice transformed by digital technology against the background of digital technology change.How will these new digital labor practices revolutionize productivity and production relations?How will they affect the labor process of workers and the value multiplication of the platform capital?How do they affect the applicability and explanatory power of classical theories?It is not only a theoretical proposition to be solved urgently but also a new clue to understand the new trend of contemporary capitalism.Therefore,the systematic theorizing of the new phenomenon of digital labor is one of the frontier issues of theoretical research in the era of the digital economy.This paper systematically reviews the latest theoretical research progress of foreign social sciences involving digital labor and summarizes and analyzes the three important aspects of theoretical research on foreign digital labor.Firstly,foreign scholars of the grounded theory construct a grounded theoretical model based on their direct empirical observation of the phenomenon of digital labor,and take the grounded theory as the methodology to mainly explain the interactive practice between gig platforms and digital workers in a multi-dimensional way,promoting research on the new practice of digital labor that the existing social science theories cannot provide directly applicable theories.Secondly,foreign scholars on the political economy of communications represented by Fox advocate the revival of Marx's labor theory of value to explain the relationship between online production and consumption practice and the value creation and realization of social media platforms,triggering relevant debates on how to correctly understand and apply Marx's labor theory of value.Thirdly,foreign labor process theorists advocate shifting the focus of digital labor research to gig labor practice,and studying the platform control suffered by gig workers and their resistance practice in the framework of independent labor process theory.To be specific,firstly,research on digital labor based on the grounded theory methodology mainly involves three forms of digital labor,namely,the digital labor of gig platform employment,the digital labor of social media platform employment,and the digital labor within families.Digital labor research on gig platform employment mainly has two dimensions:One is the time dimension of the duration of workers engaged in gig platform work,and the other is the dimension of workers'skills.This research topic discusses what specific challenges gig workers face in different dimensions,and how they explore dynamic space under the gig platform to actively respond to challenges.In addition,some scholars have discussed how workers use social media platforms to build reputations for income during times of gig outages,and how digital labor permeates families and creates an unequal division of labor.Secondly,foreign scholars on the political economy of communications represented by Fox actively advocate the revival of Marx's labor value theory to explain the relationship between profits on social media platforms and users'unpaid online production and consumption practice.Fox constructs his digital labor value theory mainly from the following aspects:(1)Fox proposes an extended digital labor conceptualization way;(2)Fox tries to establish the applicability of Marx's labor value theory to explain the profit source of contemporary digital information industry,and thus establishes Marx's labor value theory as the foundation of constructing digital labor value theory;(3)Based on Marx's labor value theory,this paper regards users'free online production and consumption practice as the source of capital accumulation for social media platforms.However,its understanding and application of Marx's labor value theory has also triggered fierce debates,the core of which is mainly around the applicability of Marx's labor value theory and the productivity of social media platform users'online production and consumption practice.Thirdly,digital labor research from the perspective of the labor process theory focuses on the special control system of gig platforms.Gig platform workers are often bought consent by free experience,face panoramic monitoring and algorithmic black box under the technical infrastructure mastered by the platform management,and suffer from instability and risk transfer in the salary system and evaluation system that meet the interests of platforms,so that they are highly atomized,poorly organized,flexible in working hours,and highly dispersed in spatial distribution.Therefore,they are in a weak position in the unbalanced power game with the gig platforms.This control system creates both obstacles and incentives for workers to unite and resist.The realization and consolidation of unity and resistance among workers are rooted in the internal contradictions caused by the control system of the gig platforms.Through the systematic review of the latest literature,this paper believes that the theoretical study of digital labor needs to strengthen the theoretical study of digital labor in the real economy,balance theoretical research and empirical research,and seek to restore the foundation of the theoretical framework of the labor process of Marx's labor value theory.
Digital LaborGrounded TheoryLabor Theory of ValueLabor Process Theory
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