Rethinking algorithmic management in minor key: The case of housecleaning platform labour in Denmark

Abstract

Algorithmic management has been a prominent focus of platform labour studies and is lately receiving increasing academic and policymaking interest. Conceptualisations of algorithmic management are mainly premised on ridehailing, crowdwork and food delivery platform research, while literature on algorithmic management of housecleaning and domestic work platforms is limited. This article draws on research in housecleaning platform labour in Denmark, demonstrating how algorithmic management unfolds in these platforms, which are the institutional devices which support algorithms in practice, and how platform workers experience, make sense of and resist this type of management. The analysis of the findings highlights two factors that greatly influence the algorithmic management process. The first is the role of customer support departments in underpinning – and sometimes substituting – the functions widely considered to be carried out by algorithms. The second factor is that intersectional subjectivities of – predominantly migrant and female – workers of Danish housecleaning platforms affect the ways in which workers experience and respond to their algorithmic management. The article concludes in proposing minor algorithmic management, as a concept more fitting to simultaneously describe the entanglement of human, social, and algorithmic components comprising housecleaning platforms’ algorithmic management and the contingent nature of migrant platform housecleaners’ compliance with such management.