2 Theoretical and Analytical Framework
In this chapter, my central research question concerns the relationship between gig workers’ migration status, and their precarity and solidarity. To answer this question, I construe a theoretical and analytical framework that brings together labour process theory (LPT) with Stephen Castle’s notion of modes of differentiation.
LPT explains workers’ precarity and solidarity in terms of the outcome of the interaction and interdependence of managerial power and worker power in the labour process. In labour processes of capitalist nature, it is argued that capital/management has the inherent tendency to overcome the double indeterminacy to push for the highest possible amount of surplus value, through constantly changing labour process arrangements (Burawoy, 1979; Gandini, 2019; Smith, 2006). In this process, insofar as production requires certain level of collaboration among them, workers, while being exploited, also forge connections among themselves, which provides basis for solidarity (Atzeni, 2010).
First formulated by Burawoy in his Manufacturing Consent, LPT has since been variously critiqued and developed. In his later work, Burawoy himself challenged the unjustified empirical priority given to what is happening inside the factory workshop when understanding worker precarity and solidarity through the lens of the interactions between managerial and worker power. In The Politics ofProduction, he considered the impact of the state and the conditions of the external labour market (Burawoy, 1985). Later work in this tradition further explored how sociocultural factors/institutions like gender and race shape micro-level labour process dynamics, including the implications for workers (e.g. Lee, 1998; Ness, 2005). This article considers the role of migration status, drawing on the notion of mode of differentiation.
In relation to migrant workers, the concept of modes of differentiation denotes the institutional and sociocultural mechanisms, in both home and host societies, that give migrant workers unequal chances in market competition and the ideologies used to legitimate them (Castles, 2015). For Castles, modes of differentiation are comprised of contextspecific combinations of a range of factors—including race, legal status, ethnicity and nationality, among others—that are weaved into modes of differentiation that align with the interest of capital, in different historical, social and cultural contexts. Historically, governments across the world play an important role in shaping particular modes of differentiation, especially through its control over immigration-related institutional arrangements to respond to labour needs and social malaise engendered by the changing capitalist political economy. Castles’s account focused exclusively on western, advanced economies. As Munck (2013) pointed out in his critique of early, European-centric debates around precarity, changes in work due to the decline of Atlantic Fordism (Kalleberg, 2013) are but one modality of precarity, and that workers—especially migrants— have always-already been precarious in the South, shaped by, echoing Castle, the ‘fraught relations between workers, the state and society’ (p. 751) (see also Schierup & Jørgensen, 2016).
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