This consideration brings us in the direction suggested by Castel (1997) to reframe the terms typically dualistically distinguished in the opposition between the ‘in’ and ‘out’ in post-wage society. For instance, the concept of adverse incorporation originates from social exclusion studies, offering a diametrically opposed perspective to residualist conceptions of poverty. It emphasises that social marginalisation phenomena primarily result from power relations, not just the consequence of more or less ascribed socioeconomic and identity characteristics (Hickey et al., 2007; Phillips, 2011; Wood, 2000). In essence, this school of thought criticises approaches that have sought to replace the concept of exploitation with that of social exclusion to explain the causes of poverty, at times indirectly legitimising the expansion of the market and financialisation as solutions (Hickey et al., 2007). As Phillips (2011, p. 390) succinctly puts it, the concept of adverse incorporation “leads us to focus not on a condition of socioeconomic exclusion as the principal determinant of poverty and marginalization, but rather on the terms on which different social groups are included and incorporated into global economic activity”. Phillips then highlights how well this concept fits the condition of informal workers and migrants. Rather than being excluded from economic processes, they are included in accumulation processes along global value chains through old and new disciplinary instruments and value extraction apparatuses. Those who have analysed the processes of differential inclusion of migrant labour have done so by looking in particular at work in detention centres or at the geographical mobility of some labour flows, not only at the transnational level but also within the same territory, for example along the urban/rural axis (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). However, these differential and adverse conditions of the inclusion of migrant labour are historically present in many sectors of the informal economy and are now inscribed in platform capitalism. What they have in common is that they are forms of employment that offer no prospect of savings and often condemn workers to living from day to day, managing their vulnerability by relying on short-term investments and tactics to meet practical and immediate needs. This is instead of focusing on broader strategies that support medium to long-term projected needs (Wood, 2000). As many professional biographies of subjects highlight, adverse incorporation, which in turn produces entrapment, of platform workers into the labour market, “acts to reinforce the limits on workers’ prospects for longer-term security and accumulation and perpetuate their vulnerability” (Phillips, 2011, p. 391). Other authors, with a similar perspective, see today the centrality of algorithmic technologies in enabling and obscuring these processes of predatory inclusion of workers in the gig economy—forms of inclusion through exclusion that mainly affect migrant populations (Cottom, 2020). Whether we are talking about differential inclusion, predatory inclusion or the adverse incorporation of migrant labour, the result of this complex hybridisation between processes of inclusion and exclusion, as scholars have often emphasised, is to produce disempowerment of labour. However, it often also generates a series of tensions between the movement of migratory flows and the apparatuses designed to govern them (Cottom, 2020; Hickey et al., 2007; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013; Phillips, 2011).
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G. PETERLONGO