Peripheral platformization: Towards a critical political economy of digital labour platforms in Latin America

Abstract

Digital platforms are part of the reconfigurations of the international division of labor and are developing a planetary labor market. While the core countries concentrate the main platform companies in this sector, the peripheral regions constitute the source of most of the workforce involved in these new productive arrangements. This article aims to respond to the following research question: How subordinate is the insertion of Latin America in this new international division of the digital labor platform sector, and how does this condition impact the mediation dynamics companies operate in labor relations from the Latin American Political Economy Communication, Information and Culture (hereafter, LAPEC). We investigate a subset of the Latin American platform economy from a Latin American approach. LAPEC deepened the broad Political Economy of Communication, Information, and Culture perspective on the production, exchange, and consumption of symbolic goods by highlighting international asymmetries in information, communication, and culture industries (ICC), by showing how this sector has a mediation role among capital, state, and society, and pointing out the role of cultural work in these processes. We understand this phenomenon as an example of what we call ‘peripheral platformization’. This approach suggests a way to understand how the international division of labor in the platform world market reconfigures multidimensional asymmetries that reinforce uneven capital accumulation among regions, with core countries and transnational companies (TNCs) seeking to reproduce and amplify their economic and political power over peripheral nations in the Majority World. For this article, we apply this notion to the case study of a specific subset of the platform world market (digital labor platforms) in a particular periphery region (Latin America).