Abstract
AbstractNew forms of work intermediation – the gig economy – and the growing use of advanced digital technologies – the new knowledge economy – are changing the nature of work. The digitalization of work, however, is shaped by how countries respond to it. But how countries respond to digitalization, we argue, depends on how digitalization is perceived in the first place. Using text-as-data methods on a novel corpus of translated newspaper and policy documents from eight European countries as well as qualitative evidence from interviews and secondary sources, we show that there are clear country effects in how digitalization is framed and fought over. Drawing on discursive–institutionalist and coalitional approaches, we argue that institutional differences explain these discursive differences by structuring interpretative struggles in favor of the social coalitions that support them. Actors, however, can also challenge these institutions by using the discursive agency to change these underlying support coalitions.
Highlights
Our results suggest that digitalization is talked and thought about in very different ways in different countries, and that these differences reflect underlying politico-economic differences (Wueest, 2013)
Do discourses on the digital future of work differ in tone and content across countries, and if so, how do we explain these differences? Here, we first look at the tone of discourse and tentatively derive a typology of digitalization discourses
We argue that what explains these differences is not the structure of Sweden’s economy but the nature of its institutions
Summary
From manufacturing goods to building relationships, from daily business to everyday life, from credit scores to social scores: digital technologies are rapidly transforming the way we live our lives and run our economies. The example of Uber has shown that different discursive flashpoints organize debates around platform work and shape the coalitions in favor of specific regulatory responses (Thelen, 2018).
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