Imagined futures of work in the making: the politics of platform workers’ contract classification in Denmark, France, Italy, and the Netherlands

A vibrant debate on the digitalisation of the economy has taken place over the last decade. Among the various manifestations of digitalisation, the rise of platform companies has divided scholars over whether a ‘platformised’ future of work would be desirable. The contract classification of platform workers, i.e. whether they should qualify as independent contractors or employees, has been among the top-debated issues. While some have stressed that coverage of freelancer platform workers should be strengthened regardless of their contract classification, others have highlighted how platform work has all the features of dependent work and should therefore qualify as such. Various national regulatory processes resulted in numerous statutory measures and collective agreements. Starting from these developments, and unsatisfied with existing institutionalist accounts of platform work regulation, this dissertation asks two research questions: i) How have national actors problematised and responded to the question of platform workers’ contract classification? ii) What were the drivers of such problematisation and responses? To address such queries, this thesis investigates the politics of platform workers’ contract classification by concentrating on i) the (evolution of) actors’ positions, ii) the building of actor coalitions, iii) the content of regulatory measures in cases they were adopted. It focuses on four actor types, namely governments, social partners, platforms, and independent platform worker organisations. It adopts a qualitative comparative case-study design to study the cases of Denmark, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Such countries represent different ‘varieties of liberalisation’: ‘dualisation’ countries (France – Italy), ‘embedded flexibilisation’ countries (Denmark – Netherlands). Methodologically, this work combines 68 semi-structured elite interviews with selected policy documents and quality newspaper articles. Data was analysed through a thematic analysis using MAXQDA software. Theoretically, an ‘Imaginative Institutional Work’ approach is developed. Such an approach adopts the concept of ‘institutional work’ to understand how ‘uncertain’ actors affect institutions. In this work, institutions are the rules linking contract classification and employment/social protection. To account for the drivers of such an institutional work, this work theorizes learning mechanisms of three kinds, i.e. ‘learning by puzzling’, ‘learning by experimenting’, and ‘learning by researching’. In turn, such mechanisms are conceived of as cognitively bounded by ‘imagined futures’, i.e. expectations on future states of the world. Thus, this dissertation unveils institutional work objectives and practices and associated learning mechanisms that have shaped the rules linking contract classification and employment/social protection. Further, it finds that learning mechanisms were anchored in three ‘imagined futures of work’, i.e. ‘Start-up Nation’, ‘Creative digitalisation’, and ‘Embedded digitalisation’. While the ‘start-up nation’ future was especially relevant in France and to some extent in the Netherlands, ‘creative digitalisation’, and ‘embedded digitalisation’ were prominent in the Italian, Danish and Dutch cases. This shows how processes of imaginative institutional work were often not in line with expectations deriving from the variety of liberalisation profile of selected countries. More broadly, this thesis contributes to the understanding of how the implications of technology are socially shaped by providing a fine-grained account of how future-oriented actors affect the rules governing the use of such a technology. In so doing, actors do not merely enact institutional dictates. Rather, they creatively navigate the uncharted waters of novel technologies, seeking to realize their preferred ‘imagined futures of work’.