Shifting Sands: Crises of Self-Worth in a Platformised Taxicab Trade

Abstract

This thesis presents the findings of an ethnographic study that interrogated the present state of work relations in the UK’s taxicab driving trade. It argues that the rapid onset of the process of platformisation in this trade, which one can trace back to when Silicon Valley firm Uber first arrived in London in 2012, has intensified two different-yet-interacting crises of self-worth in taxicab drivers. The first crisis found to be at play was that of qualified self-worth, involving, for example, the erosion of worth derived from ‘professional’ status in hackney carriage drivers, and the difficulties faced by private hire drivers working for Uber in turning a profit, given algorithmically-determined pay and job allocations. The second crisis was that of relative/strategic self-worth, whereby drivers, instead of aligning themselves with universalistic virtues, positioned themselves against other drivers based on communal group boundaries. Drawing on a hybrid theoretical toolkit composed of frameworks from pragmatic sociology and figurational sociology, the thesis retains the focus on how these disruptions to resources of worth in the wake of platformisation are encountered, evaluated, and affectively reckoned with by these social actors on an everyday basis. In doing so, it brings forth how the repercussions of platformisation are negotiated differently by those who were already in the trade and thereafter became the casualties of platformisation, as in hackney carriage drivers, versus those who joined afterwards and became directly enrolled into the economic ordering ushered in by it, as in private hire drivers working for platforms like Uber.