6.2.2 Transparency and opaqueness
As we saw above, the role of labour platforms is to match workers with tasks offered by requesters or clients. In digitally mediated virtual environments, there can be few real social contacts between workers and clients, and sometimes there is even no contact at all. The worker and the client are often strangers to each other, and their relation can be short, as in food delivery. Despite this, they need to trust each other: the client needs to trust that the worker will perform the service, and workers need to trust that they will be paid for their work. Furthermore, platform users need to trust the labour platform, and vice versa. Digital platforms, with their capacity for transparency, were in initially created for the purpose of building and maintaining trust between strangers (Sundararajan, 2016).
Transparency is defined in many ways including as the disclosure of information (Mol, 2010), “seeing through” information to detect something of interest (Stohl et al., 2016), or understandability of a specific (algorithmic) model for accountability (Kemper and Klokman, 2018). Transparency implies that somebody can trace the process through which a decision, score, or outcome is made, and it is a valued term (Ball, 2009). Transparency can be enhanced relatively easily by using digital technologies and the Internet.
Transparency is necessary for seeing and knowing. When individuals can see the behaviours of others directly, it is clearer to them what activities are conducted and how. But when behaviours are made visible through technology, seeing and knowing become more difficult. Digital technologies, data, and algorithms – also called “digital architectures” – extract and encode data from work into certain datapoints, aggregate and compile them to more abstract categorizations and compute them into scores and measures. The new scores, measures or visualizations take part in, shape, and influence workers and working in different ways (Leonardi and Treem, 2020; Flyverbom, 2022).
Usually, transparency helps people see and know better. However, transparency does not always imply that things can be seen and known (Ananny and Crawford, 2018; Stohl et al., 2016). Sometimes more transparency can even produce opaqueness, a situation that is called the transparency paradox in research literature (Stohl et al., 2016; Leonardi and Treem, 2020). The transparency paradox refers to the fact that sometimes more communication and transparency hide rather than reveal information to people. For instance, increases in transparency can produce such a large volume and diversity of communication that finding and understanding any single piece of information becomes difficult. This is called “unintentional opacity” (Stohl et al., 2016: 133).
Opacity through transparency, as in the transparency paradox, can also be intentional. Actors or organizations can purposefully make so much information visible that receivers will be distracted from some central information. Or information can be made transparent in a manner that is ambiguous, misleading or difficult to understand – in other words, transparency does not produce visibility. When opacity through transparency is intentional, as in these cases, it is called “strategic opacity” (Stohl et al., 2016: 133–134). For organizations, strategic opacity can be a way to simultaneously comply with expectations and hide important information. (Stohl et al, 2016). In Section 6.4, we will investigate some practices of the delivery platform that can be interpreted as strategic opacity.
In this chapter, transparency means that platform workers can see – or not see in the case of opaqueness– information (such as text, picture or video, figures or oral information or clarifications) that helps them use their agency, make informed choices and craft their work according to their motives and interests. While perceived autonomy is important for workers’ health and well-being in digital work environments (Christensen et al., 2019), it is argued that transparency is needed for workers’ autonomy and agency.
6.3 Delivery platform
The delivery platform offers new couriers “freedom and flexibility” and promises them “you can choose when to offer your services” (Delivery platform’s induction material, 2022). Once accepted, couriers first need to book work shifts in the platform application. In principle, they can work as much or as little they want, but in practice, competition between couriers and rules of Finnish residence permits limit this formal flexibility. For instance, students with a temporary residence permit and without an employment contract can work only a limited number of hours per week (Perkiö et al., 2023). When starting a shift, a courier goes to a starting zone and logs in to the app through their mobile phone, with GPS on. After the courier receive an order, they accept it by clicking a button in the mobile application. Couriers have a right to refuse tasks, but refusing more than two tasks means that they cannot get new orders for half an hour. A courier keystrokes into the app both pick up and drop of the food, and in case of trouble, a courier can ask for help from the platform. When the order is completed, the courier is ready to receive the next one.
The delivery platform matches food orders with couriers. Based on performance data collected from couriers, the platform ranks them into five levels at regular time intervals. Performance measures affecting the ranking level are the number of deliveries per hour, no-shows or being late to their shift, number of work hours, and other minor factors (Delivery platform’s induction material, 2022). The better a courier’s performance ranking, the better their level as a position to reserve working shifts. Therefore, ranking scores heavily affect a courier’s agency in terms of access to work and earnings. Next, we turn to the findings of the study.
6.4 Transparency, autonomy and agency in courier work
6.4.1 Transparency enhancing couriers’ autonomy and agency
The delivery platform can see couriers’ activities and their geographical locations, which enables data collection for performance metrics and scoring. The platform is able to assist couriers in finding the customers’ homes, because it records the couriers’ positions. The food courier interviews from 2017 and 2022 reveal that the delivery platform has, through technology, considerably increased transparency for couriers.
As we saw above, the platform ranks couriers to certain levels based on their performance scores. Couriers with good performance, and thus ranked highly, can choose the most lucrative shifts. Highly ranked couriers enjoy more autonomy than those with lower rankings (Perkiö et al, 2023). The ranking level is of utmost importance in getting working shifts and income. One courier said: “So if all your points [of] working performance point to something very good, then you have enough working shifts”. The delivery platform informs couriers about the basic logic of the rankings and the performance criteria based on which they are evaluated. Couriers know that speed – how many gigs they complete in an hour – and the number of hours they work are important criteria in their ranking. Couriers feel that they have agency and can influence their ranking through performance. One of them argued: “Well, it seems fair to me, because there is the system of levels, so you can yourself influence what level you are on”. This agency and the ability to influence one’s ranking is a positive outcome of the platform making transparent the evaluation criteria for couriers.
In autumn 2021, a new feature appeared on couriers’ app. They could now see the final address of the client from the first announcement of a gig. Previously, they received this information only after picking the food from a restaurant. A consequence of enabling couriers to see the customers’ addresses upon allocating the request to the courier was the strengthening of the couriers’ agency through the ability to make more informed decisions about what “gigs” to accept based on a better understanding of how lucrative they will be. One courier said: “You can more easily pick the gigs you want when you know where the client lives (…) You can refuse to take a gig that you know, okay, it will take me somewhere without restaurants and with fewer orders”.
Another new transparency feature was offered to old couriers a couple of months before the interviews. When receiving an order and before accepting it, a courier would see how much money they would get from that order. We call this feature an “advance notice of payment”. As one of the couriers argued: