Tiago Vieira

Masterclass | Algorithmic Management and Workplace Power Dynamics - Global Digital Cultures On Thursday 4th of December, the RPA Global Digital Cultures will be organising a Masterclass open to ReMa students, PhD candidates, and academic staff with Dr. Tiago Alexandre Ferraz Viera (European ...

Link:
globaldigitalcultures.uva.nl/content/even...

Excited to share that next Thursday (Dec 4) I’ll be giving a masterclass on #AlgorithmicManagement and Workplace Power Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam for the Global Digital Cultures group.

If you’re curious to learn more, check out the link below or simply drop me a line.

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Curious how #algorithmicmanagement changes the role of managers and workplace power dynamics beyond the gig economy?

Me and Sander have something for you!

Hope you enjoy it - all feedback is welcome!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Felicidades, Tiago! 🎉

Forthcoming in our final issue of 2025, this study conducted @eui-eu.bsky.social, helps understand 🇪🇸's efforts to re-embed platform couriers within standard employment relationships.

🌟 Supporting early-career scholarship remains central to our mission.

📚 Read: bit.ly/4nYk4kf

The article will be open access in English, Spanish, and French, and I’ll share it here once it’s out - stay tuned!

I explore how Spain’s efforts to bring platform couriers into standard employment relations have affected their working and living conditions (#LeyRider but not only), and how workers’ representatives and public authorities have (not) been able to leverage the new right to #algorithmic transparency.

Happy to share the first empirical chapter of my PhD thesis accepted for publication - now in the proofs stage at the International Labour Review, the International Labour Organization’s flagship journal!

health outcomes (provided there are non-tech risks also going on), but it is impossible to say such pattern is causal or just correlational only. In any case, the best combination seems to always be no AM + no other risks.

Thanks Tyler. In my qualitative studies, no. The “best” integration is the one where workers do not perceive AM as enhanced managerial control but act in ways that are detrimental to them anyway. In the quanti approach, things change. In some cases AM presence seems to offer better occupational

Curious about the whole dissertation? Don't hesitate to drop me a line – I will gladly share it!

#PhD #algorithmicmanagement #AI #employment

This means that we cannot simply assume what will come out of the adoption of these tools. Importantly, however, in the specific case of occupational health, the potentially positive effects of algorithmic management cannot compensate for the bad (non-technological) practices of managers.

5) Finally, looking at the specific case of occupational health and safety (again through a large-N analysis), I show how the outcomes from deploying algorithmic management are not pre-determined. Rather, they depend on pre-existing or parallel non-technological characteristics of management.

In such cases, managers and employers’ authority ends up being reinforced by the internalisation of the meritocratic ideals and notions of machinic superiority so familiar to the development of AI.

They experience it not as a form of insidious control (which it is!) but as a tacit incentive to improve their work performance.

this event is largely contingent on how algorithmic brokerage is conducted by managers. In some instances, algorithmic management may lead to the intensification of work rhythms, increased surveillance, and decreased autonomy of workers, but – nonetheless – be internalised by workers.

This suggests there's a perception of violation of norms by employers and, thus, resistance emerges. But is this the whole story?

4) No, things can be more complicated. Here's how: despite some workers resisting (or at least showing dissatisfaction) with algorithmic management,

But is this accepted by workers?

3) To a large extent, probably not. As I found through a large-N analysis (and confirmed in qualitative case studies), on average, the presence of algorithmic management is associated with various forms of workplace turbulence.

2) A crucial part of the change this brings to the employment relationship is that it becomes a further uneven playing field, marked by deeper forms of information asymmetry between workers and managers/employers. This paves the way for (more) opaque decision-making by managers.

Now, this doesn't mean there's no change. Rather, instead of algorithmic management equating to the automation of managers, it transforms them into algorithmic brokers (or translators of algorithmic output), paving the way for new forms of human-machine complementarity.

Concisely, my findings can be summarised in five points :

1) Contrary to platform work (where much of management seems to be run by algorithms), in conventional employment settings, things are very different. This means that human managers are still present and actually quite salient.

As you may have noticed, earlier this month I defended my PhD. But what was it about? My topic was algorithmic management. Specifically, I tried to answer the question: How does algorithmic management reshape the employment relationship? (TL;DR – see the picture at the end)

From yours truly and Pedro Mendonça: an interesting case on its own, but also important in light of EU and ILO recent decisions/recommendations regarding platform work. Hope you enjoy.

*four, obviously 🥲

Et voila, for years after joining the EUI @eui-eu.bsky.social i went from #PhDoing to #PhDone! 🥳🤓😎

#PhDdefense update: it still sounds a bit unreal, but it seems this is really happening! It'll be on June 11, 16:30, in EUI's Teatro.

Sadly, there will be no online transmission, but if you're in Florence, you are most welcome to join.

For more details 👇
www.eui.eu/events?id=57...

Platform couriers' self‐exploitation: The case study of Glovo This article examines the phenomenon of self-exploitation among platform couriers, using the company Glovo as a case study. The research, based on a qualitative approach with interviews from 22 diffe....

Hopefully, the coming months will bring more pieces on #platformwork and #algorithmicmanagement (also in conventional hashtag#employment settings) that people can read and enjoy.

If after all this you are curious to read the article, you can find it here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I suppose like any article that one writes and some years later goes back to, I would now do a lot of things differently (starting from finding a much cooler title - jeez, this one is really boring!), but it is still nice to know that people find it interesting and useful.

Although I am generally skeptical of such metrics, I can't avoid feeling a little bit happy with this tiny "distinction". This paper is the result of the improvement of my master's thesis at Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona (@upf.edu) in the already distant school year of 2019-2020.

In an unexpected piece of news, I was surprised by an e-mail from @wiley.com informing me that my article "Platform couriers' self-exploitation: The case study of Glovo" was among top-10 most cited articles published in 2023 in New Technology Work and Employment (@ntwejournal.bsky.social).

Et voilà, 1281 days after I began this journey called #PhD in the @eui-sps.bsky.social, the moment to submit the dissertation has come!

Thanks to all those who, in way or another, made this possible 🫶

Time to get some of it published and look for a job (wink wink, recruiters).