Alihan Gök

Research Project

Reappropriating Social Cooperation: Opportunities and Challenges in the Digital Platform Era

Project Abstract

This project aims to investigate the relationship between work and digital technologies to understand their effects on democratic expectations in the workplace. From a perspective that combines interest in the world of work and socio-political dynamics, the project will study work in the digital era, exploring potential avenues for the decommodification and democratization of labor.

Platform Workers Under Market Domination

Since the pandemic, rapid transformations in work have led to concentrated negative impacts in the labor market, overshadowing emancipatory potentials. The increasing speed of exchange between fragmented work and micro-capital generates new social risks, with the pressure falling heavily on a new generation of workers. Despite the proliferation of new work regulations, workers face new market risks without the promised autonomy. Platform workers, whose precarious status renders their work ephemeral yet “bearable,” face a disconnect between their expectations and reality, prompting a reevaluation of the meaning and value of work, especially in relation to emancipation.

A Normative Understanding of Social Cooperation

The dangers posed by the digital revolution, including labor commodification, are countered by initiatives that view work as an opportunity for resistance and emancipation. This exploration requires closer examination and engagement. This project, focusing on digital platform work in Turkey and France, will conduct practical research to explore the reconstruction of a normative understanding of social cooperation framed as “the struggle to reappropriate social cooperation.” Contrary to its utilitarian interpretation, which reduces it to productivity maximization serving the market, a normative understanding of social cooperation is necessary. Although the appropriation of worker cooperation seems complete in favor of capital, it remains a field of struggle where social labor forces have a say.

The Struggle for Recognition of Two-Wheeled Delivery Workers

Since 2022, delivery workers have organized various forms of resistance. This project’s objective is to understand these workers’ normative expectations and explore the political engagement potential emerging from their experiences of suffering and injustice. A field study focusing on two-wheeled delivery workers (motorbike or bicycle couriers) is planned. By immersing in this world, including personal experience as a temporary delivery worker, the project aims to investigate the challenges to the recognition relationships necessary for forming individual and collective identities, and the possibility of reconsidering the workers’ normative expectations who refuse to become mere organic extensions of platforms, often victims of reputation systems, and demand recognition of their meaningful activities.

Biography

Alihan Gök graduated from the Galatasaray High School (Francophone) in 2001 and has been a researcher at Marmara University (Istanbul) since 2011, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the Institute of Social Sciences in 2018. He continues his academic career in the Francophone Department of Political Science and Public Administration as a lecturer in political philosophy. His studies focus on theories of justice with a historical and interdisciplinary approach concerning issues like alienation and poverty, intersecting political philosophy, social philosophy, and economic thought. Interested in the impact of socio-economic transformations on recognition and social justice, his current research focuses on the condition of digital work in Turkey. A regular participant in seminars at TUFRAM (Center for Studies and Research on Franco-Turkish Relations) attached to Marmara University, he is also a member of Eğitim-Sen (Education and Science Workers’ Union, Turkey) and one of the Academics for Peace.