Accounts of Gig Work on Interconnected Platforms

Abstract

This thesis explores why Australian food-delivery workers continue gig work despite its precarious and exploitative nature. While focused on Australia, it addresses broader concerns about how digital platforms shape the future of work. Across three empirical papers, it shows how participation is sustained through intertwined forms of soft control, including algorithmic metrics, peer-based social media communities, and interface design. Using netnographic and archival methods and drawing on critical accounting and digital ethics, the thesis examines how platform power operates through calculative, relational, and design-based mechanisms. These mechanisms shape perception, shift accountability, and sustain participation by simulating agency and control. The first paper analyses DoorDash’s Top Dasher program, showing how algorithmic incentives create an illusion of control that motivates workers. Although it appears consistent with Vroom’s Expectancy Theory, unstable and opaque metrics limit informed decision-making. Social reinforcement in Facebook groups further strengthens perceived control. The second paper introduces Social Media Counter-Accounting to explain how workers use Facebook groups to interpret platform failures and develop survival strategies. While these peer-led practices offer resilience and support, they also shift repair, interpretation, and adaptation burdens onto workers, reinforcing responsibilisation logics. The third paper examines how Facebook’s interface design employs dark patterns that weaken ethical awareness and obscure consent. Using Nussbaum’s (2011) capabilities approach, it conceptualises structured unawareness as a design-driven constraint on moral reasoning and choice. Together, the papers show how platform governance operates through ambient control, shifting accountability, and the management of perception, contributing to critical accounting by revealing how extractive labour systems are made to appear participatory and routine.