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Digital technologies promise efficiency and comfort, but the smoothness of platform services relies on the hidden social labour of those who keep the gig economy running.
This book presents a comparative ethnography of young men making a living through digital technologies: selling mobile airtime in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and app-based delivery riders in Berlin, Germany. These case studies explore the significance of symbolic capital in urban youth's social existence and organisation of livelihood in the digital economy, and the technological mechanisms producing a new form of urban precarity.
Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan puts forward an original comparative approach to develop a global urban sociology for the digital era. It provides an innovative analytical toolbox that decentres discussions of precarity from the standard of a normal employment contract. With its focus on symbolic capital, the ethnography shows the consequences of the proliferating gig economy for status struggles among urban youth, and carefully embeds the densification of software and services into the socio-material relations on which these new urban infrastructures are built.
'By exploring how changes in technological and informal work transform identity, social networks, and economic survival, Schilling's book represents an important contribution to urban sociology, labor studies, and the discourse on digital economies. For scholars in the fields of urban inequalities, labor dynamics, and the global digital economy, Globalized Urban Precarity in Berlin and Abidjan is an indispensable resource. Schilling’s comparative approach and detailed ethnographic method provides a powerful examination of how young urbanites become ensnared by the social and economic forces that shape their lives. While defining new modes of survival in today’s urban spaces, Schilling’s book is an important guide in understanding the ways in which digital transformations reshape work.'
Duane Ebesu, Columbia University, African Studies Quarterly
In transition: the making of urban livelihood
1 Crossing views: airtime selling in Abidjan and food delivery in Berlin
2 Conceptual devices: inequality at work in comparative perspective
3 Hustling: the symbolic value of in-between work
4 Trust and rule: tying workers to work
5 Organizing care: distributive labour across private and public realms
Not just of symbolic value: work to make oneself living