The entrepreneurship paradox in platform work: a post-colonial approach

One of the key challenges in policy analysis regarding platform work concerns workers’ surprising enthusiasm for precarious forms of independent contractor status. While researchers and policy makers highlight exploitative working conditions in platform work and call for regulatory intervention, workers themselves often actively identify as micro-entrepreneurs. Michel Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism are often cited to explain workers’ embrace of hustling lifestyles. According to Foucault, neoliberal governmentality encourages individuals to become entrepreneurs of their own lives, turning every decision into a rational cost-benefit analysis. However, this commentary cautions against this interpretation of entrepreneurial subjectification. Self-interested rational cost-benefit analysis should convince workers to support government regulation rather than free-market deregulation. Moreover, one cannot simply assume that neoliberalism acts as one monolithic governmentality imposing the same living conditions universally. This article uses post-colonial research on working and market conditions in the Global South as alternative, more effective templates for understanding the appeal of entrepreneurial discourse across the globe. Platform workers are often enthusiastic about gambling on entrepreneurial success, despite the precarity and exploitation, because (1) structural features in some platformised labour markets, akin to the uncertainty of informal bazaars in the Global South, hinder workers from engaging in rational utility-maximisation, and (2) workers mix neoliberal articulations of entrepreneurial identity with indigenous traditions of popular entrepreneurship that predate neoliberalism. This article is part of Global Political Economy’s Commentary section on ‘The global politics of precarity and insecure work’.