Imagined futures of work in the making: the politics of platform workers’ contract classification in Denmark, France, Italy, and the Netherlands

A vibrant debate on the digitalisation of the economy has taken place over the last decade. Among the various manifestations of digitalisation, the rise of platform companies has divided scholars over whether a ‘platformised’ future of work would be desirable. The contract classification of platform workers, i.e. whether they should qualify as independent contractors or employees, has been among the top-debated issues. While some have stressed that coverage of freelancer platform workers should be strengthened regardless of their contract classification, others have highlighted how platform work has all the features of dependent work and should therefore qualify as such. Various national regulatory processes resulted in numerous statutory measures and collective agreements. Starting from these developments, and unsatisfied with existing institutionalist accounts of platform work regulation, this dissertation asks two research questions: i) How have national actors problematised and responded to the question of platform workers’ contract classification? ii) What were the drivers of such problematisation and responses? To address such queries, this thesis investigates the politics of platform workers’ contract classification by concentrating on i) the (evolution of) actors’ positions, ii) the building of actor coalitions, iii) the content of regulatory measures in cases they were adopted. It focuses on four actor types, namely governments, social partners, platforms, and independent platform worker organisations. It adopts a qualitative comparative case-study design to study the cases of Denmark, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Such countries represent different ‘varieties of liberalisation’: ‘dualisation’ countries (France – Italy), ‘embedded flexibilisation’ countries (Denmark – Netherlands). Methodologically, this work combines 68 semi-structured elite interviews with selected policy documents and quality newspaper articles. Data was analysed through a thematic analysis using MAXQDA software. Theoretically, an ‘Imaginative Institutional Work’ approach is developed. Such an approach adopts the concept of ‘institutional work’ to understand how ‘uncertain’ actors affect institutions. In this work, institutions are the rules linking contract classification and employment/social protection. To account for the drivers of such an institutional work, this work theorizes learning mechanisms of three kinds, i.e. ‘learning by puzzling’, ‘learning by experimenting’, and ‘learning by researching’. In turn, such mechanisms are conceived of as cognitively bounded by ‘imagined futures’, i.e. expectations on future states of the world. Thus, this dissertation unveils institutional work objectives and practices and associated learning mechanisms that have shaped the rules linking contract classification and employment/social protection. Further, it finds that learning mechanisms were anchored in three ‘imagined futures of work’, i.e. ‘Start-up Nation’, ‘Creative digitalisation’, and ‘Embedded digitalisation’. While the ‘start-up nation’ future was especially relevant in France and to some extent in the Netherlands, ‘creative digitalisation’, and ‘embedded digitalisation’ were prominent in the Italian, Danish and Dutch cases. This shows how processes of imaginative institutional work were often not in line with expectations deriving from the variety of liberalisation profile of selected countries. More broadly, this thesis contributes to the understanding of how the implications of technology are socially shaped by providing a fine-grained account of how future-oriented actors affect the rules governing the use of such a technology. In so doing, actors do not merely enact institutional dictates. Rather, they creatively navigate the uncharted waters of novel technologies, seeking to realize their preferred ‘imagined futures of work’

Opportunity or threat? How discourses on digitalisation vary across European countries

Digitalisation has profound implications for employment, but are there meaningful differences in how European countries view the process? Drawing on a new study, Matteo Marenco and Timo Seidl show how discourses on digitalisation vary across Europe

The discursive construction of digitalization : a comparative analysis of national discourses on the digital future of work

Published online: 07 June 2021New forms of work intermediation – the gig economy – and the growing use of advanced digital technologies – the new knowledge economy – are changing the nature of work. The digitalization of work, however, is shaped by how countries respond to it. But how countries respond to digitalization, we argue, depends on how digitalization is perceived in the first place. Using text-as-data methods on a novel corpus of translated newspaper and policy documents from eight European countries as well as qualitative evidence from interviews and secondary sources, we show that there are clear country effects in how digitalization is framed and fought over. Drawing on discursive–institutionalist and coalitional approaches, we argue that institutional differences explain these discursive differences by structuring interpretative struggles in favor of the social coalitions that support them. Actors, however, can also challenge these institutions by using the discursive agency to change these underlying support coalitions.This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2020-2022

Neufeind M., O'Reilly J., and Ranft F. (2018, eds.), Work in the Digital Age: Challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, London: Rowman & Littlefield

For Book Reviews Abstract is not require

Neufeind M., O'Reilly J., and Ranft F. (2018, eds.), Work in the Digital Age: Challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, London: Rowman & Littlefield

For Book Reviews Abstract is not require

Does Patisiran Reduce Ocular Transthyretin Synthesis? A Pilot Study of Two Cases

Background: Variant transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis (ATTR-v) is a well-characterized disease affecting the neurologic and cardiovascular systems. Patisiran has been approved for neurologic involvement as it reduces hepatic synthesis of transthyretin (TTR). Eye involvement is a late-onset feature increasing the risk of glaucoma and cataracts in patients. The aim of this case series was to assess whether patisiran can effectively reduce TTR synthesis in such a barrier-protected organ as the eye. Methods: Two patisiran-treated ATTR-v patients underwent serum and aqueous humor sampling to measure TTR levels detected by SDS-PAGE and immunoblotting. Serum samples were compared to a healthy control (HC), whereas aqueous humor samples were compared to non-amyloidotic subjects affected by cataracts and glaucoma. Results: Serum TTR levels representative of hepatic synthesis were sharply lower in treated patients if compared to the HC (-87.5% and -93.75% respectively). Aqueous humor TTR levels showed mild-to- no reduction in treated patients compared to non-amyloidotic subjects with cataracts (-34.9% and +8.1% respectively) and glaucoma (-41.1% and -2.1%). Conclusions: Patisiran does not seem to be so effective in inhibiting ocular TTR synthesis as it is in inhibiting hepatic synthesis. Re-engineering the envelope could allow the drug to target RPE cells thus avoiding any ocular involvement

Participating centers and roles within the NeuroArtP3 initiative.

Participating centers and roles within the NeuroArtP3 initiative.</p

Serotonin and Schizophrenia

Although the serotonin hypothesis of schizophrenia is one of the oldest neurochemical hypotheses on the pathogenesis of this disease, it is still highly topical. The concept of how the serotonin system is involved in the origin and progress of schizophrenia has considerably changed over the past decades. Therefore, the present work will give an overview about the development and the current directions of the serotonin hypothesis of schizophrenia. In this regard, we will discuss the phenomenology of hallucinogenic drug action, model psychosis and translational research, post-mortem studies on receptors and transporters, imaging studies, antipsychotic drug action, neuroendocrine challenge studies, platelet and cerebrospinal fluid data, genetic association studies, developmental aspects, and the cross-talk between the glutamate and the serotonin system. In sum, there are several lines of evidence suggesting that the serotonin system plays a major role in the pathogenesis of at least a subpopulation of schizophrenia patients. Further studies are needed to better characterize patients whose psychotic symptoms are suspected to have a serotonergic origin

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BackgroundThe burden of Parkinson Disease (PD) represents a key public health issue and it is essential to develop innovative and cost-effective approaches to promote sustainable diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. In this perspective the adoption of a P3 (predictive, preventive and personalized) medicine approach seems to be pivotal. The NeuroArtP3 (NET-2018-12366666) is a four-year multi-site project co-funded by the Italian Ministry of Health, bringing together clinical and computational centers operating in the field of neurology, including PD.ObjectiveThe core objectives of the project are: i) to harmonize the collection of data across the participating centers, ii) to structure standardized disease-specific datasets and iii) to advance knowledge on disease’s trajectories through machine learning analysis.MethodsThe 4-years study combines two consecutive research components: i) a multi-center retrospective observational phase; ii) a multi-center prospective observational phase. The retrospective phase aims at collecting data of the patients admitted at the participating clinical centers. Whereas the prospective phase aims at collecting the same variables of the retrospective study in newly diagnosed patients who will be enrolled at the same centers.ResultsThe participating clinical centers are the Provincial Health Services (APSS) of Trento (Italy) as the center responsible for the PD study and the IRCCS San Martino Hospital of Genoa (Italy) as the promoter center of the NeuroartP3 project. The computational centers responsible for data analysis are the Bruno Kessler Foundation of Trento (Italy) with TrentinoSalute4.0 –Competence Center for Digital Health of the Province of Trento (Italy) and the LISCOMPlab University of Genoa (Italy).ConclusionsThe work behind this observational study protocol shows how it is possible and viable to systematize data collection procedures in order to feed research and to advance the implementation of a P3 approach into the clinical practice through the use of AI models.</div