Collective identity in formation: from 1960s factory workers to digital workers

The current phase of digitalization and the rise of platform capitalism has revived old dilemmas regarding worker collective action, while digital technologies have triggered both new opportunities and challenges. Although digitalization creates new constraints, such as digital intermediation, the depersonalization of employment relations and algorithmic control, it implicitly creates new opportunities for collective action in innovative forms of communication and coordination among workers, as well as in the form of digital strikes. This chapter will investigate these forms of collective action and examine how the specific claims, frames, and repertoires of action contribute to defining the new collective identities of digital workers. Indeed, digitalization is a process shaped by the social actors involved in a specific phase of technological and organizational change that affects the nature of employment relations and processes of recognition. Depending on whether there are low or high levels of institutional regulation and worker organization, it can either trigger contradictory processes of precariousness and individualization, or help to shape new identities and solidarity in the field of labour.

The literature on social movements has investigated the various links between collective action and collective identities, exploring the necessary conditions under which pre-existing identities become relevant for the rise of new mobilization processes, or reciprocally how new collective identities are processed through action (Polletta and Jasper, 2001). These aspects have also been studied in a different manner by industrial relations research, which has shown how strikes can be conducive to specific forms of class consciousness and worker solidarity (Hyman, 1975).

The process of identity formation through collective action is usually linked to a number of specific conditions like organizational and ideational resources. Resources such as pre-existing social networks, spaces, or institutions of solidarity are as important as self-narratives that define motivations and provide the cultural repertories for collective actions (Melucci, 1996). Ideational and cultural aspects defined by collective identity also influence the choice of forms of action. Identity boundaries also vary depending on the phase and cycle of mobilization, as identities tend to be more rigid and exclusive when developed in times of disengagement, while they are more inclusive in times of collective expansion (Tarrow, 1998).