PRECANOMIES · PRECANOMIES: Precarious Autonomies? Workers’ Identity and Technocontrol in Platform Economies from the European Semi-Periphery

The rapid growth of platform work, employing over 28 million people in the EU, poses urgent challenges for labour rights, identity, and governance. In Slovenia, a semi-peripheral country with around 30,000 platform workers, weak institutional frameworks, fragmented markets, and limited enforcement exacerbate precarity. Workers face the paradox of flexi-vulnerability: valuing autonomy and flexibility while remaining dependent on opaque algorithmic systems that control pay, visibility, and recognition. PRECANOMIES addresses this gap through an interdisciplinary, ethnographic study of platform work in Slovenia, in dialogue with Spain as a comparative case. The main objective is to analyse how algorithmic management and regulatory reforms shape worker identities, autonomy, and collective agency under regimes of technocontrol. Specific objectives include: (1) documenting workers’ narratives and everyday negotiations of precarity; (2) analysing the interaction between agency and algorithmic control through ethnography and exploratory audits; (3) mapping contractual and institutional arrangements; (4) tracing strategies of resistance and solidarity; and (5) advancing theoretical concepts such as flexi-vulnerability and algorithmic subjectivation. Methodologically, the project combines multi-sited ethnography, digital ethnography, algorithmic audits, and policy analysis. Its innovation lies in bridging micro-level lived experience, meso-level organisational practices, and macro-level EU regulation, positioning semi-peripheral Europe at the centre of global debates on digital labour governance.