Seminar (CareNet): "Digital labor platforms and public healthcare restructuring"

Program

There has been a recent surge in platforms for various types of social reproductive tasks across Europe. Research on domestic labor- and care platforms provides important insights into how these reconfigure social reproductive labor. But what digital labor platforms might mean for more institutionalized social reproduction and reproductive labor, like healthcare, remains understudied. Responding to this gap, my PhD project focusses on healthcare platform companies (HPCs) in the Swedish public primary care and the healthcare professionals working for them.  These new private for-profit actors expanded rapidly during the past decade, offering app-based consultations with healthcare professionals via video and chat, funded by taxpayers’ money. For healthcare professionals work at-a-distance for HPCs presented an employment alternative to work at local primary care- and other clinics.

This presentation zooms in on two sub-studies of my PhD project. The first focusses on explaining the emergence of HPCs. Combining concepts from critical platform studies and economic geography, I discuss how HPCs’ expansion strategies feed off, and into, the geographically variegated restructuring of the Swedish public primary care, maximizing reimbursement from public funds and raising large amounts of venture capital.

The second sub-study (together with Desirée Enlund) shifts attention to healthcare professionals, asking why they engage with healthcare platform work. An analysis of interview material, informed by labor- and feminist geography, suggests that healthcare professionals’ primary motivation is healthcare platform work’s spatio-temporal flexibility. Furthermore, in opting for platform work healthcare professionals exercise different types of labor agency as their mobility power in the labor market enables heterogenous and socially differentiated reconfigurations of im/mobilities across the domains of work and life.

Peter van Eerbeek

PhD student in Human Geography at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden, and currently is a CareNet visiting scholar.