A critical realist exploration of harassment in platform work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore workplace harassment in the context of platform work. To seek a causal explanation for harassment experienced by platform workers, we conducted a secondary analysis of already-published empirical studies and engaged labour process theory, a theory that is philosophically compatible with critical realism. The results indicate that harassment is causally governed by forces that control the labour process, although these forces do not always bring about the harassment behaviours. The paper contributes to the field of critical realism in its application to labour process theory to advance the understanding of harassment experienced by platform workers. Our analysis identifies harassment as an emergent property of the structural characteristics of the labour process that interact with workers' agency to produce harassment experiences of platform workers. As well, through our use of secondary analysis, the paper demonstrates the utility of secondary analysis for critical realist analyses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".