Digitalization and dignity: digital driving in Kenya
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As digitally-mediated work grows worldwide, development scholars and practitioners are raising questions about the quality of these new forms of work. This article explores the subjective dignity experiences of digital drivers in Kenya drawing on both a survey and in-depth qualitative interviews. In spite of material indignities, a majority of drivers in 2019 considered their work dignified, particularly relative to counterfactual work opportunities in their highly informal context. This article demonstrates the ways that digitalization itself has been central to shaping a more dignified subjective work experience. Digitalization imposes dignifying rules and order, breaks down socioeconomic barriers through digital matchmaking, and to some extent democratizes opportunities for social mobility. However, dignity gains from digitalization can be undermined by failures of app companies to maintain sufficient rule enforcement and to ensure material dignity through adequate pay. In contexts of existing high informality, platform work can feel for workers like a step towards dignifying formality rather than a slide away from it.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it