Walking the Digital Tightrope: Diversity and voice in creative platform work

This study examines how diversity shapes creative platform workers’ access to and exercise of voice within the precarious landscape of platform capitalism. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and field, we explore unique qualitative materials collected from 40 Brazilian literary content creators. The findings show that creative platform workers’ access to and exercise of voice is based on three conditions of privilege: playing the rules of the game; drawing on bundles of resources; and leveraging intermediation capacity. We identify four forms of voice among creative platform workers – shielding, demonstrating, ingroup-focused gatekeeping and affirmative voices – and highlight the relational dynamics of power in this context. This research contributes to understanding diversity in creative platform work through a privilege lens, thereby revealing the complex dynamics of power and dependence that creative platform workers experience with different industry stakeholders. This study contributes to the literature about diversity and voice by: showing that online prestige alone does not ensure voice opportunities; unveiling the variety of targets and agents in the four forms of voice in creative platform work; and highlighting the limitations of collective voice in challenging existing privilege and disadvantage systems.