Social choices in platform design: technology from a workers’ standpoint in digital platform cooperatives

Digital technology is a key driver of social inequality in the gig economy, but little is known about how platform technologies can be tailored to workers’ needs. To fill this gap, the article examines social design choices by workers in digital platform cooperatives of the CoopCycle federation, an association of worker-owned cooperatives operating in the bicycle delivery sector. Based on empirical interviews, it is shown that by developing their own platform technology, the workers tailor it to the riders’ tacit knowledge and self-organization. In light of this, social choices of platform design are traced at three levels: the organization of work in the immediate labour process, the business decisions at the cooperative level, and the strategic course-setting at the federation level. To reconstruct this, the article draws on labour process theory and the STS concept of social choices in the design of workplace technology. With these concepts, social choices on technology in digital platform cooperatives can be explained by changed power relations in worker-owned corporations and their specific market environments enabling design paths for a technology from a worker’s standpoint.