Paper short abstract:

This paper builds on the ethnographic cases of petty textile producers and their remaking of subcontracting chains to explore the promises and pitfalls of digitalization. I detail the inherent ambiguity of digitalization by showing how it leads to new forms of discipline and dispossession.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the promises, perils and pitfalls of digitalization in fast fashion industry subcontracting chains, building on the ethnographic cases of petty entrepreneurs in Southern Europe. The Vale do Ave in Northern Portugal, formerly among Europe's top textile outputting regions, has been shaped by persistent crisis and deindustrialization since the 1990s, a trend that recent austerity interventions compound. What textile industry remains in the region today takes the form of micro workshops located in the homes of subcontracted, allegedly "entrepreneurial" workers, who are controlled by a single monopoly producer. In this contribution, I explore the ascend of digital work platforms and their remaking the landscape of subcontracting in the region. I investigate how petty entrepreneurs' access to out-working orders alters from often decade-old networks of patronage, kin and affiliation towards digital competition. While this shift seems to offer opportunities for growth to some, it also radically precarizes many others. This is the case not least because digital competition and work monitoring on platforms involves surveillance of output demands and thus places novel disciplinary measures on producers. In detailing the (often adverse) effects of this process in an already low-wage, highly flexible production regime, this contribution highlights the ambiguity inherent in the emancipation that digitalization appears to offer. I thereby aim to critically intervene in emergent scholarly debates about digitalization by showcasing how it, too, undermines the possibilities for collective social bargaining and thus leads, in the long run, to dispossession.