"At the end of the day, I am accountable": Gig Workers' Self-Tracking for Multi-Dimensional Accountability Management

"At the end of the day, I am accountable": Gig Workers' Self-Tracking for Multi-Dimensional Accountability Management

Tracking is inherent in and central to the gig economy. Platforms track gig workers' performance through metrics such as acceptance rate and punctuality, while gig workers themselves engage in self-tracking. Although prior research has extensively examined how gig platforms track workers through metrics -- with some studies briefly acknowledging the phenomenon of self-tracking among workers -- there is a dearth of studies that explore how and why gig workers track themselves. To address this, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews, revealing how gig workers self-tracking to manage accountabilities to themselves and external entities across three identities: the holistic self, the entrepreneurial self, and the platformized self. We connect our findings to neoliberalism, through which we contextualize gig workers' self-accountability and the invisible labor of self-tracking. We further discuss how self-tracking mitigates information and power asymmetries in gig work and offer design implications to support gig workers' multi-dimensional self-tracking.

跟踪是零工经济的固有和核心。平台通过诸如接受率和守时的指标跟踪工作人员的绩效，而演出工人自己也从事自我跟踪。尽管先前的研究已广泛研究了演出平台如何通过指标跟踪工人 - 一些研究简短地承认了工人之间自我追踪的现象，但缺乏研究来探讨如何以及为什么演出工人跟踪自己。为了解决这个问题，我们进行了25次半结构化访谈，揭示了演出工人如何自我追踪以管理三个身份的对自己和外部实体的责任：整体自我，企业家自我以及平台化的自我。我们将我们的发现与新自由主义联系起来，通过这些自由主义，我们将演出工人的自我责任和自我追踪的无形劳动与之相结合。我们进一步讨论自我追踪如何减轻演出中的信息和力量不对称，并提供设计含义，以支持演出工人的多维自我追踪。